If it were not for that, he said, there could be no escape from birth and death, impermanence and suffering. The Buddha awoke to a state of perfect enlightenment, which he described as deathless, unborn and unchanging. Samsara is like a sickness the Buddha, who was called the Great Physician, offers a cure but the patient must recognize the illness, with its causes, its symptoms, and its effects, before the cure can begin. In this way, he surpassed his teachers and eventually attained his great awakening. He always wanted to know their cause and to see what lay beyond. In his spiritual practice, too, he always went further and further, never satisfied with the states of knowledge, peace and bliss that he attained under the guidance of his teachers. In his search for the origin of suffering, he found that he had to go right back to the very beginning, to the very first flicker of individual self-awareness. The key to the Buddha’s realization and teaching is the understanding of causality, because it is only when we know the cause of something that we can truly bring it to an end and prevent it from arising again. When someone awakens to reality, even for a moment, the world does not disappear but is experienced in its true nature: pure, brilliant, sacred and indestructible. Although samsara seems to be all-powerful and all-pervading, it is created by our own state of mind, like the world of a dream, and it can be dissolved into nothingness just like awakening from a dream. This world contains good and evil, joy and pain, but they are relative, not absolute they can be defined only in relationship to each other and are continually changing into their opposites. Samsara is life as we live it under the influence of ignorance, the subjective world each of us creates for ourselves. Samsara is not the actual external world or life itself, but the way we interpret them.

Existence with these three characteristics is called samsara, which means we are continually flowing, moving on, from one moment to the next moment, and from one life to the next life.

We suffer because we imagine what is not self to be self, what is impermanent to be permanent, and what, from an ultimate viewpoint, is pain to be pleasure. The Buddha described all worldly phenomena as having three characteristics: impermanence, suffering and nonself.

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Wheel of life thangka