Three characteristics show up everywhere in conditioned experience, the Tilakkhana. They are offered not as beliefs to adopt but as things to verify directly:
- Anicca — impermanence: everything that arises passes.
- Dukkha — unsatisfactoriness: woven into conditioned existence, nothing conditioned fully satisfies.
- Anatta — non-self: what we take to be a fixed, permanent self is a process, not a thing.
Impermanence met as a practice, including maranasati, mindfulness of death, is taken up on Death and impermanence.
Anatta is the point of genuine difference with the yogic Purusha, held honestly rather than smoothed over. Both traditions agree the isolated, separate self is an illusion; they describe what remains differently. The difference is real and worth keeping. See The Convergence.
The five skandhas
If there is no fixed self, what is actually there? The Buddha's answer is the five skandhas, the five aggregates we bundle together and mistake for an owner: Rupa (form), Vedana (sensation), Samjna (perception), Sanskara (mental formations), and Vijnana (consciousness). Look closely and you find process all the way down, with no separate one standing behind it. "Under no circumstances attach to anything as me or mine."