The Three Marks of Existence—or is it four?

According to the Buddha, there are three marks of existence: suffering, impermanence and anatman (no self).

Suffering (dukkha)

When most of us think about suffering we think about great trauma and affliction: people starving to death in Darfur, the victims of suicide bombers, suspected terrorists under torture, battered women. But suffering (dukka) is a lot more subtle and pervasive that that. It’s more like “dissatisfaction.” Life is not inherently satisfying. We eat—and then a few hours later we become hungry again. The best food in the world cannot give us lasting satisfaction. The same is true for all aspects of our lives. We lose what we have and that grieves us. We reach for something better and when we get it, we worry that we’ll lose it. We grow dissatisfied with our life—our job, our car, our spouse. We reach for something better.

Impermanence (annica)

It’s a very interesting fact that food ultimately turns into shit.

Properly applied, shit turns into fertilizer and that way becomes food.

The whole entire universe is exactly like this. Nothing lasts forever.

Some things have a longer life span. Some insects live for a day. Human beings live up to about one hundred and twenty years. Civilizations last a few thousand years. Our sun is has a predicted life span of about 9.5 billion years.

So food turns into shit turns into food.

So joy turns into grief turns into joy.

No self (annata)

If everything under the sun must die, so must the self. And not only the body, but the psyche, the ego, the “I.”

Actually, the self was never born so the self can never die.

The greatest cause of human suffering lies in our refusal to see that the self is nothing more than a collection of feelings and perceptions and memories and opinions with no more substance than a spider web. We cling so desperately to something that we know we cannot keep, something that is already a ghost.

Enlightenment

Some later commentators view enlightenment as the fourth mark of existence. For a long time this puzzled me. Wasn’t the Buddha’s teaching already complete?

Now I think, why not? Enlightenment is our natural state. It is who and what we are even when we refuse to see it. But when we relax, even a little, we see that it’s always appearing disappearing appearing.

It’s the the spider and the web

the living fly and the corpse of the fly

the anchoring tree and the pull of the wind

the wind and all the time and all the space within which

a child watches a spider spin a web and turns around and dies

and the light that follows