IB World Religions 2.1.1. the Three Marks of Existence: Dukkha, Anicca and Anatta Notes

2.1.1. The Three Marks of Existence: Dukkha, Anicca and Anatta

The three marks

1. The three marks are what Buddhists call the tilakkhana (Sanskrit trilakshana), three features the Buddha said any attentive person could check. The tradition holds they are true of everything that comes into being through conditions.
2. The three are dukkha (Sanskrit duhkha: suffering or unsatisfactoriness), anicca (Sanskrit anitya: impermanence) and anatta (Sanskrit anatman: the absence of a permanent self).
3. Buddhists present these as observations rather than revelations. The claim is that the Buddha noticed them by looking closely at ordinary experience, and that anyone willing to look can check them the same way.
4. Two of the marks are stated of everything conditioned. Anicca and dukkha are said to hold of all sankharas (conditioned things), while anatta is stated more widely still, in the formula sabbe dhamma anatta: all things are without self.
5. The Dhammapada sets out the three in parallel verses, and each verse closes the same way: seeing this, a person turns away from dukkha, and that is the path of purification.
6. The marks are not three doctrines to be listed in a row. Buddhists treat them as a single argument, and the sections below follow that argument from one mark to the next.

Dukkha and its three kinds

1. Dukkha is usually translated as suffering, though Buddhists stretch the word to cover anything unreliable, unsatisfying or incapable of holding still long enough to be enjoyed. So understood it reaches into pleasant experience as well as painful experience.
2. The commentarial tradition splits it three ways. Dukkha-dukkha is ordinary pain, viparinama-dukkha is the suffering that arrives when something pleasant changes, and sankhara-dukkha is the background strain of holding a conditioned life together.
3. The second and third kinds carry the weight of the teaching. They place dukkha inside good experiences rather than only in bad ones, on the ground that a pleasure due to end is already unreliable while it lasts.
4. The Buddha's first sermon lists the standard instances: birth, ageing, sickness, death, meeting what is disliked, parting from what is loved, and not getting what one wants.
5. That list ends with a clause that ties dukkha to the other two marks: in brief, the five khandas (aggregates) of grasping are dukkha.
6. Buddhists across the branches therefore read dukkha as a description of how conditioned things behave. Noticing it accurately is treated as the first move of the cure rather than as a verdict on life.

Anicca in doctrine and practice

1. Anicca (Sanskrit anitya) is the claim that everything conditioned arises, changes and passes away, from mountains and empires down to a single moment of attention. Attachment is therefore left with nothing that stays still to be held.
2. Buddhists apply it to the mind as firmly as to the body. Thoughts, moods and even the sense of being a continuous observer are treated as events that appear and vanish.
3. The Abhidhamma pushes this to its limit with the doctrine of momentariness, analysing what feels like a steady stream of experience into rapid, separate moments.
4. The teaching is trained rather than merely agreed with. In vipassana (insight meditation) a practitioner watches breath and sensation closely in order to catch arising and passing as they happen.
5. Maranasati (mindfulness of death) and the asubha contemplations on decaying bodies put the lesson into deliberately uncomfortable form, and they are still practised in Theravada forest monasteries.
6. Theravada funerals say anicca out loud. Monks chant anicca vata sankhara, impermanent indeed are conditioned things, over the body, so mourners hear the doctrine at the moment it is hardest to doubt.
7. Vajrayana practice stages the same point when monks sweep away a coloured sand mandala that took days or weeks to build.

Anatta and the five khandas

1. Anatta (Sanskrit anatman) denies that there is a permanent, unchanging self behind experience, and so withdraws the owner that all the grasping was working for. The word is built to contradict the atman of the Upanishads, the eternal self taught in the Indian setting the Buddha was speaking into.
2. The argument in the Anattalakkhana Sutta runs through the five khandas (Sanskrit skandhas): form, feeling, perception, mental formations and consciousness.
3. Each is put to the same test. If any of them were truly self, a person could order it to be other than it is, and since nobody can, the text concludes that none of them is self.
4. The second test uses anicca directly. What is impermanent is unsatisfactory, and what is impermanent and unsatisfactory should not be regarded as this is mine, this I am, this is my self.
5. Buddhists take the practical result to be the loosening of grasping. If nothing here belongs to an owner, the work of defending and enlarging a self loses the thing it was working for.
6. The branches develop the point differently. Theravada teaching keeps anatta as an analysis of the person, while Mahayana thinkers extend it into sunyata (emptiness), holding that all phenomena, and not only persons, lack independent existence.
7. Practice follows the doctrine. Buddhists dedicate the good of their actions outwards and cultivate karuna (compassion) partly on the ground that the self such goods might have been hoarded for was never there.

Tanha and the marks

1. Tanha (Sanskrit trishna: craving, literally thirst) is what turns two neutral observations into a diagnosis, and it is the hinge between the marks. Buddhists name it as the cause of dukkha in the second of the Four Noble Truths.
2. Impermanence by itself is only change. It becomes painful when it meets a mind that wants what is changing to stay.
3. Buddhist analysis distinguishes three forms of it: kama-tanha, craving for sense pleasures, bhava-tanha, craving to be or become something, and vibhava-tanha, craving for an unwanted experience to stop existing.
4. The second form sits closest to anatta. Craving to be a particular kind of self keeps the mind building and defending the very thing the doctrine says was never found.
5. This is why Buddhists hold that dukkha can actually end. Change cannot be stopped, but craving is a trained habit of mind, and a habit can be untrained.
6. Every factor of the Noble Eightfold Path is aimed at that habit. The tradition does not ask a practitioner to fix the world's impermanence, only to stop demanding that it be otherwise.

The marks as one argument

1. Taken separately the marks look like three unrelated remarks, and each one needs the other two before the argument does any work. Taken together they form a chain: things change, so nothing here can be permanently owned, so grasping at them produces dukkha.
2. The chain also runs backwards. Dukkha is the symptom that makes a person look, anicca is what looking finds, and anatta is what anicca implies about the one who is doing the looking.
3. This is why Buddhists say the marks have to be seen rather than merely accepted. Panna (Sanskrit prajna: wisdom) means direct insight into these three, which is why insight meditation takes them as its objects.
4. Mahayana traditions often add a fourth seal to the list, that nibbana (Sanskrit nirvana) is peace, so that the analysis is heard as arriving somewhere rather than as ending in despair.
5. The doctrine shapes the calendar as well as the meditation cushion. At Wesak Buddhists remember the Buddha's birth, enlightenment and death together, marking the impermanence of even his body alongside what he is held to have understood.
6. Buddhists themselves resist reading the three marks as pessimism. On their account an accurate description of how conditioned things behave is exactly what makes the freedom promised by the rest of the teaching possible.