Wanting Sends the Eyes into the Future
Desire fixes the eyes on a result that has not yet come. I tell myself that I will finally live after making money, passing an examination, buying a home, or being understood. The present then remains only a corridor toward the goal, and today’s body, people, and action become invisible. The ability to plan a future is not itself the problem. We enter the cave when the future image erases the present.
We too easily assume that tomorrow will arrive like today. We make schedules, arrange meetings, and live as if the planned result were already possessed. Dependent origination says that tomorrow depends on innumerable conditions. Planning is necessary, but a plan must not be mistaken for reality.
Desire seeks what is absent now. Someone trying to become a Buddha pursues a future image without knowing what Buddha is or whether becoming one is possible. An awakened person may predict and plan, but is fundamentally gathered here and now.
I may want more subscribers while making a video. If satisfaction requires a future number, present recording becomes an unpleasant instrument. If I rejoice that even one person watches and immerse myself in recording, I prepare for the future while living now. Action and bondage to its result are different.
The Tomorrow That Did Not Come to Hiroshima
Ordinary people in Hiroshima must also have imagined the next day’s routine. They would go to school, open shops, meet family, and perhaps postpone things that needed to be done. One atomic bomb prevented the tomorrow they treated as obvious from arriving. This is not a demand for pessimism but a way to see how many conditions support the future we take for granted.
Dinosaurs too must have anticipated another season and another meal. The disappearance of whole, immense species shows that impermanence is not merely a pretty sentence about flowers falling and people aging. When environments and conditions change, even long-lasting forms of existence collapse. Neither human civilization nor my routine is guaranteed to be an exception.
People in Hiroshima in 1945 expected another day. One morning an atomic bomb fell, and tomorrow did not come for many. How many imagined that day was their last?
People tolerate stress and dissatisfaction while thinking, “I will be happy after attaining that.” Yet life can end before the goal arrives. Tomorrow’s sunrise and my survival are probable expectations, not guarantees.
A Billiard Hall and the Conditions of the Pandemic
I planned to operate a billiard hall and tried to assemble the real conditions. I calculated location, cost, customers, and livelihood, but when COVID arrived, the assumptions of the plan changed at once. It was not simply because I lacked diligence or because every part of the plan was wrong. Social conditions beyond one person’s control entered the result.
This experience is not evidence against effort. Human beings plan and create causes, while results arise in a wider network of conditions. Success therefore cannot be claimed entirely as my ability, and failure need not be used to destroy myself as wholly at fault. If I do what I can while releasing ownership of the result, I can see changed conditions and choose the next action.
Before COVID, I considered opening a billiard hall. Lack of money prevented it. Had I borrowed and opened one with determination, restrictions on nighttime gathering would have struck it directly.
Effort cannot guarantee results. Pandemic, war, earthquake, illness, and the choices of others enter life. We breathe, eat, and relate in a world of conditions from which we cannot separate. Because everything affects us, life is impermanent.
Dinosaurs Also Expected Tomorrow
Cretaceous dinosaurs lived as if tomorrow would continue. An asteroid filled the world with heat and dust and destroyed most terrestrial dinosaurs. Some mammals survived and eventually led to us.
This is not meant to create absurd fear but to restore weight to “impermanent.” The world can change independently of my plan.
Is a Year Meaningful Only after Passing an Examination?
Someone focused only on passing treats the year before the announcement as unfinished time. If the result is failure, the person erases the study, the people met, and the habits learned as if all of it were failure. Actual life, however, existed not only in the instant of acceptance but in every day of opening the book, understanding, and enduring.
Concentration on process does not mean eliminating goals. A goal provides direction, but the action to be taken today exists now. Study while studying, move while exercising, and gather the mind with the person one meets; the process itself then becomes life. Even when the result changes, that time does not disappear.
In an examination with ten applicants for one place, nine fail. If study itself is treated as miserable and meaningless until success, an entire year is deleted for one result that may never arrive.
People can plan, but completion belongs to the whole network of conditions—war, disease, economy, competition, health, and others. Success is not my effort alone, so arrogance is unwarranted; failure is not my fault alone, so self-destruction is unwarranted. Effort remains necessary, but entitlement to success ignores conditions.
Absorption Makes the Process the Goal
One may work to become a singer, civil servant, politician, or entrepreneur. Knowing that effort may not succeed prevents present action from becoming a slave to outcome. Learning, solving problems, and creating can matter in themselves.
When I am absorbed in what I am doing and rejoice in that moment, here and now becomes both the goal and the result of life.
This absorption connects with samādhi: a gathered mind, equanimous and unmoving, whose eyes are not lost in future or past. A short life spent in future anxiety becomes a life of dissatisfaction.
Delusion Means Failing to See Reality
If delusion is translated merely as stupidity or low intelligence, Buddhism becomes a way to blame someone else’s foolishness. Delusion is the condition of being absorbed in past memory and future image rather than present reality. The deluded person cannot see what is already possessed or the people already present and gazes only at the absent golden toy.
“Here and now” is not a light slogan telling us simply to enjoy the present. It is the starting point for seeing body, mind, relationship, and conditions accurately. Remembering the past and preparing for the future are also mental activities taking place now. The problem is believing those images to be reality itself and moving far from the present.
I therefore reconsider the term avadanīya not only through inherited moral or narrative meanings but through the context “a person far from now.” Even if its etymology is related to apadāna, stories of former lives, the present verse must be judged by its surrounding argument. Its living meaning is to look at the person who has departed from now through desire and delusion.
Moha, conventionally translated as ignorance, is not low intelligence. It is wandering without seeing things as they are—pursuing the wrong object and not knowing how one has been conditioned.
Five fingers, breath, and sight are difficult to appreciate because they are already present. Only after loss does value appear. A person who cannot see may regard sight as miraculous; one who sees looks elsewhere for what is absent. Seeking the absent while missing the present is delusion.
Retranslating the Term as “Far from Now”
I initially followed earlier translations and rendered avadāniyā as stingy. It did not connect with craving and delusion before it or lack of equilibrium after it. Other translations forced a moral sentence by rendering visama as an evil path.
Buddhism does not first establish fixed good and evil. Sama concerns gathering and equilibrium; visama is separation from it, a disturbed state. Reading ava as away and idāni as now allows avadāniyā to mean “far from now.” The sentence then flows: those craving and deluded, far from now, dwell without equilibrium.
This may also illuminate apadāna or avadāna, collections of past-life tales: stories far from now. After hours of searching dictionaries and usage, this connection appeared.
I too had mistranslated a central word. The point is to correct error when context resists authority. Once “here and now” became the key, the third and fourth verses opened together. Craving and delusion move us away from now and destroy equanimity. Gathering here and now is Buddhism’s beginning and end.
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