M A Y 2 7, 2 0 2 1

The Three Perceptions

I’d like to say a few words tonight about the three perceptions: anicca, dukkha,
and anattā—inconstancy, stress, and not-self. To understand them best, you have
to pay attention to the principles with which you interpret them.
Here it’s important to realize there’s a link between what the Buddha says in
his discussion of everyday Dhamma—the Dhamma of generosity, of the precepts,
of kamma in general, along with his autobiographical narratives—and what he
has to say about the Dhamma in its more advanced, technical aspects. There’s a
connection between the two contexts that’s often missed. His everyday
statements aren’t just wise statements floating around unsupported. Instead,
they’re anchored in the deeper principles the Buddha learned in the course of his
successful quest for awakening. As he applies those principles to everyday issues,
he’s establishing a point of view that will eventually develop into more advanced
insights.
A good example is when, in the context of kamma, he discusses the
beginnings of discernment. He says that discernment begins with asking
questions of contemplatives—in other words, wise people: “What, when I do it,
will lead to my long-term harm and suffering? And what, when I do it, will lead
to my long-term welfare and happiness?” In the context of these questions,
discernment becomes a matter of your search for a happiness that’s reliable.
It’s always important to keep that context in mind.
This principle relates, of course, to the Buddha’s own original quest for
freedom from suffering, freedom from aging, illness, and death. What was
special about his quest was how high he set the standards against which he
measured the answer to that question. He didn’t content himself with just the
long-term. He wanted something totally unchanging. He didn’t content himself
with any old happiness. He wanted the ultimate: no aging, no illness, no death at
all.
That was how he ended up with the four noble truths, which are basically the
ultimate answer to the question, “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term
welfare and happiness?” The noble eightfold path is the course of action that
leads to the ultimate happiness by bringing suffering totally to an end. It does
this by inducing dispassion for the origins of craving, which are the cause of all
suffering.
At the same time, this question and these standards relate to the three
perceptions. They’re principles for judging whether something meets the criteria
established by the question. On an everyday level, if a form of welfare and
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happiness is long-term and is worth the effort of claiming as yours, then it’s
worth holding on to. If not, you can let it go. The three perceptions are basically
techniques for letting go of things that don’t meet up with the criteria. “Long-
term,” of course, relates to anicca or inconstancy; “welfare and happiness” relates
to dukkha, stress or suffering; and the “I” and the “mine”—“what I do” and “my
welfare and happiness”—relate to anattā. If something is inconstant, stressful,
and not really you or yours, it doesn’t qualify to be taken as your long-term
welfare and happiness.
In terms of the Buddha’s quest for awakening, anicca relates to aging, dukkha
to illness, and anattā to death. You may know the story of Ven. Raṭṭhapāla’s
discussion with King Koravya. Koravya asks Raṭṭhapāla, “Why did you ordain?
Most people ordain when they suffer loss of relatives, loss of health, loss of
wealth, but you haven’t suffered any of those losses.” Raṭṭhapāla replies that he
was inspired to ordain by four Dhamma summaries taught by the Buddha: “The
world is swept away. It does not endure. The world offers no shelter, no
protection. There is no one in charge. The world has nothing of its own. One must
pass on, leaving everything behind. The world is insufficient, a slave to craving.”
The king asks for some explanations of these summaries, and in the course of
giving the explanations, Raṭṭhapāla shows that, when he talks about the world
being swept away, he’s talking about anicca and aging together. He asks the king,
“How old are you now?”
The king says he’s 80 years old.
“Are you as strong now as you used to be?”
“Well, no, of course not. Sometimes I mean to place my foot one place and it
goes someplace else—even though when I was young, I thought I had
supernormal strength.”
So that’s aging: anicca.
The second summary: The world offers no shelter, there’s no one in charge.
The king argues that he has plenty of protection with all his armed forces, so
Raṭṭhapāla asks him: “Do you have any illnesses?”
“Yes.” He has a recurring wind illness, which is basically shooting pains in the
body.
“And here you are, you’re a king. Can you order your courtiers to share out
the pain so that you feel less pain?”
“No, I have to experience all that pain myself.”
That’s illness: dukkha.
Then the king says, “And what do you mean, ‘The world has nothing of its
own’? We have storerooms filled with gold, silver, all kinds of wealth.”
