Hi Lal,
My reply is with regard to trying to understand thilakkana without the need to believe in re-birth. This is something I mentioned under a different topic as well.
The truth of the Dhamma is said to be seen / experienced here and now. The Buddha told this to the Liccavi’s saying that if the dhamma is practiced properly it will not bring any bad outcomes, even if one doesn’t believe in a life after a death. So I’m trying to explain how I see the truth of anicca, dukka, anatta in this light. This is not to mean that, I don’t believe in rebirth or that one shouldn’t believe in it.
So let me try and explain. “Yadaniccan tan dukkan, Yan dukkan tadanatta”. If something is anicca, it is dukka (leads to / causes dukka). If something is dukka, it is (leads to) anatta. This is something we can see / experience and understand here and now.
If I cannot keep something to my satisfaction, then it causes distress / pain / unhappiness / sadness etc. If something causes distress etc. then there is no point in doing it. So when we realise that everything cannot be kept the way we like it, we realise that everything causes dukka and therefore everything is of no point / substance etc. I am not going to give any example because one can check this out with anything.
Let me put it in a different way, and this is something I do most of the time. Every time we experience dukka, if we look to the cause of it, we see that it is because something has turned out in a way that we did not like it to be. We thought something would be one way, but when it turned out in a different way, that causes us dukka. This is always true. There is no one time that I have been able to say that the distress / unhappiness / anger that I have experienced is because of something other than anicca. So it is very very obvious to me that all the dukka we experience is only and simply because of anicca. Or more specifically that we thought we could have something the way we like but it didn’t turn out that way.
If you take the example of the man who was born into the wealthy family and lived a fulfilling life, can you say that he wasn’t sad or unhappy even for a second during his life. However fulfilling one’s life may seem there is no one who has not experienced sadness at least for a moment in his life. If he analyses that moment of sadness and the causes, he will see that the reason for that sadness is nothing but anicca.
There is no need to account for rebirth to see this. Whether rebirth is there or not, we can see that all dukka is because of anicca. And if something is dukka then it is anatta.
Saying this, the more one sees the truth of this, the more he will tend to believe in all other things that the Buddha has told as well. This is definitely the case for me especially since I have not been able to disprove or find any loopholes in the teachings.