His Four Noble Truths are the key to understanding the Buddhist psychology of mind.

The three poisons of ignorance, aversion, and attachment, respectively. The pig stands for ignorance; this comparison is based on the Indian concept of a pig being the most foolish of animals, since it sleeps in the dirtiest places and eats whatever comes to its mouth. The snake represents aversion or anger; this is because it will be aroused and strike at the slightest touch. The bird represents attachment (also translated as desireor clinging). The particular bird used in this diagram represents an Indian bird that is very attached to its partner.

While “suffering” is the conventional translation for the Buddha’s word dukkha, it does not really do the word justice. A more specific translation would be something on the order of “pervasive unsatisfactoriness.” The Buddha is speaking on a number of levels here. Life, he says, is filled with a sense of pervasive unsatisfactoriness, stemming from at least three sources. First, physical illness and mental anguish are inescapable phenomena in our lives: old age, sickness, and death clash with our wishful fantasies of immortality and therefore contribute to our sense of dissatisfaction. Second, our own likes and dislikes contribute to this sense of dukkha. Not to obtain what one desires causes dissatisfaction, being stuck with what one does not desire causes dissatisfaction, and being separated from what one cherishes causes dissatisfaction. Third, our own personalities contribute to this sense of general unease. As many a psychotherapist can testify, and as the Buddha so clearly recognized, our own selves can feel somehow unsatisfactory to us. We are all touched by a gnawing sense of imperfection, insubstantiality, uncertainty, or unrest, and we all long for a magical resolution of that dis-ease. From the very beginning, the human infant is vulnerable to an unfathomable anxiety that survives in the adult as a sense of futility or as a feeling of unreality. Hovering between two opposing fears—one of isolation and the other of dissolution or merger—we are never certain of where we stand. We search for definition either in independence or in relationship, but the ground always feels as if it is being pulled out from beneath our feet. Our identity is never as fixed as we think it should be.

* Mark Epstein: Thoughts Without a Thinker