Impermanence: This too shall pass
I WAS having a drink with my ‘kopitiam kakis’ at our favourite coffee shop when our conversation was interrupted by loud noises that went: “Boom, boom, boom.”
“Wow! That’s a very big firecracker,” said my friend.
We were in the frantic midst of the Chinese New Year and could be forgiven for jumping to that conclusion.
“But that does not sound like a firecracker. The sound is too deep,” chirped in another.
So, it was a mystery, but not for long though.
The next day, I received a video in my WhatsApp group with the caption: “Wow! It still works.”
It showed a soldier in full military regalia firing the ancient cannon at the Kuching Waterfront.
Then it dawned on me that it was the 17-gun salute, the final farewell in honour of the late Pehin Sri Abdul Taib Mahmud, the former Governor, and Chief Minister of Sarawak, who ruled Sarawak for over 30 years.
Such was his impact on the state that glowing eulogies were aplenty, hailing him as the ‘Father of the Politics of Development’.
However, equally critical appraisals are also beginning to surface.
I do not intend to join the bandwagon – there are many pundits and politicos to do that.
Above all these, one thing is the eternal truth. Our life in this world is transient and whatever possession we acquire during our sojourn in this world cannot be transferred to the next.
Benjamin Franklin (the founder of the United States) was quoted to have said: “Nothing is certain except death and taxes” – though I disagree with the taxes bits.
Since thousands of years ago, many powerful rulers and personalities refused to accept that verdict. In Year 221 BCE when the Prince Zheng of the House of Qin in the Kingdom of Zhou, through cunning alliances and outright military excellence, defeated the other six kingdoms during the ‘Warring States Period’ in China, and brought them under his total control, he created a new title, Huang Di.
One version of the story says that the word ‘Huang’ meant ‘great’, while the word ‘Di’ referred to the ‘Supreme God in Heaven, Creator of the World’. By joining these two words for the first time, he created a title befitting his feat of uniting the seemingly endless Chinese realm.
Thus he took the title, Shi Huang Di, which could be translated as ‘The First, or Commencing Emperor’. Since the Chinese believed that their empire encompassed the whole world, literally he was ‘Qin the First Emperor of the Whole World’.
Qin Shi Huang Ti went on to strengthen his empire by building an efficient administrative and military system. He unified China economically by standardising the units of measurements such as weights and measures, the currency, the length of the axles of carts (so every cart could run smoothly in the ruts of the new roads), the legal system, and so on.
The Emperor also developed an extensive network of roads and canals connecting the provinces to improve trade between them, and to accelerate military marches to pacify recalcitrant provinces.
Indeed, he instituted a phase of development that transformed the erstwhile shifting alliance of bickering warring states into one unified kingdom. He declared that he had built a dynasty that would rule for 1,000 years.
As it turned out, the Qin Dynasty barely survived a dozen years after his death in 210 BCE. It crumbled to palace intrigues, treacheries and civil strife, which led the way to the establishment of a new dynasty, the Han.
So, what appeared to be intransmutable too succumbed to the law on change.
Perhaps the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (792-1822) captured this fact most succinctly in his poem ‘Ozymandias’. “I met a traveller from an antique land,
“Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone,
“Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
“Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
“And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
“Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
“Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
“The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
“And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
“Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
“Nothing beside remains. Round the decay,
“Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
“The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
The poet met a person who travelled to Egypt, and the traveller related to him what he saw while on his journey.
He said in the middle of the desert, he saw the ruin of a statute. Only the two legs remained standing in the sand and nearby, lay the broken head of the statute.
From the expression on the face of the statute and, more pointedly, from the inscription on the pedestal, it was obvious that the King was a man of ruthless power and arrogance.
He appeared to challenge the gods themselves with the words: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Yet for all his boasting, he time too past, for: “Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.”
This poem reminds us of the teaching of the impermanence of things. Even things that are at the pinnacle of greatness today will prove to be ephemeral and in time, will be just a faded memory.
‘Memory’, perhaps, is the keyword. While our physical being might be ephemeral, the memory endures.