And Raṭṭhapāla says, “When you die, can you take any of that with you?”
“Well, no. I have to leave it in the world as I go on.”
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So anattā, not-self—not me, not mine—relates to death.

Of course, the real irony in their discussion comes when they get to the final
point: “The world is a slave to craving.” The king doesn’t like being called a slave
to anything. “How can you say I’m a slave to craving?”
Raṭṭhapāla asks him, “If there were a kingdom to the east and a reliable
person were to come and say, ‘Your majesty, you could conquer that kingdom. It
has lots of wealth, but its army is very weak.’ Would you try to conquer it?”
The king says, “Of course.” Here he is, 80 years old, and he’s just been
reflecting on aging, illness, and death, yet when the opportunity to conquer
another kingdom comes along, he’ll go for it.
“How about another kingdom to the west… north… south?”
The king says, “Yes… yes… yes, I’d try to conquer those, too.”
“How about a kingdom on the other side of the ocean?”
“I’d go for that one as well.”
That’s what Raṭṭhapāla meant when he said, “a slave to craving.”
That’s the real problem to which the four noble truths point: We suffer
because of our craving, which makes us want to keep coming back to these things
that are marked by aging, illness, and death, inconstancy, stress, and not-self. We
see their drawbacks, and yet our craving keeps us yearning for more.
So when we’re exercising our discernment and applying the three perceptions
to whatever’s coming up in our awareness, we’re passing a value judgment as to
which actions are worth doing and which actions are not worth doing, which
ones are worth the effort and which ones are not, seen in the light of the quest for
genuine happiness. The perceptions are designed to raise your standards so you
won’t keep craving things that will make you suffer. When you come across
something in your practice, you judge it. If any of the three perceptions apply,
then it’s not what you’re looking for.
Now, there are some things that are stressful and inconstant, but they lead to
your long-term welfare and happiness. Virtue and concentration, for instance,
require effort to maintain them, but because they’re essential to the path to the
end of suffering and stress, you hold on to them for the time being. You wait until
they’re fully developed and have performed their functions before you let them
go. This means that, as you progress in the practice, you have apply the three
perceptions selectively primarily to things that would pull you off the path, until
you get to the very end. That’s when you apply the three perceptions across the
board.
At the same time, try to remember the Buddha’s high standards for his own
happiness: something totally free from aging, illness, and death. He saw that he
would find ultimate happiness by letting go of all clinging to suffering, and by
inducing dispassion both for clinging and for craving. This is what the three
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perceptions are for. This is their role within the context of the four noble truths: to
induce that dispassion.
This is an issue that comes up sometimes in discussions of Buddhist wisdom.
Which is the context: What they call the “three characteristics”? Or the four noble
truths? Now, the term, “three characteristics,” is not found in the Canon. It’s
found in the commentaries. The commentaries tend to take the three
characteristics as the context, saying that they’re a description of the true nature
of reality is, and then, given that this is the way reality functions, the four noble
truths are ways of negotiating the reality that’s defined by what’s inconstant,
stressful, and not-self.
But there are some problems if you put the four noble truths under the three
characteristics. First of all, the three characteristics themselves carry no duties.
Just because something is inconstant doesn’t mean that you’ll immediately feel
compelled to follow the four noble truths. We see this all around as people say,
“Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you may die.” That’s their way of
making the most of inconstancy, our precarious position here where death could
come at any moment. The three characteristics, on their own, don’t hold out any
prospect of anything lasting or truly happy. From that, it’s easy to conclude that
you should look for your happiness in the realm of the three characteristics and
accept that as the best you can do. You accept them as the limitations on your
prospects for long-term welfare and happiness. This means that if you start with
the three characteristics as your context, you can define your duties with regard
to them in any way at all.
Second, if we make the three characteristics the context, we’re shaping how
we understand what ignorance means. We believe that we cling because we think
things are permanent. If we knew that something was impermanent, our
relationship to it would not count as clinging, because we wouldn’t be ignorant.
But the reality is we cling to things and activities even when we know that the
results will be impermanent. That’s because we calculate what’s worth doing in
terms of the effort expended and the happiness obtained as a result. Again, this is
a value judgment. As long as we see that the pleasure gained overrides the pain
and the effort that goes into gaining it, then we think it’s going to be worth it.
