Real Facts of Life English 2001

The Buddha taught that all conditioned things—ourselves included—have three characteristics: impermanence (anicca), unsatisfactoriness (dukkha), and selflessness or nonsubstantiality (anattā). When we fail to recognize these three characteristics of existence, we regard that which is impermanent as permanent, that which is unsatisfactory as pleasure, and the selfless as possessing an unchanging self. The Buddha summed up these tendencies in the Pali word avijjā, ignorance. Being ignorant of our own true nature, and of the true nature of the things around us, we engage in actions based on these delusions, and thereby we accumulate karma which keeps us in bondage to the cycle of birth and death.