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The Essential Teaching of Buddha

The outstanding characteristic
of the human situation is "dukkha"1
"dukkha" comes from our difficulty
in facing the basic fact of life,
that everything around us is impermanent and transitory.
"All components are impermanent"
All things arise and pass away
Suffering arises, whenever we resist
the flow of life and try to cling
to fixed forms which all are "maya"2,
whether there are things , events, people or ideas.
The idea of separate individual
self is an illusion,
just another form of "maya",
an intellectual concept which has no reality.
To cling to this concept leads to
the same frustration as adherence
to any other fixed category of thought.

1dukkha = suffering or frustration.
2maya = illusion

from - THE TAO OF PHYSICS - Fritjof Capra, PhD

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