But in the context of the four noble truths, the Buddha has us contemplate the
pleasures that we’re looking for in life, the things that we’re attached to, using
these three perceptions to develop some dispassion for them, to see that maybe
they’re not worth it after all.
At the same time, we find in the Canon passages where the Buddha talks
about people clinging to the deathless. They’ll have an experience of the
discernment that allows them to see the deathless, and they’ll cling to that. That’s
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what keeps them from gaining total freedom. So it’s possible to cling even to
things that don’t change.
So there are advantages to putting the three perceptions under the four noble
truths. One is that the four noble truths have clear duties. Suffering is to be
comprehended, which means that you overcome any passion, aversion, or
delusion around it. Its origination is to be abandoned, its cessation realized, and
the path to its cessation developed.
So if there’s suffering, you want to put an end to it, but you can’t do that by
abandoning it. You have to comprehend it first until you understand what its
cause is: its origination in the mind. That’s what you abandon. It’s like going into
your house and seeing that the house is full of water, so you have to find the
broken pipe from which it’s gushing. You don’t just bail out the water, bail out
the water, bail out the water. In fact, the more time you waste bailing out the
water, the more the water’s going to flood your house. You’ve got to find the
broken pipe and fix it. Then the water will go down on its own.
In the same way, you look for the cause of suffering and you solve the
problem at the cause. To do that, you also try to develop the path so that you can
realize the cessation of suffering. Those duties are inherent in the four noble
truths.
Once we’ve got the duties in place, then we look at how the three perceptions
function within those duties, and we can see that the duties with regard to them
are clear and universal: We use these perceptions to comprehend suffering and
abandon its cause.
Also, the fact that there is the third noble truth—a deathless element where
there’s no more suffering, found by developing dispassion for all clinging and
craving: That’s why the three perceptions make sense. If there weren’t the
prospect of that deathless element, you could justifiably say, “Well, the things
that I’m clinging to, even though they’re imperfect, are as good as it gets, so I
might as well hold on to them.” This is the way most people function as they go
through life. It’s not that they don’t know that the objects of their clinging and
craving are impermanent. They know, but they simply think, “This is the best
there is.”
With the four noble truths, though, you’ve got a challenge: The Buddha says,
“No, the best is the total end of suffering, something that is totally
unconditioned.” The fact that we have that as a prospect, a genuine possibility,
gives us the energy and the motivation to actually apply the perceptions of
inconstancy, stress, not-self to all our attachments, so that we can develop
dispassion for the things we’ve been holding on to.
So the three perceptions are used for the sake of the third noble truth. They do
that by helping to fulfill all four duties of the four noble truths, so as to overcome
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your general ignorance as to what’s truly worth doing in your quest for
happiness.
Now, these perceptions are applied in various ways in stages along the path.
When you’re developing your virtue, you don’t apply these perceptions to your
virtue. You apply them to things that would pull you away from the practice of
virtue, things that you might use as an excuse for not following the precepts. The
Buddha says that there are basically three kinds of loss that would tempt people
to break the precepts: loss of wealth, loss of health, and loss in terms of relatives.
He says that you have to remind yourself that those kinds of loss are minor. The
really serious loss is losing your virtue and losing your right view. This means
that you have to learn how to view any potential loss in terms of health, wealth,
or your relatives as not-self. For the time being, though, you hold on to your
precepts, you hold on to your right view as yours.
Similarly with the practice of concentration: Anything that would pull you
away from your concentration, you have to learn how to regard as not-self. But as
you’re working on developing the concentration, you don’t apply those
perceptions to the concentration itself. You don’t say, “Well, I just saw my
concentration come and go, and that taught me a lesson about anicca, dukkha, and
anattā.” That doesn’t help you fulfill the duty with regard to concentration, which
is to develop it. You have to be selective in how you apply these perceptions.
The way the Buddha has you develop a sense of dispassion for things that
would pull you away from the path, is that first he has you see how those things
originated: They come from within the mind. Notice that when the Buddha uses
the word origination, one, it means causality; and two, it usually refers to causes
coming from within the mind.
Then the Buddha has you see these things pass away. You realize that greed,
aversion, delusion, fear, and jealousy come in discrete moments. They come and
they go, but then you pick them up again. What keeps them going is the fact that
you’re stitching those moments together, one by one by one. A lot of effort goes
into that.
