The story of The Life of the Buddha describes how the young Prince Siddhartha saw an old person, a sick person and a dead person and recognised that the idyllic existence he had enjoyed evaded the fundamental truth of life. When he saw a holy man he realised that he needed to live in a way that was an authentic response to what he had seen, and he became a holy man himself. Buddhist teachings draw out the lesson he learned through the teaching of the three marks, or characteristics, of existence
The Buddha observed that the world, as we experience it, is a constant flux, with things always coming into existence and passing away. This means that everything is impermanent, and impermanence is a characteristic of everything. One way this impacts us personally is recognising that we will die, and so will everyone else. But that’s just the start. From stars and galaxies right down to sub-atomic particles, nothing stays still or lasts forever, and the same is true of the environment we inhabit. We live in a universe of constant change.
We may know this intellectually, but Buddhism urges us to take the truth of impermanence deep into our experience.
"It is better to live one day seeing the rise and fall of things than to live a hundred years without ever seeing the rise and fall of things." The Buddha, The Dhammapada
If everything we experience is changing all the time, then how can we say that any of it has any fixed or eternal essence – any ‘substance’?
Most of the Buddha’s contemporaries thought that there was a fixed, eternal essence at the heart of existence of which ordinary life was a shadow or reflection, and that beneath the surface of our experience lay a soul – the Indian word is atman. Similar beliefs underlie many religious traditions. Because the Buddha said there is no fixed self or soul he called his teaching anatman, meaning ‘no self’, or ‘insubstantiality’. This makes our experience elusive, mysterious and ungraspable.
"Pleasure is fleeting and mixed with pain, it quickly disappears like figures traced in water." The Buddha, The Dhammapada
Now we come to our personal experience which always includes struggle and difficulty along with pleasure and satisfaction. Why should this be? Unsatisfactoriness or suffering is the first of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths and in that teaching the explanation is that we suffer because of craving. But the account of the marks of the marks of existence helps explain what he meant by ‘craving’.
Living in an impermanent and insubstantial world is very hard, and on a deep level we don’t like it. We crave for a security, certainty and permanence that the world can’t provide: as Buddhism says, we don’t get what we want and we get what we don’t want. So we direct our energy in ways we think will bring us happiness and enable us to avoid suffering. It’s easy to think of examples from pursuing money, popularity, sex, stimulation to a successful career and a thousand other things. But none of these can give us what we yearn for because they are all impermanent. We can’t control what life brings.
Recognising that things are impermanent, insubstantial and therefore unsatisfactory is not an end in itself, but a reason to turn away from worldly ways of thinking and take up a path of inner transformation leading to Nirvana.
Recognising impermanence spurs us to reflect that, if our time is limited, we should be sure not to waste it. It also helps us to be less attached to things being the way we want them to be and see events in a wider perspective.
The Buddhist path is a way to root out the deep emotional orientations that engage us in samsara: craving, aversion and ignorance. The teaching of conditionality explains more fully how our experience comes to be like this and what we should do about it to gain liberation.
"The world is afflicted by death and decay. But the wise do not grieve, having realised the nature of the world." The Buddha, Sutta Nipata
🎧 Listen to a collection of talks on the lakshanas (impermanence, insubstantiality and unsatisfactoriness)
📖 'What is the Dharma?' by Sangharakshita
📖 'Sailing The Worldly Winds: A Buddhist Way Through the Ups and Downs of Life' by Vajragupta
