Ezra 3:13 Meaning So That the People Could Not Discern

Anicca: Impermanence Everything put together comes apart, and this fresh foundation proves it: the first house stood on stones like these and is rubble now. The young cheer a beginning while the old, who watched the other end, weep over the same pile of cut stone, and both are reading it correctly. A life long enough to see a temple raised and razed will carry both sounds in it.

Upādāna: Clinging Clinging is the mind's grip on what it loves. The elders who had seen Solomon's house still carry it with them, and the tighter the hold, the louder the weeping over a foundation that will never match it. A new temple cannot be received by hands already full, so the gladdest day of their return arrives as loss.

Parideva: Lamentation Parideva is sorrow that leaves the body as noise. These men held it in through the years of exile, and the cornerstone is what finally lets it out, up into the same open air as the trumpets and traveling the same distance. Grief and gladness reach the neighboring fields as one report, so the whole returned people stand inside the crying together rather than each man swallowing his own.

Vedanā: Feeling Tone Vedanā is the pleasant or painful edge that comes with every experience. Two of them sound at once over one courtyard, one crowd finding the day sweet and the other finding it bitter, with nothing different in front of them. The stone is not carrying the joy or the grief; each man brings his own tone and lays it on the same event.

Saññā: Recognition Saññā is the faculty that names what arrives, calling this sound joy and that one grief. It gives out in the middle of the shouting, and no one standing there can cut the noise into two. The ear received one sound; sorting it was always going to be the mind's later work, and for a while that work simply stops, leaving a single roar rolling out across the country with the labels still off it.