In the Buddhist tradition, there is a rigorous standard for determining whether a teaching accords with the Buddha’s insight: it must be consistent with the marks, or seals, of the Dharma.
In Chinese Buddhism, the Three Dharma Seals are commonly expressed as: all conditioned phenomena are impermanent; all phenomena are without a fixed self; nirvana is peace.[1]
Many beginners therefore memorize them as three separate pieces of Buddhist knowledge: the world changes, there is no permanent self, and nirvana is a state of peace. Remembering these three statements is not difficult. The real difficulty is that a person may recite them fluently and still remain completely unaware of how suffering is being created within the mind.
This is because the Three Marks of Existence are not ultimately addressed to memory. They challenge the way we perceive and interpret reality.
Translated into the language of modern psychology, they help us understand two deeply entangled systems: how reality operates and how the human mind interprets reality.
Reality is always changing, yet the mind longs for permanence. The sense of self is assembled through changing conditions, yet we continuously defend a fixed image of “who I am.” When reality collides with that self-narrative, fear, anger, shame, and rumination begin to operate.
I therefore do not want to treat the Three Marks as three isolated conceptual cards. I prefer to understand them as one continuous psychological process:Change occurs → the mind rejects change → change is interpreted as a negation of the self → the mind begins grasping, resisting, and proving → suffering is repeatedly produced → when grasping and identification cease, the machinery of suffering gradually stops.
This is my contemporary interpretation of the Three Marks from the perspective of a psychological counselor. I call it Huishan’s Psychological Chain Model of the Three Marks. It is not intended to replace traditional Buddhist explanations. It is an attempt to answer a question that is urgently relevant to modern life:
Why can an event end in the external world, while the suffering it caused continues inside us for months—or even years?
The First Mark: Impermanence—Reality Flows, but the Mind Demands That It Remain Fixed
The Buddha first pointed out that everything arising through causes and conditions is subject to change.[2]
Relationships change. Emotions change. Wealth changes. Social identities change. The body changes. Even the way we understand ourselves changes.
Impermanence is not a pessimistic prophecy. It describes the basic operation of reality: whatever comes into being through particular conditions must also change when those conditions change.
Yet the human mind has a powerful tendency to seek permanence within a world of movement and to manufacture guarantees in the midst of uncertainty.
We want love never to change, income always to remain secure, youth never to fade, effort always to be rewarded, and recognition never to be withdrawn. There is nothing shameful about these desires. The problem begins when a desire quietly becomes a command imposed upon reality:
It must remain this way. It must not change.
When change actually arrives, the first thing that appears in the mind is often not the fact itself, but a protest:
“This should not have happened.”
A relationship ends, and the mind says, “He should not have left.”
A position is eliminated, and the mind says, “If I worked hard enough, I should never have been replaced.”
The body ages, and the mind says, “I should not have become this version of myself.”
Loss naturally brings pain. But on top of that pain, the mind adds another layer: the refusal of reality.
The event has already happened, yet consciousness continues to demand that it must not have happened. Reality moves forward, while the psyche remains behind, struggling with a version of life that no longer exists.
This is the first layer in the production of suffering:
Change itself brings pain; resistance to change prevents that pain from completing its natural course.
The teaching that “all conditioned phenomena are impermanent” does more than remind us that change is constant. It exposes a deeper cognitive error: the world never promised to remain fixed, yet we behave as though stability were a debt the world owed us.
The Second Mark: Non-Self—After an Event Occurs, the Mind Turns It Into a Definition of “Who I Am”
If suffering remained at the level of “something changed,” it might gradually diminish. But the human mind rarely remains with the facts.
Once change occurs, we quickly move into a second layer: we use the event to define the self.
Failure is no longer one outcome; it becomes “I am incapable.”
Rejection is no longer the ending of one relationship; it becomes “I am unworthy of love.”
Losing a job is no longer an organizational decision; it becomes “I have no value.”
Being ignored is no longer another person’s lack of response; it becomes “I am unimportant.”
The external event happens once. The mind’s interpretation repeats it countless times.
When the Buddha spoke of non-self, he was not claiming that human beings do not exist, nor was he asking us to suppress emotion. What is denied is an independent, fixed, permanent self-entity capable of exercising absolute control over life.
What we ordinarily experience as “I” is composed of bodily sensations, memories, emotions, desires, relationships, social roles, and continuously changing identifications. The Buddhist analysis of the five aggregates offers one classical framework for examining this process.[3]
From the perspective of modern psychology, identity is not merely a definition. It is a narrative system that is continually being written.