So you have to ask yourself, “Why do I keep picking them up? What’s the
allure? What do I find attractive about holding on to these things?” If you don’t
see what’s attractive about these things, you can try to let go, let go, let go, but
it’ll be like trying to let go of taffy: You throw it away but it still sticks to your
fingers. It keeps coming back. You have to see why part of you likes these things.
Once you see that, then you can compare the allure with the drawbacks of
holding on. When you see that the drawbacks outweigh the allure—using the
three perceptions to pass that value judgment—you develop the dispassion that
allows you to truly let go. That’s when you’re free.
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I’ve been giving you English equivalents for these three perceptions. Perhaps I
should explain them a bit more. Anicca is usually translated as impermanent, but I
prefer to translate it as inconstant largely because, one, its opposite, the Pali word
nicca, means “constant” rather than “permanent.” And two, “inconstancy”
implies not only that things end, but that they change even as they’re continuing,
even as they last. They’re unreliable and unpredictable.
You can build your house, say, on a mountain, thinking, “Well, the mountain
may be impermanent, and maybe someday it’s going to erode into the ocean, but
as long as I’m around, it seems to be permanent enough, so I’ll build my house
there.” The impermanence of the mountain doesn’t really deter you. But if you
realize that the mountain often has earthquakes and landslides, you’d be wise to
decide not to build your house there after all. Or it’s like sitting in a chair where
the legs are uneven: You have to tense your legs all the time you’re in the chair to
keep from tipping over.
It’s important to remember that anicca here functions in the context of the
search for true happiness. Sometimes you see it explained the other way around.
People say, “Given the fact that things are inconstant in the world, we have to find
a happiness by learning to content ourselves with what’s inconstant or
impermanent.” Often they’ll compare this to a dance. You dance with this
partner, but when this partner leaves you, you find another partner to dance
with. Things keep changing, so you avoid suffering by learning how to move
fluidly from one attachment to the next—as if that were the way to find
happiness in a world that’s constantly changing.
But when the Buddha teaches these topics, as I said, he reverses the context.
In other words, you start out with your search for happiness, with the conviction
that there is such a thing as a happiness that lasts. Then you apply the perception
of anicca, inconstancy, to whatever is coming up in your experience, or as the
result of your actions, to measure it: If the perception really fits, then you have to
realize that this is not what you’re looking for. It may be part of the path that you
hold on to provisionally, but ultimately you realize that in terms of the goal, there
must be something better.
As for dukkha, I translate it as stress rather than suffering, mostly because, one,
stress is hard to romanticize. You can romanticize your sufferings, but you can’t
romanticize stress. Two, it’s something that everyone recognizes as a feature of
life. I knew a journalist once in Bangkok who asked me, “Why is it that Buddhists
talk about suffering all the time? I don’t have any suffering in my life.” So I asked
him, “Well, do you have any stress?” “Oh, yeah, lots and lots of stress.” “That’s
what we’re talking about.” So translating dukkha as stress enables people to relate
to something that they’re all experiencing.
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The third reason is that there are subtle levels of dukkha, even in the practice
of concentration where there’s a lot of pleasure or equanimity and no blatant
suffering, but there’s still stress. And by translating dukkha as a range of
suffering through stress, you begin to realize that it covers not just the blatant
suffering, but also the more refined levels of stress as well.
You also have to make a distinction between the dukkha in the three
perceptions and the dukkha in four noble truths. The dukkha in the four noble
truths is the dukkha caused by craving. The dukkha in the three perceptions is
inherent in everything that changes, everything that’s fabricated. Basically, you
apply it to all the raw material that would go into a state of becoming—and that
includes what we do as we engage in the process of I-making and my-making,
which is how the Buddha looks at the issue of self. He doesn’t have us see the
issue of self as a thing that we either have or don’t have. He has us view “self” as
an activity, something we all do: We create a sense of “I” in various ways; we
create a sense of “my” as we hold on to things. And because these are activities,
the relevant question is not, “What is my genuine self?” It’s, “When is it skillful to
do those activities, and when is it not?” If you see that all the raw material that
you’ve been using in these activities is inconstant and stressful, you begin to
realize: “No matter how well I design myself, it’s all going to fall apart. Maybe
this is not what I want. Maybe I have to look elsewhere for true happiness.”
