Bhante Homagama Rewatha
Take a deep breath. Feel how it rises — filling your lungs, expanding your chest, bringing life into every cell of your body. Now release it, sensing the fall as air flows out and your body settles back into stillness. In this simple movement of rising and falling lies a profound truth that Buddhist meditators have explored for many years: everything in our experience follows this same universal pattern. Our thoughts rise and fall. Our emotions rise and fall. Our joys and sorrows, our hopes and fears, even our sense of who we are — all of it rises and falls like waves upon an endless ocean. When we learn to see this clearly, not as philosophy but as living reality, we discover the wisdom that leads to genuine peace and freedom.
You have picked up this book, perhaps because something within you senses that life offers more than the endless cycle of wanting and getting, losing and grieving, that characterizes so much of our existence. Perhaps you have achieved success by worldly standards yet still feel an inexplicable emptiness. Perhaps you have experienced moments of profound peace during quiet walks in nature or in the stillness before dawn, and you wonder how to access that peace more consistently. Perhaps you simply feel tired — tired of the constant mental chatter, tired of anxiety about the future and regret about the past, tired of searching for happiness in places where it can never be found.
Whatever has brought you here, know this: the door to inner peace is not locked away in some distant monastery or hidden in esoteric practices beyond your reach. The door is already open. It has always been open. You need only learn to see it.
The Buddhist philosophy describes something remarkable about human consciousness. It reveals that our suffering does not arise from life's difficulties themselves but from a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of reality. We believe we are permanent, unchanging selves navigating through a world of solid, stable objects. We grasp after pleasure, expecting it to last. We push away pain, believing we can escape it entirely. We construct elaborate stories about who we are and what we need to be happy, and then we suffer when reality refuses to conform to our stories. This basic confusion is described as ‘ignorance’ — not as stupidity, but simply as the failure to see things as they truly are.
The remarkable news is that this confusion can be cleared away. Through systematic training of the mind, we can learn to perceive reality with increasing clarity. We can observe directly how every experience arises from causes and conditions, persists for a moment, and then passes away to make room for the following arising. This direct perception of impermanence gradually loosens our desperate grasping after the permanent and unchanging. As grasping relaxes, peace naturally emerges. Not a peace that depends on circumstances being just right, but an unconditional peace that remains stable whether we face pleasure or pain, gain or loss, praise or blame.
From the introduction to Rising and Falling: A Progressive Buddhist Path to Insight and Awakening. Forthcoming from Hellstern Schwegler Press.