According to Tricycle: Buddhism for Beginners, the three marks of existence are most common in the Buddhist schools of Theravada and Mahayana. Though varying somewhat depending on the location, there are primarily three major schools of Buddhist thought — there's that number three again — the two already mentioned, and add to that list, Vajrayana, or Tibetan Buddhism, as Buddho.org explains. In most Buddhist traditions, anicca loosely translates to the fleeting nature of everything, impermanence, or that everything falls apart, a notion echoed in Western science by the word entropy.

In Buddhist thought, an acceptance that everything dies and nothing lasts is crucial on the path to true enlightenment. The next term in the Buddhist three marks of existence is dukkha which means something like suffering or dissatisfaction (via BBC). In Buddhist teachings, understanding the concept of dukkha — the idea that all of existence carries with it some sense of discomfort, sadness, or pain — is another step on the path to nirvaṇa, the Buddhist concept in which dukkha and samsara — or the infinite cycle of birth, life, and death to the point of dull repetition with no beginning or end — can finally be overcome, as Oxford Bibliographies writes.

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