And finally anattā is translated as not-self. Sometimes you see it translated as
“no self,” but the Buddha never took a position on the question of whether there
is or is not a self. He noted that if you hold on to the idea that you have no self,
that view itself then becomes an object of clinging, in the same way that the view
that you have a self, however you define it, would also become an object of
clinging. So instead, he has you look at self and not-self both as actions. Instead of
being answers to the question of whether there’s a self, they’re answers to the
question lying at the origin of discernment: “What, when I do it, will lead to my
long-term welfare and happiness?” When you see your sense of “self” and “not-
self” as activities, then the question with regard to each becomes, “When is this
activity conducive to my long-term welfare and happiness, and when does it lead
to long-term harm and suffering?” The perception of “not-self” gets applied to
any perception of self that would get in the way of long-term welfare and
happiness.
Here again there’s a question of context. Kamma, action, is the context for
anattā, not the other way around. All too often you hear the question, “If there is
no self, then who does the kamma, who receives the results, how can there be
rebirth?” But that’s getting the context and the content backwards. The real
context is the kamma of looking for happiness, and then the question becomes
how the kamma of selfing and not-selfing fits into that context. Both “self” and
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“not-self” are strategies for happiness, and what the Buddha’s asking us to do is
to look more carefully at how we do these things and whether our strategies are
actually working or not.
Now, there’s a certain logic to how the Buddha teaches not-self. Sometimes
you hear it expressed this way, like a syllogism:
“Self has to be permanent.
The five aggregates are impermanent,
Therefore: The five aggregates are not self, and
Therefore: There is no self.”
But that’s not the Buddha’s logic. He never says that the self has to be
permanent. He often talks about views of self that are impermanent, saying that
they can be objects of clinging to the same extent as views of a permanent self.
The actual logic for using not-self lies in seeing that there’s a greater
happiness that can be found by applying the perception of not-self to the
aggregates. After all, remember the whole point of creating a sense of self: It’s a
strategy for happiness. The Buddha’s simply pointing out that, even though it has
its uses, in the ultimate stages of the practice it’s a poor strategy to hold on to
because it involves clinging, which is the same as suffering. There’s a greater
happiness to be found when you let that strategy go. When you’ve tasted that
greater happiness, the perception of self loses its reason for being. And when you
can finally let it go, that opens the way to an unchanging happiness.
At the same time, we apply the perception of not-self because we realize that
we’re holding on to things that are not as ideal as they could be. When we let
them go, then we can let go of the perception of not-self, too—after all, as a
perception, it’s one of the aggregates. When we drop perceptions of self and not-
self, that’s when we arrive at full freedom, totally free from change.
That’s the logic of not-self.
There’s an irony here. All too often we’re told that the idea of a permanent,
unchanging nibbana is at odds with the teaching that there is no self. It’s accused
of being a kind of closet self. But actually, the teaching on nibbana is a
prerequisite for how the teaching on not-self will work. Once you know there is
an unconditioned, unchanging element that’s totally free from suffering—
because it’s free from clinging—and then you look at the things that you’re
identifying with as part of your strategies for finding happiness, you realize that
these things are not unconditioned, these things are not free from suffering and
stress, because they’re not free from clinging. That’s what will induce you to be
willing to even think the idea: “Maybe I should let this go.”
Remember, the Buddha says we suffer because of craving and clinging to the
things we really like, the things we really find valuable. And he’s trying to
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convince us, “No, there’s something more valuable.” Only when we’re willing to
listen to him will we seriously apply perceptions of not-self to these things.
When we apply these perceptions to the point of developing dispassion for
the things we’ve been holding on to, that’s how these perceptions lead to an
experience of unbinding. As the Buddha says, we suffer from our clinging, and
it’s not the case that the things we’re clinging to are clinging to us at the same
time. Ajaan Lee has a nice comparison. He says, “When you don’t eat a plate of
rice when you’re hungry, it’s not the rice that’s going to cry. You’re the one who’s
crying. The rice doesn’t care.” In other words, the reason we’re not free is not
because these things are holding on to us, it’s because we’re holding on to them.
We have to let go.
