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Examples
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But the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self.
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It employs the Three Characteristics — of inconstancy, stress, and not-self — not as abstract statements about existence, but as inducement for mastering those skills and as guidelines for measuring your progress along the way.
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By carefully examining them in light of their Three Characteristics — to see exactly how they're inconstant, stressful, and not-self — you become less inclined to keep on producing and consuming them.
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Inevitably, then, his way of expressing the dharma was a blend of the truly new for example, the teachings about anatta, or "not-self," and paticca-samuppada, or "dependent origination" and the conventional religious thought of his time.
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Their original logic — "Whatever is inconstant is stressful; whatever is stressful is not-self" — leaves open the possibility that whatever is constant could be (1) easeful and (2) self.
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When we add the Buddhist teaching about not-self—in contemporary terms, that one's sense of self is a mental construct—we can see that karma is not something the self has; rather, karma is what the sense of self is, and what the sense of self is changes according to one's conscious choices.
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I don't think this interpretation is wrong, but I think the poem (also) is deeper and more literal than that, reflecting what Buddhists call anatta, "not-self," the discovery that the personal self that we usually call "me" has no more substantial existence than the moon reflected on the surface of a lake.
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And because all mind-objects are abandoned in this happiness, questions of constant or inconstant, stress or ease, self or not-self are no longer an issue.
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As the early texts state repeatedly, if something is anicca then the other two characteristics automatically follow: it's dukkha (stressful) and anatta (not-self), i.e., not worthy to be claimed as me or mine.
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To go beyond space and time, you have to go beyond fabricating the producing and consuming self, which is why the concluding insight of the path is: "All dhammas" — constant or not — "are not-self."
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