A piece on NPR awhile back got me thinking. It was titled, “The Kilogram has a weight loss problem. It presented so much juicy information about how people used to look at the world, and how many still do, that I want to talk about it this morning.
A man by the name of Gabriel Mouton was the vicar of a catholic church in the French city of Lyons in the 17th century. He has been generally recognized as the founding father of the metric system. Seeing a need for constancy, he proposed standard measurements for the mile and other expressions of length and mass.
Up until that time, every culture and many countries had their own systems of weights and measures, and it was all very confusing and complicated for everyone. Mouton’s work was embraced by French revolutionaries in the 18th century, especially one of the leaders of the revolution, Talleyrand, a catholic bishop. Assuming that the Earth was constant and never changing, commissions appointed by the French government proposed units of length based on the Earth’s circumference, and corresponding units of mass or weight derived from spatial relations to the unit of length.
Scientists, keen observers of the physical world, embraced the idea of uniform standards of measurement. A French survey team spent 6 years measuring the arc that the Earth made between Dunkirk in France and Barcelona in Spain in an attempt to arrive at a standard definition of length which was to become the meter.
Not long after their studies were complete, metric weights and measures, the kil
ogram and the meter, were fashioned from precious platinum and iridium which would serve as the standard by which the world would know what length or weight something was. It was only much later that scientists would come to understand that all of these calculations were quite inaccurate, being based as they were, on an object in the physical world.
In a suburb of Paris stands an edifice which has existed for 130 years as a temple dedicated to the idea of permanence in a world which abundantly disproves it. There are no towering monoliths or symbols or statuary to motivate or inspire you...only a metal cylinder the size of a salt-shaker and a shining meter-long rod.
This is the International center for Weights and Measures. It was established as an icon for the metric system when it was first devised in the mid-nineteenth century. But trouble has arrived in this scientific Shangri-la. It seems that the actual weight of the sacred kilogram artifact has actually been changing over time. No one can tell for sure, because it can never be known with certainty whether it is the actually prime kilogram which is changing or the lesser knock-off kilograms with which it is compared, but trouble is brewing in this absolutist paradise.
It has only been fairly recently that scientists at the Center would come to understand the world as the Buddha had seen it thousands of years before, not as a constant thing, but a universe in which all was constantly changing, with nothing existing except in relation to everything else.
They were to discover, for instance, that the arc which the french scientists took six years to measure, did not take into account irregularities in the earth’s shape due to the gravitational pulls from the moon and other bodies. They were also to discover, that the precious platinum meter fashioned so carefully, changed in length with changes in temperature, humidity, and even the effects of repeated cleaning which little by little, removed atoms from the gleaming metallic surface.
The scientists were finally to learn that they only way they would be able to achieve permanence and constancy with these measurements would be to eliminate the measure of an actual object and substitute for it some abstract concept. So instead of some fraction of the distance in relation to the actual Earth, the definition of the meter has been changed; in scientific parlance “improved” to be an expression of the distance light travels in a vacuum over an infinitely tiny fraction of a second. Because the speed of light is ‘constant,‘ this new definition will never change.
Similar efforts are now underway to do the same thing with the kilogram, measuring it in terms of electrical and magnetic forces exerted by objects with mass. Both these definitions have removed objects from the equation and substituted the abstract equations themselves as expressions of mass and length.
As a follower on the Buddhist path, one reads a story like this with some feelings. Constancy, you say? That is a fiction. To entertain the notion that anything in the universe outside of Nibbana, is constant, absolute, or eternal is a delusion. Enjoy that idea at your peril. In the Lalitavistara Sutra the Buddha teaches:
“Impermanent and unstable are all conditioned things,
Essentially brittle, like an unbaked pot.
Like some borrowed article, like a town built on sand,
They last for a short while only.
“These complexes are doomed to destruction,
Like plaster washed away by the rainy season,
Like sand on a river’s bank.
They are subject to conditions, and their own-being is hard to get at.”
(Conze, p. 158).
What the Buddha is talking about references the first Noble Truth, that human existence is dukkha, suffering, due principally to the fact that everything in existence is essentially unsatisfactory, impermanent, and self-less. Even the things which bring us joy cause us suffering when they end.
And in the quote above, what the Buddha was talking about when he said “their own-being is hard to get at” when he refers to own-being, what he is referencing is the concept of paticca-sammutpada, or conditioned arising, the idea that nothing exists except in relation to something else. The kilogram in Paris only exists in relation to the air molecules around it and the skin molecules of the hands touching it, and all these are in a constant dance of exchanging energy and fluid matter.
Bhikkhu Bodhi is a Theravada monk and teacher of some renown. He speaks eloquently of the Buddha’s teaching of impermanence. He points to impermanence as the initial motivation for the Buddha’s quest for enlightenment, then relates it to the grand scale of the universe, and ends up by linking anicca to the moment by moment mindfulness of meditation. He writes:
“The notion of impermanence, (aniccata) forms the bedrock for the Buddha’s teaching, having been the initial insight that impelled the Bodhisattva to leave the palace in search of a path to enlightenment. Impermanence, in the Buddhistview, comprises the totality of conditioned existence, ranging in scale from the cosmic to the microscopic. At the far end of the spectrum the Buddha’s vision reveals a universe of immense dimensions evolving and disintegrating in repetitive cycles throughout beginningless time....
In the middle range the mark of impermanence comes to manifestation in our inescapable mortality, our condition of being bound to ageing, sickness, and death, of possessing a body that is subject to “being worn and rubbed away, to dissolution and disintegration.”
And at the close end of the spectrum, the Buddha’s teaching discloses the radical impermanence uncovered only by sustained attention to experience in its living immediacy: the fact that all the constituents of our being, bodily and mental, are in constant process, arising and passing away in rapid succession from moment to moment without any persistent underlying substance. In the very act of observation they are undergoing “destruction, vanishing, fading away, and ceasing” (Bodhi, p. 72).
Bhikkhu Bodhi connects impermanence the Buddhist understanding of the universe and human existence. The idea that literally everything is in a constant state of change. This change can be for the worse if it is guided by ignorance, or for the better if we breathe into it the breath of dhamma written large on every atomic particle.
References
Bhikkhu Bodhi, “Impermanence and the Four Noble Truths,” in Radiant Mind, Jean Smith, ed. Riverhead Books, New York, 1999.
“The origin of the Metric System.” http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/origin.html
“This Kilogram has a Weight-Loss Problem.” NPR Broadcast August 21, 2009.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112003322
Lalitavistara, XIII, v. 95. p. 158, Conze, Edward, ed., Buddhist Texts Through the Ages, Oneworld Publications, Oxford, England, 1995.
-- John Corbaley, M.S., M.A.
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