Dhammapada verses 100-115 share the importance of one teaching that brings peace, the benefits of self-conquest, the value of honoring the awakened, and the importance of rousing of energy and recognizing impermanence.

Dhammapada verses 146–156 explore impermanence, the nature of the body, and the inevitability of aging and death. Through metaphors of a world ablaze, a decaying body, the house-builder and a city of bones, they point to life’s transience and the futility of clinging to sensual pleasures. The verses highlight the cultivation of wisdom, detachment, and the pursuit of an unconditioned state beyond constructs, contrasting fleeting youth and inevitable old age with the timeless teachings that lead to liberation.

Dhammapada verses 273–289 emphasize the eightfold path as the foremost way to liberation, seeing the impermanent, unsatisfactory, and not-self nature of all things. Further, the verses mention the relation of meditation and wisdom, They mention restraint, how wisdom through meditation, on cutting off the forest as well as the undergrowth, and making swift effort to purify by the way of practice leading to Nibbāna.

Dhammapada verses 360–382 depict the ideal bhikkhu as one who restrains the senses, body, speech, and mind, leading to freedom from suffering. Emphasis is placed on mindfulness, inner joy, collectedness, and self-reliance. Through discipline and reflection, the bhikkhu advances towards the peace of Nibbāna, shining like the moon freed from clouds.

The Buddha describes how to see the three felt experiences that are experienced on contact through the sense doors - pleasant, painful, and neither-painful-nor-pleasant.

The body is fragile, consciousness is of a fading nature. All substrates of existence are impermanent, dissatisfactory, and subject to change.

The Buddha advises to 1) dwell contemplating the unattractive nature of the body, 2) establish mindfulness as the first priority while breathing in and out, and 3) observe impermanence in all conditioned phenomena.

The Buddha instructs Rāhula on how to regard the five aggregates as not-self which he immediately applies to practice. The Buddha then teaches Rāhula on how to meditate on the elements, the divine abodes, unattractiveness, impermanence, and mindfulness of breathing to abandon unwholesome mental qualities and cultivate wholesome mental qualities.

The Buddha teaches in detail how to develop mindfulness while breathing in and out through sixteen naturally unfolding steps, showing how their cultivation fulfills the four establishments of mindfulness, which in turn fulfill the seven factors of awakening, culminating in true knowledge and liberation.

When venerable Ānanda inquires about the Buddha’s frequent abiding in emptiness, the Blessed One describes a gradual progression of abidings in ever-stiller perceptions, each seen as empty of what is absent while discerning what still remains, culminating in the unsurpassed abiding in emptiness.

The Buddha provides a detailed analysis of the six sense bases, differentiating worldly feelings based on attachment from those born of renunciation and insight. He outlines a progressive path of abandoning lower states for higher ones, guiding practitioners through refined meditative states toward complete liberation.

The Buddha shares a reflection on aging and the impermanence of life and possessions. Seeing that all we call ‘mine’ must be lost at death, one should not cling to self. The sage, like a lotus leaf unstained by water, does not cling or spurn what is seen, heard, or sensed.

Endowed with ten powers and four assurances, the Buddha reveals the impermanence of the five aggregates and teaches dependent co-arising.

The Buddha, endowed with the ten powers and four assurances, reveals the impermanence of the five aggregates and teaches dependent co-arising. He then urges the bhikkhus to practice with diligence for their highest welfare as well as for the welfare of others.

The Buddha uses a simile of a bronze cup of beverage mixed with poison to illustrate how craving for agreeable and pleasant sense experiences leads to acquisition and suffering, while wisely seeing their impermanent nature leads to the end of suffering through the abandoning of craving.

The Buddha explains that those recollecting past lives are merely recalling one or more of the five aggregates. He defines each aggregate and shows how a noble disciple sees them as impermanent, dissatisfactory, and not suitable to identify with, leading to disenchantment, dispassion, and liberation.

A bhikkhu asks the Buddha if there exists any form, feeling, perception, intentional constructs, or consciousness that is stable, enduring, and not subject to change.

The Buddha shares vivid similes to illustrate the benefits of developing the recognition of impermanence. This practice gradually exhausts all passion for sensual pleasure, materiality, becoming, ignorance, and uproots the conceit ‘I am.’

By clinging to the five aggregates, one experiences pleasure and pain.

The Buddha teaches on how to know and see the impermanence of the six sense bases and the process leading up to the arising of feeling and perception for the abandoning of ignorance and the arising of wisdom.

On the passing away of Sāriputta, the Buddha advises Ānanda to be an island unto himself, with no other refuge, with the Dhamma as his island, with the Dhamma as his refuge, not dependent on another as a refuge.

The Buddha visits the dying lay disciple Dīghāvu and guides him to reflect on his solid foundation of faith and virtue (stream-entry), and then on deeper insights into impermanence. After his death, the Buddha declares him a wise non-returner, now bound for final Nibbāna.

The three characteristics of the conditioned and the unconditioned.

Before his awakening, the Buddha reflected on the gratification in the world, the drawback in it, and the escape from it.

The Buddha describes these four inversions of perception, thought, and view, and the four non-inversions. An uninstructed ordinary person perceives permanence in the impermanent, pleasure in the unsatisfactory, a self in what is impersonal, and beauty in the unattractive.

When approached with abundant offerings, the Buddha expresses a heartfelt wish to avoid fame, and speaks of five contemplations which result in being established in dispassion and wisdom.

The Buddha explains the distinction between how an uninstructed ordinary person and a learned disciple of the Noble Ones respond to the five unobtainable states of aging, illness, death, perishing, and loss.

In response to a king’s grief over his queen's death, the Buddha teaches that aging, illness, death, and loss are inevitable. He contrasts the self-torment of an ordinary person who resists these truths with the peace a learned disciple of the Noble Ones finds through acceptance, thereby removing the “poisonous dart of sorrow.”

The Buddha explains the eight causes and conditions that lead to the attainment, further development, growth, cultivation, and fulfillment of wisdom that pertains to the fundamentals of the spiritual life.

After his full awakening, the Buddha surveys the world, seeing beings aflame with passion, aversion, and delusion. He reflects on the nature of the world and the suffering inherent in existence. By seeing the world as it truly is, he points to the path of liberation.