Anicca
anicca (sct. anitya)
The impermanence: everything that is composed is born, transforms, and unravels. The first of the three marks of existence, it is not a thesis about the world but a fact to be penetrated—whoever is "well penetrated" by it, says the *Dhammapada*, is freed from suffering. Fernand Hû renders it with an adjective: aggregations are "transient."
« Toutes les agrégations sont passagères. » Lorsqu’on est bien pénétré de ce fait, on est délivré de la douleur. C’est là la voie de la purification.
The Pali word anicca is a negation: a-nicca, that which is not nicca—stable, enduring, permanent. The term introduces the triad of the three marks of existence, which Chapter XX of the Dhammapada sets forth in three paired verses: all compounded things are impermanent (277), subject to suffering (278), without self (279).
In 1878, Fernand Hû translated it without pathos: “All aggregations are transient.” Aggregations renders the Pali saṅkhārā, the compounded—everything that arises from a convergence of conditions. Transient is an almost gentle adjective for a radical observation: nothing compounded holds.
The term’s function lies precisely here: impermanence is not a doctrine to profess but a fact to be “thoroughly penetrated.” The verse immediately continues—penetrated by this fact, “one is freed from suffering.” To see impermanence is to cease clinging; craving loses its grip when its object is seen as already passing away.
To be distinguished from Heracliteanism: Heraclitus’ flux is a cosmological thesis, grounded in a logos that persists beneath becoming. Anicca does not describe the world in order to understand it—it marks it in order to relinquish it. Its domain is not physics, but liberation.