2 Kings 19:26 · World English Bible
Therefore their inhabitants had little power. They were dismayed and confounded. They were like the grass of the field, and like the green herb, like the grass on the housetops, and like grain blasted before it has grown up.
Anicca: Impermanence Whatever is put together comes apart. Rooftop grass has a finger of dirt under it, so it greens after one rain and browns before anyone thinks to cut it, and that is about how long those fortified towns held once the ramps went up.
From the Buddhism reading below.
The same verse, read by one tradition.
BUDDHISM
Anicca: Impermanence Whatever is put together comes apart. Rooftop grass has a finger of dirt under it, so it greens after one rain and browns before anyone thinks to cut it, and that is about how long those fortified towns held once the ramps went up. Grass runs the common course of things at a speed slow eyes can follow; the fields outside the gate had been showing the inhabitants their own year all along.
Anattā: Not-self Nothing here carries an owner inside it who can give orders. "Little power" sounds at first like the particular weakness of small towns in front of Assyrian siege engines, and it names the standing condition of anything assembled from parts. None of those inhabitants could say to a wall, a harvest, or a body, hold, and have it hold; whatever answers to no command was never theirs.
Maraṇassati: Mindfulness of death Death kept deliberately in view. Grain blasted before it has grown up is the young and the strong, scorched in the blade by an east wind, counted by nobody as this year's dead. Farmers know that wind can come in any week, and holding the ruined field in mind daily wears down the assumption that there is time to ripen first.
Saṃvega: Urgency Shock at frailty that turns a person toward practice. Dismayed and confounded is the raw form of it: hands going slack on the parapet as dust rises off the road and the column comes into view. That same dust can set someone working on what no siege reaches, which is the difference between fear that fades by evening and fear that changes what you do with the morning.
Mada: Intoxication with life and health Drunkenness on being young, well, and alive. Sennacherib rides past the mown fields and counts them as proof of his own arm, never once as his portrait. Sobering up means standing in front of the withered stalks on the roof and granting the resemblance: his chariots grow in the same thin soil, and his camp outside Jerusalem has one night to go.
Karuṇā: Compassion The heart quivering at another's pain. Grass is how people look from horseback, described by a rider who never has to learn the names in the towns he burns. From the ground, dismayed and confounded is a woman on a roof watching her own crop fail, and frailty that makes an easy taunt makes a plain claim on kindness.
Buddhism lens
Whose frailty have you been seeing from horseback?
Alive, a person is soft and yielding; dead, they are stiff and hard, and the same holds for grass and trees. The hard and strong belong to death, the soft and weak to life.
Marcus reminds himself that generations are leaves, grown in spring and scattered by wind, and that the one scattering them will be scattered too. The emperor writing it includes himself in the count.
Bodies are worn and set aside like clothing, says the teaching, and grieving over what is certain for everyone born is grief misplaced. What passes was always going to pass.
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