These suc­cinct phrases de­scrib­ing the three char­ac­ter­is­tics of re­al­ity are a well-known sum­mary of the Buddha’s teach­ing. They are pro­found, rad­i­cal, even dev­as­tat­ing in their philo­soph­i­cal im­pli­ca­tions. But, true to the prag­matic ori­en­ta­tion of the Dhamma, their chief pur­pose is not to fuel coffee-table de­bates on the mean­ing of life, but to ori­ent our in­ner ex­plo­rations, pro­vid­ing con­cise yet com­pre­hen­sive guide­lines for in­sight med­i­ta­tion.

As such, the mean­ing of these phrases would seem to be of no lit­tle in­ter­est for those pur­su­ing the Buddha’s way of calm and in­sight. Yet their pre­cise in­ter­pre­ta­tion re­mains elu­sive, par­tic­u­larly the enig­matic shift from ‘saṅkhāras’ to ‘dham­mas’ in the third phrase. Both of these terms are highly am­bigu­ous, as­sum­ing a va­ri­ety of mean­ings in dif­fer­ent con­texts. Here I will leave them un­trans­lated so as to not colour the in­ter­pre­ta­tion.

One pop­u­lar con­tem­po­rary in­ter­pre­ta­tion sees saṅkhāras here as ‘con­di­tioned phe­nom­ena’, or more pre­cisely, the phe­nom­ena of ex­pe­ri­ence as ac­tive par­tic­i­pants in an on­go­ing process of cause and ef­fect. Dhammas is seen as be­ing broader, in­clud­ing con­di­tioned phe­nom­ena plus Nibbana, the un­con­di­tioned. Doubt has been thrown on this view, how­ever, be­cause Nibbana is never di­rectly re­ferred to as ‘not-self’ in the sut­tas. The pur­pose of this con­tem­pla­tion is to be­come re­pulsed from suf­fer­ing, so one con­tem­plates phe­nom­ena as ‘not-self’, ‘a dis­ease’, ‘a barb’, ‘an af­flic­tion’, etc. Obviously, Nibbana does not come within the scope of such con­tem­pla­tion.

It has been pointed out, how­ever, that Nibbana is re­ferred to as ‘not-self’ in the Vinaya Parivāra. This late com­pendium of monas­tic dis­ci­pline is an odd place in­deed to find such a state­ment, but at least this shows that such ideas were con­sid­ered or­tho­dox by the emerg­ing Theravada school.

One rea­son for the pop­u­lar­ity of the view that ‘all dham­mas’ in­cludes Nibbana has been to counter the opin­ion of some promi­nent schol­ars that Nibbana is a kind of higher ‘Self’. The per­sis­tence of such ideas is quite as­ton­ish­ing in light of the Buddha’s con­sis­tent and un­spar­ing con­dem­na­tion of all doc­trines of self, and the to­tal lack of any hint that Nibbana is a ‘self’. However, it does not nec­es­sar­ily fol­low that the state­ment ‘all dham­mas are not-self’ refers to Nibbana. In fact, it’s a weak ar­gu­ment. One should never rely on a dis­puted in­ter­pre­ta­tion of an am­bigu­ous term to but­tress one’s po­si­tion in a de­bate.

The Theravada com­men­taries of­fer con­flict­ing opin­ions on this point – a sure sign that the teach­ers of old were not unan­i­mous. One ex­pla­na­tion has it that saṅkhāras here means the ‘ag­gre­gate of saṅkhāras’ (i.e. var­i­ous men­tal fac­tors headed by vo­li­tion), while dham­mas means all five ag­gre­gates. I find this in­ter­pre­ta­tion too ar­bitary to do jus­tice to the con­text. Elsewhere the com­men­taries sug­gest that dhamma in­cludes ‘con­cepts’ along with con­di­tioned phe­nom­ena. This is in­ter­est­ing, but it rests on philo­soph­i­cal premises more char­ac­ter­is­tic of later strata of Buddhist thought, namely the dis­tinc­tion be­tween ul­ti­mate truth and con­ven­tional truth.

The main prob­lem with all the above the­o­ries is that they lack sutta sup­port. Ideally we should like an im­por­tant sutta deal­ing di­rectly with the three char­ac­ter­is­tics which refers to some­thing as a dhamma while stat­ing or im­ply­ing that that dhamma is nei­ther im­per­ma­nent nor suf­fer­ing. To find such a pas­sage we need look no fur­ther than the well-known ‘Discourse on the Lawfulness of Dhamma’. I trans­late only the rel­e­vant por­tions.

