Ecclesiastes 6:4 Meaning For It Comes in Vanity

A life can be spent entirely in vanity, chasing the empty promises of the ego and seeking identity in possessions, achievements, and the approval of others. Such a life arrives grasping and departs in darkness, its name soon forgotten.

This is not meant to frighten you but to wake you. Whatever you build out of the mind's need to be someone rests on passing form, and it cannot last. Beneath all of it, however, is what you already are, the aware presence that was here before the striving began, and that is where a life is safe to be rooted. A life of vanity ends forgotten in darkness for one simple reason: it was built entirely on things that were always going to disappear.

Anicca: Impermanence Everything conditioned arises and breaks up. Coming and departing press so close together here that nothing fits between them, while the man with a hundred sons and many years gets the same two events set further apart. Stretching the span thins the vapor without hardening it, which is why Qoheleth can set the two lives on one scale at all.

Nāmarūpa: Name and form Nāmarūpa is the mind-and-body bundle that forms when consciousness settles into the womb. Something was assembled in the dark there and came apart before anyone spoke a name over it, which shows the ordinary order plainly: the bundle runs first, and a name gets fastened on afterward by other people. Every named person in that household is the same bundle with a syllable attached.

Anattā: Not-self No owner stands behind the process. Darkness closing over the name takes away a handle, and the hand that seemed to be gripping the other end was never there to lose. The man with a hundred children heard his own name said aloud every day of a long life, and it covered the same blank; the crowd of children only meant it was said more often.

Avijjā: Not knowing Avijjā is the darkness at the root of becoming. The dark this small one departs into covers every departure, since nobody arrives or leaves with the lights on. A man may live a thousand years twice over and see no further into his own coming and going, and the darkness over the name is that darkness, visible here only because no long life stands in front of it.

Saṃvega: Urgency Saṃvega is the shock that turns a person toward practice. Weighing a nameless grave against a long, crowded, comfortless life and finding the grave the better bargain is that shock arriving. Held rather than shaken off, it thins out whatever was merely length and leaves standing the question of what the years are for.