We interpret ourselves through past experience. We confirm ourselves through social roles. We infer our value from the way others treat us. As long as this story continues to explain life, we feel coherent. But when reality contradicts one of its central assumptions, suffering is no longer simply the loss of something external. The answer to “Who am I?” begins to collapse.
I once worked with a client who was a man in his thirties. To protect his privacy, identifying details of the case have been modified.
For many years, he understood himself through several deeply held beliefs:
“I believe hard work will be rewarded.”
“If I am conscientious enough, the company will not eliminate me.”
“I may not be the most intelligent person here, but I am dependable, hardworking, and valuable.”
These were not merely a few sentences. Together, they formed the internal structure of his identity.
Then his company announced layoffs. His name was on the list.
At the level of observable fact, only one thing had happened: the company restructured its workforce, and he was not included in its next phase. The decision may have involved costs, strategy, organizational politics, business contraction, or changes in the role. It could not offer a complete judgment of his ability or human worth.
But psychological suffering does not automatically remain at the level of fact. His mind immediately began to continue the story:
“What was the meaning of all those years of effort?”
“Does being laid off prove that I was never capable?”
“If hard work does not necessarily produce a reward, was everything I believed a lie?”
What had been shattered was no longer merely a job. It was a deeper judgment about the self:Perhaps I am not the person I believed myself to be.
From that moment, an external event became an identity verdict.
Modern psychotherapy offers a useful concept for understanding this process: cognitive fusion. In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, cognitive fusion describes a condition in which a person becomes entangled with thoughts and responds to them as if they were reality itself.[4]
When someone thinks, “I failed,” cognitive fusion turns that experience into “I am a failure.” When someone thinks, “I was rejected,” the thought becomes “I am unworthy of love.” A thought is no longer recognized as an event occurring within consciousness. It becomes an unquestionable verdict.
This helps explain why attachment is so difficult to see. Its most dangerous feature is not that a person has a thought, but that the person does not realize they are holding tightly to an interpretation.
My client did not say:
“I am forming an interpretation of my worth based on one layoff.”
He experienced it as:
“This is the fact. This is the truth I must face.”
The event occurred once, but the brain began automatically generating additional suffering. It revisited the past in search of evidence of failure, imagined a future of further collapse, and compared his life with other people’s progress. Rumination allowed one event to be replayed psychologically without limit.
This is the moment when the suffering production line truly begins to operate.Impermanence brings change. Attachment to self interprets that change as a threat to identity. Cognitive fusion then disguises the interpretation as fact.
The more uncertain reality becomes, the more tightly we grip a fixed identity. The tighter the grip, the more every change feels like an attack upon our very existence.
The Third Mark: The Peace of Nirvana—Not Acquiring a Better Feeling, but Ceasing to Manufacture More Suffering
If the first two marks reveal how suffering is produced, the third turns toward cessation.
“Nirvana is peace” is often misunderstood as death, withdrawal from life, or a permanent emotional state in which one is always happy and never disturbed. But nirvana is not a superior mood, nor is it the training of oneself into emotional indifference.
Within Buddhist doctrine, nirvana has a far deeper and more comprehensive meaning than “the end of rumination.” It concerns the cessation of greed, hatred, and delusion and liberation from the bondage of cyclic existence. A modern psychological concept cannot simply be equated with the full Buddhist meaning of nirvana.[5]
For a modern reader, however, we can approach it through an experience that can be directly observed:The cessation of suffering begins when we stop adding fuel to suffering.
After an event occurs, the mind often initiates three movements: grasping what has already been lost, resisting what has already happened, and proving the self that now feels threatened.
We cling to the previous identity. We fight the new reality. We repeatedly tell the story “I am a failure” in an attempt to preserve the wounded self.
The direction indicated by the peace of nirvana is not the construction of a stronger “I” that can overpower suffering. It is seeing the entire production process and ceasing to feed it.
For my client, this did not mean persuading himself that he was not upset. Nor did it mean pretending the layoff had no practical consequences. He still had to address income, family responsibilities, and career decisions. He could still feel shock, shame, and fear.
The real change occurred elsewhere.
He began to distinguish between two statements:
“I lost a job” was a fact.
“I am a failure” was an identity interpretation added to that fact.
