Transience | Rs. 2000

Transience  is one of the key themes that animates Vipeksha Gupta’s art. Transience as the procession of thoughts and sensations that course through the consciousness, like flames that flicker briefly and then go out, to be replaced by others, in ceaseless succession. Or as the sequence of experiences that rise up from the flow of temporality and are dissolved back into it, the fragile building blocks of our identity and our sense of reality. Or the transience that constitutes the often unacknowledged stage on which we lead our lives before passing from it into infinity, as we hope, or extinction, as we fear.

Vipeksha’s preoccupation with the theme of transience takes us back to the central teaching of the early Buddhist tradition, as codified in the Pali canon:  Sabbe sankhāra anicca. The Buddha did not sugar-coat his medicine. Brisk and resonant, his formulation assures us bleakly that all created things are impermanent: mere shadows in the river of time. This applies, not only to what we think and feel, and to what surrounds us, but to ourselves as well. We are, after all, mortal creatures impelled forward by an often irresolute tangle of desires, anxieties, hopes and dreams. And yet, we can find a way beyond the ceaseless rush-hour traffic of thoughts and sensations, as the meditative practice of vipassana or mindfulness demonstrates. By bearing detached witness to the ebb and flow of that traffic, liberating ourselves from its raucous affective and cognitive claims, we might achieve inward stillness as well as a balanced relationship with the world.

Except from the essay, ‘Vipeksha Gupta: Maps of Rupture and Rapture’ by Ranjit Hoskote

Editorial Adviser: Amit Kumar Jain
Graphic Design: Mansha Chhatwal
Printing: Naveen Printers

ISBN 978-81-954427-2-0
Pages: 140 + cover