Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this guided meditation, Thubten Chodron leads practitioners through a contemplative investigation of three fundamental characteristics of cyclic existence: impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and selflessness. She begins with impermanence, inviting listeners to observe how everything—people, objects, relationships, reputation—changes moment by moment, and to notice how our refusal to accept this transience causes suffering rather than change itself. She then explores unsatisfactoriness through three lenses: direct suffering, the way pleasurable situations degenerate into dissatisfaction when grasped at, and the vulnerability of a mind and body subject to aging, sickness, and death under disturbing emotions. Finally, she introduces selflessness, the view that phenomena lack independent inherent existence and arise only through causes, conditions, and mental labeling. Throughout, she frames these reflections as antidotes to core misconceptions—clinging to permanence, grasping for happiness in objects, and believing in solid independent selfhood—each of which undermines our well-being.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 12 GM.mp3
UUID: e5e5e61f-cdeb-485a-bf32-19099089c11d
Teacher: Thubten Chodron Guided Med
Collection: Guided Meditation (Thubten Chodron Guided Med)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~1,075
When we reflected on the four noble truths, we had an idea of our current situation and our potential. Now we’re going to look a little bit more deeply into three characteristics of our present situation. By understanding these, it helps us to understand reality, and it also helps us to generate the wish to practice the Dharma to transform our mind and to free ourselves and others from suffering. So the first characteristic is that everything in cyclic existence is transient by nature. Everything is changing moment by moment simply because it was produced in dependence on causes.
So contemplate the fact that everything in our world, ourselves, people we know, objects, reputation, love, disapproval, life, that all these are transient and changing moment by moment without stop simply because their nature is to change. It’s impossible to fix anything, to stop anything, to cling to anything because its nature is transient. So think about this and make some examples. There’s one part of our mind that refuses to accept this impermanent nature, So we cling on to people and expect them to live forever, expect relationships not to change, expect our body not to grow old and die. And we can see that our refusal to, in our heart, accept the transient nature of things is what causes us suffering.
The change isn’t the source of the suffering. Our refusal to accept change is what causes us pain. So imagine what it might feel like to really, in your heart, accept the transient nature of things, to accept the impermanent nature of your own life, accept the impermanent nature, the lives of everybody you care about. Everything’s impermanent anyway. It’s not that our accepting it is going to make things change, but our accepting it will make our mind more in harmony with what the reality of the situation is, and thus will stop the turmoil and confusion that occurs with change.
Just try and get a sense of what that acceptance of transience would feel like. The second characteristic is that things are unsatisfactory. In other words, not everything is a hundred percent wonderful in our lives. So there’s three kinds of unsatisfactory conditions that we experience. The first is pain and suffering, so physical and mental.
Recognize that this is just part of your life. And as you recognize it, you can also generate a wish to free yourself from it through practicing the Dharma. The second unsatisfactory condition is that happy situations aren’t really completely happy. In other words, they’re basically no more than temporarily alleviating our suffering. And by their nature, they too are suffering.
So if we’re lonely, that’s the first kind of unsatisfactoriness, that mental pain. Then we seek to be with a friend or a companion, and initially, we feel happy. But if we stay with that person day in and day out, that very quickly degenerates and becomes unsatisfactory, and we wanna be somewhere else, do something else. Or when we’re hungry, we may eat, and that brings some temporary relief from our suffering. But if we continue to eat, it again turns into suffering.
So through this, we begin to see that what we consider happiness is basically just temporarily alleviating suffering. And if we continue to do the same thing that brings us happiness, that same thing eventually brings us suffering. So that’s unsatisfactory. So, again, make some examples from your life. And as you understand this kind of unsatisfactory condition, generate a wish to free yourself from it through practicing the Dharma and transforming your mind.
And the third kind of unsatisfactory condition is that we have a body which ages and gets sick and eventually dies. And we also have a mind which is not under our own control, but filled with disturbing attitudes and disturbing emotions. So having this kind of body and mind under the influence of disturbing attitudes and karma is also unsatisfactory. Again, as we reflect on this, generate the wish to free yourself from it through the Dharma practice. The third characteristic is that things are selfless.
In other words, they don’t have any inherent findable way of existence. They don’t have their own intrinsic nature. They aren’t solid and concrete. Rather, everything that exists exists because it has parts or because it has causes, conditions that produce it, and because our mind conceives and labels it. So this dependent way of existence is the nature of reality.
The fact that things are empty of independent inherent existence. They’re empty of being able to exist under their own power to set themselves up. So we meditate on these three characteristics of impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and selflessness in order to attune our mind more closely to the way things actually are. Our mind currently is filled with many misconceptions, and these misconceptions are the source of our confusion and our problems. So the misconception that’s kind of innate in our own heart that thinks that things are permanent and long lasting, that’s overcome by meditating on transience and impermanence.
And that takes away the suffering caused by clinging to things as being static and always there. One part of our mind also mistakenly thinks that things are very pleasurable and that there’s happiness out there in other objects. And if we only had this or that or were with this and that person, then we would be happy. So that distorted conception causes us suffering. And when we meditate on the three types of unsatisfactory conditions, that helps us to overcome that misconception, helps us to stop grasping at straws, It helps us to tune our mind into what is really worthwhile.
And then the root of our suffering is thinking that things have inherent or independent existence, that they are isolated independent units in some kind of external objective universe independent of mind. And that view causes us a lot of suffering because we expect things from objects and people that they can’t possibly deliver. We expect things even of ourself that are totally unrealistic. When we meditate on selflessness and the dependent nature of phenomena, this overcomes that misconception that clings on to a self, that clings on to inherent existence. And that wisdom that understands selflessness then makes our mind happy because we’re more in accord with reality, cuts the root of our suffering.
So it’s for this reason that we contemplate these three characteristics.