Sukhi.com

THE THREE SIGNS OF BEING

An alternative heading might be 'The Three Characteristics of All Phenomena'. With his awakened insight into 'all things as they really are', the Buddha saw that all things, either subjective or objective (inside as thoughts, feelings and moods, and outside as phenomena) bear, or are marked by, three characteristics :

1. Impermanence (change)                           Anicca

2. Unsatisfactoriness (suffering, Dis-ease)     Dukkha

3. Voidness of any self-nature (no-'I')          Anatta

The first two characteristics are comparatively easy to understand, but the third is a little more difficult. It is also one of the most important features of specifically Buddhist teaching.

1. Anicca

The Buddha saw that everything we know, both in the internal world and the external, is always in a state of change. Even schoolchildren today know that physical objects, apparently so solid, are not at all what they seem to be. Physicists tell us that the nature of matter is extremely complex but it can briefly be stated to consist of minute particles in violent motion, and these particles have only a relative reality. the same is true of each and every cell in each and every living thing, including Man.
These cells are forever changing. The rate of change going on in the cells of the brain and thus in the mind is no less rapid. If this is true of the physical world, the rate of change of mental and emotional phenomena is at least as rapid. In fact nothing whatever of our ordinary physical, emotional or mental world ever stays the same for two consecutive instants. Real stability is an illusion and even the relative stability which seems to prevail is at best but a temporary state of balance which is liable to be shifted at any moment. our thoughts, moods and bodies change - arise (are born), gain strength (grow), fade (deteriorate), and cease to be (die).

2. Dukkha

The consequences for us of anicca or impermanence is that, whether we admit it or not, we suffer from a perpetual feeling of insecurity and frustration. We can count on nothing to last indefinately. Things we want to keep are snatched away from us, or we are snatched away from them before we can enjoy them. Most of the time we try not to see life in this way because it is too unsettling. We yearn for some state of security, of lasting satisfaction, of happiness, but it is always just out of reach, or changing just as we grasp it. This is the basic suffering or unsatisfactoriness of life from which none of us is exempt. Buddhism actually gives us hope that there is an escape from this intolerable situation - once we have faced it. for the Buddha's message is 'suffering I teach and the way out of suffering'. The object of Buddhist training is to enable us to do this.

3. Anatta

From impermanence (anicca) to insubstantiability or voidness of self-nature (Anatta) is only a short step; if we penetrate at all deeply into the former, we find ourselves in the midst of the latter if everything is always in a state of change, can there be any abiding entity?

The Buddha's teaching on Anatta has given rise to much controversy. Curiously, since he emphasised so strongly that we must cling to no doctrine of any kind, argument has only risen because Anatta has been mistakenly taken to be a doctrine, something that all Buddhists should believe in because the Buddha taught it. The Buddha, however, taught practice, not doctrine, and Anatta is a practice, not a doctrine. The mind is incapable of understanding the ultimate mystery of self, this also the Buddha made clear but it is of central importance for each of us to examine as closely as possible, with the mind quiet, what is not me, what is not mine.

Some of us are so possessive of our house and belongings that we come to regard them as extensions of our ego, truly part of ourselves, to which we cling. Who owns the tree at the bottom of the garden - you or the thrush defending his territory with song? You burn yourself on the oven: 'Oh! I've hurt myself.' At other times we regard our body as something which we inhabit, 'mine'. With a still mind the body is seen as part of the world, just like other bodies (not 'me', not 'mine'), then work can begin on the emotional and thinking process. These can be watched in fascinating detail with a quiet mind. however, trying to force the realisation, "not 'me', not 'mine', is contrary to the whole exercise. It is trying to turn Anatta into a doctrine. 'See for yourself' was the Buddha's repeated instruction.

How does Dukkha (suffering and unsatisfactoriness) arise from this? We can all answer by looking into our own hearts to see the tensions that arise because one part of us wants to do one thing whilst the other part wants something else. We all know this conflict between natural wants and ideals which we tend to find it impossible to live up to. we strive to achieve certain ideals that can only be known in the absence of 'I', hence the conflict. We all have an inherent yearning for 'something more', or better - a 'fuller life', more satisfactory, away from the petty preoccupations of ourselves.

Even the general loving attitude of the mother herself, and of people in general, that 'baby' is the centre of her world and of his own, becomes undesirable when it persists into adult life without conscious awareness on our part of its presence. Each and every time we get cross, frustrated, embittered when things do not go the way 'I' want them to go, we are in Dukkha and we have allowed an infantile habit to control us. It is these automatic and generally infantile habits that are the direct cause of Dukkha, and in Buddhism they are called the 'Cankers', the addictions that stain the mind.

HOME