Lesson 38 from A Comprehensive Commentary on the Words of My Perfect Teacher continues the teaching on the impermanence of life, focusing on how to integrate impermanence into every aspect of daily conduct.
After establishing that the Dharma alone is of use at the moment of death, the lesson works through eleven domains of daily life — walking, places, food, sleep, wealth, loved ones, rank, speech, virtuous thoughts, discursive thoughts, and meditative experiences — showing how each can become a support for the contemplation of impermanence rather than a source of distraction. A rich story from the Great Treatise on the Perfection of Wisdom — in which a traveller's body is dismembered and reassembled by two quarrelling ghosts, leading him to attain arhatship upon realising the five aggregates are not the self — illustrates the ultimate groundlessness of clinging to "I." The lesson closes with two sets of three-stage instructions on impermanence from the Kadampa master Dagpo Rinpoche, the Buddha's own praise of impermanence as the supreme of all meditations, and the story of Song dynasty official Wu Xinsou who slept in his own coffin each night until he passed away peacefully reciting Amitabha's name.
