Three Perceptions
August 21, 2007
Almost any book on Buddhism will tell you that the three characteristics — the characteristic of inconstancy, the characteristic of stress or suffering, and the characteristic of not-self — were one of the Buddha’s most central teachings. The strange thing, though, is that when you look in the Pali Canon, the word for “three characteristics,” ti-lakkhana,doesn’t appear. If you do a search on any computerized version of the Canon and type in, say, the characteristic of inconstancy, anicca-lakkhana, it comes up with nothing. The word’s not in the Pali Canon at all. The same with dukkha-lakkhana and anatta-lakkhana: Those compounds don’t appear. This is not to say that the concepts of anicca, dukkha, and anattadon’t occur in the Canon; just that they’re not termed characteristics. They’re not compounded with the word “characteristic.” The words they are compounded with are perception, sañña —as in the perception of inconstancy, the perception of stress, and the perception of not-self — and the word anupassana, which means to contemplate or to keep track of something as it occurs. For instance, aniccanupassana, to contemplate inconstancy, means to look for inconstancy wherever it happens.