Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.
- Basho
The Three Characteristics of Existence
The Buddha identified three characteristics of existence: suffering, impermanence and the concept of no unique self.
Suffering, comes from life, as sickness, loneliness, old age, or just a general feeling of life not being what it should.
Impermanence - We tend to wish that things in life were permanent, but all existence is impermanent - everything is subject to continuous change. Birth and death are part of that process of change. Every living thing is in a continuous state of flux.
No self - As we live, we take on both positive and negative habits and we cling to ideas which we associate with "our permanent selves". But our permanent self is a myth, and once we learn that, we can look beyond the need to have life stay the same.
While the Buddha saw life continuing after death, he described it more as the lighting of one candle by another, the flame originates at the first flame, but the second is a consequence of the first, and not a unique reproduction of it.
While he saw no separate self or ego, he did emphasize the interdependence of all life as well as dependence on what had gone before.
The Buddha taught instead the interconnectedness of life. Each self has no fixed reality, but is a constantly changing self and dependant on changing conditions.
So each person has a physical body which is dependant on food and warmth, and develops in response to those inputs and to the ageing process. Our feelings change with our mood and our time in life, and as a direct result of perceptions which comes from what we see and hear around us. We make decisions based on our feelings and perceptions and these constitute our mental formations.
From these four, body, feelings, perceptions, and mental formations comes consciousness which is dependant on the other four. And the sum of these is what we refer to as self, so therefore, according to the Buddha, there is no fixed definable self. You are still there, with a personality and feelings, and with tremendous possibility for change, and not locked in to some rigid fate, because your nature is built on change.
The Buddha took a middle way on the definition of self. He saw the self as dependant on everything that had gone before, and constantly changing in response to an interconnecting and changing reality. While we are not permanent and fixed entities, we are certainly part on the on-going reality.
Once this is understood, once interconnectedness becomes part of the way of seeing the world, then suffering arises from the personal concept of an independent self.
Suffering, comes from life, as sickness, loneliness, old age, or just a general feeling of life not being what it should.
Impermanence - We tend to wish that things in life were permanent, but all existence is impermanent - everything is subject to continuous change. Birth and death are part of that process of change. Every living thing is in a continuous state of flux.
No self - As we live, we take on both positive and negative habits and we cling to ideas which we associate with "our permanent selves". But our permanent self is a myth, and once we learn that, we can look beyond the need to have life stay the same.
While the Buddha saw life continuing after death, he described it more as the lighting of one candle by another, the flame originates at the first flame, but the second is a consequence of the first, and not a unique reproduction of it.
While he saw no separate self or ego, he did emphasize the interdependence of all life as well as dependence on what had gone before.
The Buddha taught instead the interconnectedness of life. Each self has no fixed reality, but is a constantly changing self and dependant on changing conditions.
So each person has a physical body which is dependant on food and warmth, and develops in response to those inputs and to the ageing process. Our feelings change with our mood and our time in life, and as a direct result of perceptions which comes from what we see and hear around us. We make decisions based on our feelings and perceptions and these constitute our mental formations.
From these four, body, feelings, perceptions, and mental formations comes consciousness which is dependant on the other four. And the sum of these is what we refer to as self, so therefore, according to the Buddha, there is no fixed definable self. You are still there, with a personality and feelings, and with tremendous possibility for change, and not locked in to some rigid fate, because your nature is built on change.
The Buddha took a middle way on the definition of self. He saw the self as dependant on everything that had gone before, and constantly changing in response to an interconnecting and changing reality. While we are not permanent and fixed entities, we are certainly part on the on-going reality.
Once this is understood, once interconnectedness becomes part of the way of seeing the world, then suffering arises from the personal concept of an independent self.