‘All saṅkhāras are im­per­ma­nent.’ Whether Tathagatas arise or not, that el­e­ment is sta­ble, that sta­bil­ity of dhamma, that law­ful­ness of dhamma… ‘All saṅkhāras are suf­fer­ing.’ Whether Tathagatas arise or not, that el­e­ment is sta­ble, that sta­bil­ity of dhamma, that law­ful­ness of dhamma… ‘All dham­mas are not-self.’ Whether Tathagatas arise or not, that el­e­ment is sta­ble, that sta­bil­ity of dhamma, that law­ful­ness of dhamma…

The idea is that the prin­ci­ples of the Dhamma are al­ways true. Things are im­per­ma­nent. In the past they were im­per­ma­nent. In the fu­ture, too, they will be im­per­ma­nent. While the sutta stops short of such a bold state­ment as ‘im­per­ma­nence is per­ma­nent’, still the terms ‘sta­bil­ity’ and ‘law­ful­ness’ are vir­tu­ally the op­po­site of ‘im­per­ma­nence’.

If the prin­ci­ples of the dhamma can­not be re­garded as im­per­ma­nent, nei­ther, it would seem, should they be re­garded as suf­fer­ing. They are not men­tioned in the usual de­scrip­tions of suf­fer­ing, nor do they fall into the three­fold analy­sis of suf­fer­ing as the suf­fer­ing of painful feel­ing, the suf­fer­ing of saṅkhāras, and the suf­fer­ing of change.

So the prin­ci­ples of im­per­ma­nence, suf­fer­ing, and self­less­ness are the ‘dhamma’ which is not im­per­ma­nent or suf­fer­ing; yet it seems plain enough that such prin­ci­ples are not-self. This is con­firmed in a re­lated dis­course, which uses sim­i­lar phrases such as the ‘sta­bil­ity of dhamma’ in the con­text of de­pen­dent orig­i­na­tion. While the fac­tors of de­pen­dent orig­i­na­tion, the ‘de­pen­dently orig­i­nated phe­nom­ena’ headed by ig­no­rance, are im­per­ma­nent, the causal re­la­tion­ship be­tween the phe­nom­ena re­mains fixed. Whenever there is ig­no­rance, that will al­ways give rise to con­cep­tual ac­tiv­i­ties, and so on. And it is pre­cisely this con­sis­tent man­ner in which ex­pe­ri­ence op­er­ates which cre­ates the il­lu­sion of ‘self’, of a per­ma­nent essence or core un­der­ly­ing the tran­sient fluc­tu­a­tions of ex­pe­ri­ence. To see through this il­lu­sion, the Buddha taught us to make the con­di­tional re­la­tion it­self a fo­cus of our in­ves­ti­ga­tion, to see ex­pe­ri­ence nei­ther as a ran­dom mean­ing­less chaos, nor as di­verse sur­face man­i­fes­ta­tions of a hid­den in­ner unity, but as a flow of tran­sient phe­nom­ena gov­erned by nat­ural laws.

The three char­ac­ter­is­tics them­selves are re­ally lit­tle more than an­other per­spec­tive for ex­am­in­ing con­di­tion­al­ity. The sut­tas of­ten treat ‘im­per­ma­nent’ as a vir­tual syn­onym for ‘de­pen­dently orig­i­nated’. So in the end we can sum­ma­rize like this. Saṅkhāras means ‘con­di­tioned phe­nom­ena’, while ‘dham­mas’ en­com­passes the con­di­tioned phe­nom­ena as well as the prin­ci­ples of con­di­tion­al­ity.

This is use­ful. It re­minds us that in­sight is not just ‘bare aware­ness’ of tran­sient phe­nom­ena, but must lead to an act of un­der­stand­ing, an in­tu­itive re­al­iza­tion of their fun­da­men­tal na­ture. Seeing that ‘this thought is im­per­ma­nent’, ‘this feel­ing is suf­fer­ing’, ‘this idea is not-self’, we can let go of that thought, that feel­ing, that idea. But only when we see that ‘all thoughts are im­per­ma­nent’, ‘all feel­ings are suf­fer­ing’, ‘all ideas are not-self’ can we let go of all thoughts, all feel­ings, all ideas.

The key to thus uni­ver­sal­iz­ing the par­tic­u­lars of one’s own ex­pe­ri­ence is con­di­tion­al­ity. Again and again and again one sees thoughts aris­ing when cer­tain con­di­tions are present; and again and again and again one sees that when those con­di­tions are ab­sent, thoughts do not arise.

One bright day it clicks: one un­der­stands. This in­ner event is re­ally quite mys­te­ri­ous. No-one can say how or when it will oc­cur; and yet we can point out how to bring it about. When it hap­pens, one has no thought of iden­ti­fy­ing or cling­ing to the pass­ing pa­rade of phe­nom­ena, the Mardi-gras of the mind, for one un­der­stands: all dham­mas are not-self.