One Time, One Meeting

If you are a homeowner in Alfred, New York, you may have heard of Orangeburg pipe. Widely used for drainage and sewer lines, it is best described as ten layers of tarpaper rolled up to form a pipe. Orangeburg takes its name from Orangeburg, New York, its point of manufacture. Properly seated in a bed of sand, Orangeburg might last fifty years. Or it might not.

Last month, I learned these facts the hard way. With little warning, our sewer line backed up, and our basement flooded. We called a plumber, and when his power snake brought back dirt, we knew we were in for some serious digging. Twenty-four hours later, in a trench where our lawn had been, we laid eyes on the cause of our misery. Sure enough, it was a length of Orangeburg pipe, flattened and degraded. Calling it a name not fit to print, I wondered why anyone would choose such a product, let alone trust it to last.

The answers weren’t far to seek. Orangeburg pipe gained popularity in the decade after World War II, when iron and steel were in short supply. Contractors liked it because it was user-friendly and readily available. Homeowners liked it because it was cheap. By the standards of its day, it was a serviceable product, if hardly top of the line. That it would one day fall apart was the future homeowner’s problem.

Whatever its merits as a plumbing component, Orangeburg pipe well illustrates a central focus of Zen training. For in Zen teachings we learn of “the impermanence of all conditioned things,” whether those things be our sewer lines, our bodies, our thoughts, our relationships, or our very lives. And in Zen practice, we come to know the truth of impermanence through direct experience.

That all things change is hardly breaking news. A few years ago, as I was waiting for a TV show to resume, the words “Embrace change” flashed on the screen. While that sounded like something a Zen master might say, the purveyor of this advice turned out to be Rochester Gas and Electric. It would seem that awareness of impermanence has at long last entered the American mainstream.

Yet it is one thing to have a conceptual understanding of impermanence and quite another to experience it concretely. In Zen meditation we cultivate a continuous awareness of impermanence not through the contemplation of lofty verities but through an intimate contact with changes as they are unfolding, moment by moment and breath by breath. We notice that no two breaths are quite the same. And if we are really paying attention, we notice that everything is changing, including our sensations, thoughts, feelings, and states of mind. Neither we nor the world’s bright things are as solid as we’d supposed.

Or, if we prefer, we can contemplate Orangeburg pipe