"The logs of wood which move down the river together Are driven apart by every wave. Such inevitable parting Should not be the cause of misery"
About this Quote
Nagarjuna takes an image that feels almost embarrassingly ordinary - logs sharing a current - and uses it to puncture one of our favorite human fantasies: that togetherness is a stable thing the world is obligated to protect. The river isn’t a villain here. Neither are the waves. They’re just the conditions of reality doing what conditions do: shifting, colliding, recombining. The quiet brutality of the metaphor is its refusal to grant romance any special exemptions.
The subtext lands on attachment, the engine of misery in much Buddhist thought. The logs “move down the river together” only because circumstances temporarily align: proximity, momentum, a shared direction. Then “every wave” drives them apart, not as a tragedy but as a reminder that what we call a bond is often a contingent arrangement we’ve mistaken for permanence. The line “Such inevitable parting / Should not be the cause of misery” isn’t a scold so much as a diagnostic: suffering is what happens when we treat the temporary as if it were guaranteed.
Context matters: Nagarjuna’s philosophy (especially in the Madhyamaka tradition) insists on emptiness - not nihilism, but the idea that things lack fixed, independent essence. Relationships, identities, even the “self” that clings are processes, not possessions. The rhetorical power here is how gently it shifts the blame: not onto love, not onto loss, but onto the mind’s demand that the river stop being a river.
The subtext lands on attachment, the engine of misery in much Buddhist thought. The logs “move down the river together” only because circumstances temporarily align: proximity, momentum, a shared direction. Then “every wave” drives them apart, not as a tragedy but as a reminder that what we call a bond is often a contingent arrangement we’ve mistaken for permanence. The line “Such inevitable parting / Should not be the cause of misery” isn’t a scold so much as a diagnostic: suffering is what happens when we treat the temporary as if it were guaranteed.
Context matters: Nagarjuna’s philosophy (especially in the Madhyamaka tradition) insists on emptiness - not nihilism, but the idea that things lack fixed, independent essence. Relationships, identities, even the “self” that clings are processes, not possessions. The rhetorical power here is how gently it shifts the blame: not onto love, not onto loss, but onto the mind’s demand that the river stop being a river.
Quote Details
| Topic | Letting Go |
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