Ecclesiastes 2:15 · World English Bible
Then I said in my heart, “As it happens to the fool, so will it happen even to me; and why was I then more wise?” Then I said in my heart that this also is vanity.
Maraṇasati: Mindfulness of death Keep death steadily in view. "As it happens to the fool, so will it happen even to me": the wise man's careful ledger and the fool's blank one are closed on the very same day, and the grave never pauses to read your accounts before it takes you.
From the Buddhism reading below.
The same verse, read by one tradition.
BUDDHISM
Maraṇasati: Mindfulness of death Keep death steadily in view. "As it happens to the fool, so will it happen even to me": the wise man's careful ledger and the fool's blank one are closed on the very same day, and the grave never pauses to read your accounts before it takes you. Holding that plainly, long before it is forced on you, is where a wise life should have started.
Anicca: Impermanence Everything woven of time comes apart in time. Read "vanity" here as vapor, the breath you can see on a cold morning that thins and is gone before you finish looking at it, and close your hand on it and you hold nothing. Wisdom, wealth, the name you built all drift off as that same mist, so none of it can be banked against tomorrow.
Taṇhā: Craving A thirst that reaches for more and for what lasts. "Why was I then more wise?" is that thirst counting its winnings and finding the purse empty, because wisdom was bought to secure an edge that keeps, a profit that death cannot cancel. Loosen the grip on that edge and the shared ending stays certain while the wound wrapped around it falls away.
Dukkha: Unsatisfactoriness An ache hides inside anything you lean your weight on. Chase the finest wisdom and it still leaves the gnawing "why," the flat taste after a full meal that should have satisfied you and somehow did not, since being more wise only seasons the plate and never fills you. Everything here is asked to bear a weight past its strength, and it gives way.
Saṃvega: Urgent awakening A cold jolt of urgency that turns a person toward the path. "Then I said in my heart that this also is vanity" fires like a starting gun, the instant the whole chase is seen as chasing vapor. Let it start you running toward what does not thin rather than drop you where you stand, for the heart that can sink this far is the same heart that can wake.
Buddhism lens
What am I hoping my carefulness will buy me that it was never going to buy?
He tells himself that the rich and the poor, the famous and the forgotten, all lie down in the same earth, so there is no point in buying an edge against it. What is left is doing the right thing now.
Trying to grasp the world is like grasping at water; the hand closes on nothing. The sage therefore holds nothing tightly and so loses nothing.
He writes of the reed cut from the reed bed, aching because it was taken from what it belonged to. The ache is not a flaw in the reed, it is what makes the music.
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Buddhism