“The world has laid low, and the wind blows away like ashes Alexander, Caesar, and all who were in their trust; grass-grown is Tara, and see Troy now how it is--and the English themselves, perhaps they too will pass!”

That's an Irish saying from the 18^th century. It's just a political twist on the concept of impermanence, which is the central idea of Buddhism and is often emphasized in Christianity too- but is frequently overlooked by people in both the East and the West, who want their pleasures and their luxuries to last forever, and too often act as if they will.

I was in the Scottish Highlands about fifteen years ago with a couple of friends. We were driving around and looking for interesting things. It was the middle of February, but it was warm enough for us to be in our shirt-sleeves. We stumbled on a crumbling old ruined mansion from the eighteenth century, a mansion that once housed the local gentry.

We looked through the gaping holes that used to be windows, and into the shattered wreckage of the house's Great Room, which would have been used for dances and parties. Huge stones from the roof had fallen and burst right through it, and you could see all the way into the cellars below. Despite the obvious dangers we scrambled down there through the ruins, and entered a lost world of empty passageways and moss-covered stones, dark rooms with nothing in them and the rotting remains of old barrels and pieces of furniture.

Everything elegant and beautiful that had once been in that house was now broken and bare and covered over with grass, and every year more of it fell into ruins. When the house was alive with the sound of conversation and the music of the dance, how many of the people who walked through those halls could ever have imagined it the way we were to see it?