(Excerpt from the Maha Bodhi, printed in 1984 Vol. 92)

Buddhism on the Nature of Existence
"Sabbe samkhara anicca"
"Sabbe samkhara dukkha"
"Sabbe dhamma anatta"

In these quotations taken from the three verses of the Dhammapada the central teachings of Buddhism regarding existence are expressed.

All conditioned things are impermanent
All conditioned things are dukkha
All things are without substance

By “things” is meant not only the physical world, but also all in the psychic, moral, social and spiritual realms. “Conditioned” means consequent, dependent, subject to the law of causality by which the existence of one thing is dependent on that of others.

The three qualities which the verses attribute to things are generally referred to as the “ Three Characteristics of Existence”, or “ Signs of Being”. To explain them more fully we shall take them in a different order.

Sabbe Samkhara Anicca
That everything is impermanent, transient in its nature, is a commonplace of all higher religious and philosophical thought, and a theme of poets and mystics in every age and clime. What distinguishes the Buddhist treatment of it is the relentless thoroughness with which it pursues, explores and exhausts the topic. No exception to the law that all conditioned things are transient has ever been recognized by Buddhism, for it sees clearly that whatever has a beginning must have an end. In the physical universe without and the psychic world within, nothing is so huge or so minute, so long-lasting or so short-lived that it escapes the law of transience, of arising and falling. But deep as this insight goes, the human mind has a basic resistance to it, in the form of a delusion that there is a real “I”, a residual self or immortal soul. The undeceivable Eye of Enlightenment, however, sees no such unchanging entity, but instead perceives an uninterrupted flow of mental events. Each event arises as a consequence of others, and in its turn functions as a condition for further events. In this, no continuing entity independent of the flow of events can ever be found.

The flow of events should be seen not as a succession of separate ‘states’ or ‘elements’, (which would leave us with the problem of how they are to be joined), but rather as so many phases of two streams of energy, one physical , the other psychic. Both are pure, absolutely continuous, and they are inter-dependent.

Sabbe Dhamma Anatta
It will be noted that here the word ‘dhamma’ is used, meaning both conditioned and unconditioned things, establishing that there is no substance outside conditioned things, just as there is none within them.

From the transience of the conditioned to its lack of substance is a short step, which we can conveniently take by considering the notion of change. We say, ‘ The leaf changes from green to red’. Grammatically and logically analyzed, this sentence predicates that one attribute succeeds another. And it implies that in some sense it is possible for a substance to exist without its attributes, that there can be a leaf without any colour or shape or texture or any other quality. In what sense this is possible is by no means clear, yet an extraordinarily large number of beliefs and doctrines are based on this fallacy. They include the conception of God as Absolute Being (that is, as apart from all particular existent things), and the existence of the soul as the changeless self of the individual independent of the sum-total of psychophysical states.

Removed from its colour and other qualities, a leaf is not an independent entity but only a name. When it changes its colour what really happens is that, as the traditional formula puts it, in dependence on a green leaf, a red leaf arises. This does not mean that there is first a green leaf, then a red one, or that one is the cause of the other, for the change is a continuous process. It means that there is nothing but change.

Thus anicca affirms that all conditioned things change, but anatta penetrating far deeper, affirms that there is nothing which changes. To abstract the ‘thing’ which is changed from the process of change and set it up as an independent entity affected by change, as it were, from outside is fallacious.

There is, as the Buddha said, an Unconditioned, for without it no escape from the conditioned would be possible. Conditioned things are anatta because they are no more than the sum of their parts, and because when they change there is nothing which changes apart from change itself. But the Unconditioned is not made up of parts, and it is unchanging. How, the, can it be said to be anatta? Only in the sense that it has no determinate nature, and cannot be pointed out as this or that and cannot be defined as existent or non-existent, or neither, or both.

Here, the insubstantiality of the Unconditioned and the conditioned overlap. Normally one thinks of the dhamma into which the psycho-physical personality is divided (the ‘khandas’) as separate. But, like the centimeters on a rule, they have only a nominal, not a real, existence and forms a continuum, which like the Unconditioned, cannot be pointed out as this or that. Here, we approach the indescribable ‘thusness’ – ‘tathata’ which constitutes the ultimate reality of the conditioned and the Unconditioned.

Sabbe Samkhara Dukkha
It is the teaching of Buddhism – as in the First Noble Truth – that although on the surface conditioned existence often appears as permanent, pleasant and real, it also contains a number of undeniably unpleasant things, such as old age, disease, death, being separated from what we like and being associated with what we dislike. The pleasant things and the painful things, the sweet and bitter things of life, are inter-connected, so that it is impossible to enjoy one without having to suffer the other. No conditioned thing can be pleasant under all circumstances and from all points of view. But it is not to say that “all is misery”.

There is a notable passage in the Digha Nikaya which states, “Whenever one reaches up to the Release, called the Beautiful, then he knows indeed what Beauty is”. It is clear that, in principle, awareness of beauty, the positive factor, predominates in the Buddhist spiritual life over awareness of ugliness, the negative one. Only by developing awareness of and delight in the ‘beauty’ of the Unconditioned can we understand that conditioned things do not satisfy our deepest longings.

Once one experiences the bliss of a higher degree one naturally loses interest in that of a lower degree of intensity, as we can, most of us, confirm even from our experience of the conditioned world.
What this Sign of Being really means is that only the Unconditioned is peace, and that conditioned things are painful because we seek in them for that absolute bliss which only comes from the Unconditioned, and have, therefore, inevitably to experience disappointment and frustration.

One may think that the nature of existence is a philosophical, abstract experience, remote from our everyday lives. But, in reality, all our thoughts, all our actions, are conditioned by our views. Only when we see existence as it is can we escape the realm of suffering and enter that of true beauty.