The image they use in the Canon is of a burning fire. To understand the
image, you have to know how they understood fire at that time. Fire burns
because the fire element or the fire property latches on to a piece of fuel on which
it feeds. In fact, the word for taking sustenance is the same as the word for
clinging: upādāna. As long as the fire is clinging to the fuel, it’ll continue to burn.
When it lets go, the fire goes out and is freed. That’s the image behind the word
nibbāna, or unbinding, meaning the extinguishing of a fire. This is the implication
it had for people of those times: There is freedom to be found by letting go.
Now, the Buddha says that nibbāna is something indescribable, but he will
talk about it to some extent so that we’ll desire to go there. To begin with, he says
that it exists. This is unlike the case of the arahant, where he refuses to answer the
question as to whether the arahant exists as a being. In fact, his refusal there is so
thorough that he rules out all the possible answers to the question: that the
arahant exists, doesn’t exist, both exists and doesn’t exist, or neither exists not
doesn’t exist. That’s because beings are defined by their attachments, whereas
arahants have no attachments, so you can’t define them. If you can’t define them,
then you can’t describe them. Nibbāna, though, is a state. States are not defined
by attachments. They’re defined by whether they’re realities. The Buddha says
that nibbāna is very much a reality—a reality with five main attributes.
• One, it is a type of consciousness. It’s not a blanking-out. It’s not
consciousness in the aggregates, though. And because it’s beyond name and
form, it’s not the consciousness of found in the formless jhānas. It’s called
consciousness without surface, a consciousness that, unlike the consciousness in
the aggregates or in the jhānas, isn’t known through the six senses, including the
sense of the mind. The image is of a light beam that doesn’t land anywhere. If
you had a light beam going through space and it didn’t land on any material
object, you wouldn’t be able to see it, because it wouldn’t be reflected. It’s
through the reflections coming off of surfaces that we see light. But if it doesn’t
land on anything—and that’s how the Buddha talks about it, he calls it
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consciousness that’s unestablished, a consciousness that doesn’t land—it’s bright

in and of itself, but it doesn’t appear as brightness to anything else, so it can’t be
located.
• Two, it is freedom. This is why the Buddha calls it nibbāna, or unbinding. As
I said, it’s like a flame that’s been freed from its fuel.
• Three, it’s something true, unchanging, and undeceptive. Because it’s not
conditioned, it’s just there. It doesn’t change at all.
• Four, for this reason, it’s a state of security and happiness. As the Buddha
said, it’s the ultimate happiness.
• And five, it’s excellent, the ultimate, beyond anything else that could be
found.
The purpose of using the three perceptions is to reach that unbound state.
They do this by inducing a state of dispassion for all of the things that we’re
holding on to that constitute suffering and stress through the fact that we’re
holding on to them. We can develop that state of dispassion first by letting go of
things that would pull us away from the path. Then we finally apply these
perceptions to the path itself. That’s when the mind reaches total dispassion.
When it reaches total dispassion, it no longer fabricates anything, because it
fabricates because of passion. When it’s no longer fabricating anything, then
everything ceases—including the perceptions and concepts used on the path—
and the mind can totally let go into total freedom.
In the experience of awakening, the six senses cease, and then you return to
them, but you return with a different relationship. Even at the stage of stream-
entry, you return having realized that what the Buddha said really is true: There
is something that’s deathless. As for arahants, after they experience full
awakening, they return to the six senses with a sense of being radically disjoined
from them—not in a sense of alienation, but simply because they’re no longer
feeding on them. They live with the six senses but without trying to gobble them
down, so they can’t be poisoned by them. The fact that we get poisoned by our
environment is because we’re feeding off of it all the time. The arahant can
continue functioning within the world but with a sense of being totally freed
from being influenced by the world.
So this is the goal to which we’re aiming: a state of mind totally independent
of the six senses. Even when the six senses end at death, that state of mind is not
affected. In the meantime, before death, we can function in the world purely out
of compassion. Think of the Buddha after he gained his awakening: At that point
he really didn’t have to teach anybody. This is a fact that bothers the
commentators quite a lot: the Buddha’s reflections after his awakening that
maybe he wouldn’t teach after all because it required a lot of effort. It was only
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when he realized it would be worth the effort that he decided to give the teaching
as a free gift. And because it was given freely, it’s worthy of trust.