The Three Characteristics of Existence are a distillation of a Buddhist argument for how liberation from suffering works. It goes like this:
Experience is always changing.
Change takes away the things we want and causes us to suffer.
If something were truly our self, it would be ours to command—”be this way, not that”.
Experience doesn’t obey: it changes and brings suffering regardless of what we want.
Thus nothing in experience is fit to be taken as self.
Or, put more succinctly, existence is characterized by impermanence, suffering, and not self.
For a long time I didn’t really know what to make of the Three Characteristics. I mean, sure, I could follow the argument, it made sense, but it didn’t seem to be doing much work to help me wake up. Which is ironic, because in fact I now realize that the Three Characteristics are also an attempt to describe what it’s like to be enlightened.
But this isn’t obvious from the way we normally phrase them, especially if “not self” is turned into “no self”, as it commonly is. They’re too much like metaphysical claims about the nature of reality, and not enough like pointers to what to look for in your experience.
I think we can do better. While preparing some notes for a talk, I stumbled on phrasing them thusly:
Nothing’s forever (everything changes)
Nothing’s enough (we always want more)
Nothing’s separate (not even the self)
What I like about this phrasing is it better fits my own experience with awakening, because to take something as self is to set it apart from that which is not self. When I resolved the great matter, I was overcome with the sense that nothing is separate, and in particular that this person who is called “I” and “me” is not fundamentally set apart from those called “you” and “they”. I remember walking around, deeply feeling the newly unlocked connection between myself and the rest of reality, finally seeing that it was already perfect and in no need of change to make me happy.
And part of the reason it didn’t need to change was because I accepted that nothing was ever going to be enough. I would always have wants, for to want is to be alive. And although many Buddhists practice in lineages that seek to suppress all desire, I don’t. Instead I practice in one where we learn to accept want and work with it through Zen’s 16 Bodhisattva precepts.
And what makes acceptance of want possible is knowing that the only thing permanent is change. Even if my wants are for a moment completely satisfied, in the next they won’t be, because the world will change with me in it. All I can do is be here, along for the ride, to find out what I and the world together are going to do.