As a young'un, I liked incense for a number of material reasons. It smelled good and it gave me the sense of belonging to a hippie subculture, and I thought hippies had the best sense of style.
Whenever I had friends over, I’d light up a stick of incense, and when conversation died down we’d watch the smoke float in ringlets toward the ceiling. It never occurred to me what incense might mean to anyone else, or that it could mean anything.
At 18, I took a World Religions class. One of my assignments was to visit the place of worship of a religion not my own. I chose a Buddhist temple for this.
There, I was able to have a personal discussion with the minister himself, a very nice young man. He told me that Buddhism is not a religion; rather, a way of life. Buddhism has no belief system. He said it was just the reality of life. He compared the ideas behind Buddhism to water. Water, he said, is essential, yet how often do we consider this? Water is always around us, always available; water is taken for granted. It is the same with many things in life, and Buddhism attempts to focus on and appreciate these essential things.
He said Buddhism was the Middle Way, not a faith or a dogma — it was a way of living, a path of happiness, a philosophy and a science.
He told me about the burning of incense, a subject I didn’t ask about and hadn’t considered, but I still really liked incense so I was happy to hear what he had to say. I was a little surprised by it.
He said it signified impermanence. It was to remind us that things come and go. One second they can exist and be before our eyes, in our reach, and then they will burn and fall into ash. He explained it as something not to be mourned, but accepted, because some day you will have to lose everything and there is no escaping that. No matter what, all things change, and it it better to let go than cling to what is now gone.
Buddhism largely rejects the common religious concept of a material, eternal afterlife, and instead encourages embracing the reality of impermanence so that we may let go and still be happy in this life, without having to wait for Heaven to experience bliss.
This idea has stuck with me. “Anicca,” as it is called, is the inconstancy of the world. Simple fact. As incense burns and turns to ash, so will all the world. As such, it is attachment, the inability to let go, that causes most of human suffering.
When I’m sad or stressed over something in my life, I find watching swirling plumes of smoke rise from the ember of an incense stick so soothing I can easily forget my troubles.
It may be a depressing thought to some, that everything will end and there's no stopping it, but to me it's nothing but liberating. You need only to accept the inevitable to find peace.
