October 07, 2026

What Gathers Must Scatter

All worldly pursuits have but the one unavoidable and inevitable end, which is sorrow: acquisitions end in dispersion; buildings, in destruction; meetings, in separation; births, in death.

Milarepa was an eleventh-century Tibetan yogi who spent his early life seeking revenge through black magic before turning to intense solitary practice in the Himalayan caves under his guru Marpa. By the time he sang this teaching to wandering disciples, he had already watched his family's wealth collapse into poverty and had renounced worldly ambition entirely. The passage names four ordinary human projects — gathering wealth, building shelter, meeting loved ones, being born — and shows that each one carries its own undoing already inside it. This is the heart of how the Eastern wisdom tradition treats impermanence: not as a grim fact to escape but as the basic shape of reality, so that clinging to any of these four creates the suffering, not the changing itself. Practice here means watching the pattern clearly enough that the ending no longer arrives as a betrayal.

A principle of Eastern Wisdom: Impermanence →