He began to see that fear was present, but fear was not the whole of him. An old identity was disintegrating, but his life had not thereby received a final verdict. The company had made one decision, but that decision did not have the authority to define his entire existence.
When he stopped treating every thought as truth, stopped demanding that reality return to its previous form, and stopped using one event to prove who he was, the suffering production line began to lose fuel.
The world continued to change. Practical problems still required action. But the mind no longer had to be dragged by change into limitless suffering.
This is a psychological point of entry into “not grasping, not resisting, and not continuing to fabricate.” It is not the whole of nirvana, but it helps modern readers understand something concrete:
Liberation does not always begin by acquiring more. Sometimes it begins by ceasing to manufacture what no longer needs to continue.
How Do the Three Marks Form a Psychological Chain?
We can now place the Three Marks back into one continuous process.
First, reality is impermanent. Conditions keep changing.
Second, we reject change and attempt to hold on to relationships, identities, outcomes, and evaluations.
Third, in order to hold on to these things, we construct and defend a fixed self: “I am successful,” “I am loved,” “I am valuable.”
Fourth, when reality no longer supports that identity narrative, the event is experienced as an attack upon “me.”
Fifth, fear, anger, craving, shame, and rumination begin to operate, and suffering is repeatedly produced.
Sixth, when we see impermanence, we no longer freeze an event into an eternal condition; when we see non-self, we no longer equate an interpretation with the whole self; when grasping and identification cease, the production of suffering can also begin to cease.
In my psychological interpretation, therefore, the Three Marks are not three disconnected conclusions. They form a complete deconstruction of the suffering system:Reality is always changing. We construct a fixed “self” to resist change. In defending that self, the mind continuously produces suffering. When attachment to permanence and attachment to self cease, peace becomes possible.
Psychological healing begins by seeing this process as it unfolds within us.
It does not mean forcing the mind to contain no thoughts. It means reducing blind identification with thoughts. It does not mean eliminating emotion. It means refusing to let emotion define our entire existence. It does not mean abandoning action. It means addressing reality without simultaneously constructing the story, “My life is over.”
Continue the Journey from Suffering to Inner Freedom
If you would like to understand more deeply how the Buddha explained suffering, attachment, impermanence, and inner freedom—and how these ancient insights can be brought into modern psychological life—you can continue with my English book:
👉🏻Buddhism for Beginners: A Practical Guide to Ending Suffering and Finding Inner Peace
This book does not ask for blind belief, nor does it promise that a single Buddhist teaching will eliminate every difficulty in life. It begins with an understanding of suffering, then helps readers recognize how attachment forms and how awareness can restore clarity and inner freedom amid change and uncertainty.
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Academic and Canonical Notes
[1] Chinese Buddhist traditions commonly formulate the Three Dharma Seals as “all conditioned phenomena are impermanent” (諸行無常), “all phenomena are without self” (諸法無我), and “nirvana is peace” (涅槃寂靜). Early Pāli sources more commonly group impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and non-self, as in Dhammapada 277–279. These are related doctrinal arrangements, but they should not be treated as historically identical formulations. See Dhammapada 277–279, SuttaCentral.
[2] Aṅguttara Nikāya 3.136 states that whether or not a Tathāgata appears, it remains the case that conditioned phenomena are impermanent, conditioned phenomena are unsatisfactory, and all phenomena are non-self. See AN 3.136, SuttaCentral.
[3] In Saṃyutta Nikāya 22.15, form, feeling, perception, volitional formations, and consciousness are examined as impermanent, unsatisfactory, and non-self. The contemplative formula is: “This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.” See SN 22.15, SuttaCentral.
[4] “Cognitive fusion” is used here in the sense developed in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: becoming entangled with thoughts so that their verbal content dominates behavior and is treated as literal reality. See Steven C. Hayes, Kirk D. Strosahl, and Kelly G. Wilson, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change, 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford Press, 2012). Cognitive fusion can be placed in dialogue with Buddhist attachment and self-clinging, but the concepts are not identical.
[5] The psychological language of “stopping the production of suffering” is Huishan’s contemporary interpretive model, not a complete definition of nirvana. In Buddhist traditions, nirvana concerns the cessation of greed, hatred, and delusion and liberation from the processes that sustain suffering and rebirth.
Author’s note: “Huishan’s Psychological Chain Model of the Three Marks” is the author’s contemporary psychological translation. It is not an ancient canonical term and is not presented as the only legitimate Buddhist interpretation.