Have you ever craved something yet felt unsatisfied when you got it? How does this feeling represent how we see the world?
Robin Wright says that we’re stuck in a cycle of craving and dissatisfaction because our perception of the world isn’t clear. Our understanding of ourselves and the world is clouded by subtle illusions.
Let’s look at the contorted way we view ourselves and the world.
A Clouded View Within
Let’s start with how we view ourselves before looking at our clouded perception of the world. Here, Buddhism presents the idea of anatta, translated as “no-self.” As Wright explains, this is the claim that what you conventionally think of as your “self” doesn’t have inherent existence. In other words, your self—the seemingly distinct person you identify as—is less concrete and permanent than you think.
Anatta doesn’t mean you don’t exist at all, though. To clarify, Wright references two Buddhist discourses (the Buddha’s ancient oral teachings).
In the first, the Buddha asks his followers to look for their selves in each of the five aggregates (form, sensation, perception, mental activity, and consciousness), which in Buddhism constitute all of experience. He says that the self must be something permanent but that each of these aspects of experience is transient. Therefore, none of them are the self.
In the other discourse, Wright says, the Buddha uses the analogy of a king and his kingdom. Saying that the self must be something in your control, he points out that you don’t control your experience the way a king controls his kingdom: You can’t pick and choose your feelings, sensations, or the activities of any of the five aggregates. Therefore, your self can’t be found in them.
Wright affirms this reasoning, saying that from a common sense point of view, it makes sense that the self should be something permanent and in control. The takeaway is that in the Buddhist view, your “self” can’t be found in any aspect of your experience. And in believing that we are such selves, we see unclearly.
A Clouded View Without
Next, let’s look at how we view the world. According to Wright, Buddhists say that reality lacks inherent existence—that it doesn’t exist as we conventionally think it does. This is the idea of sunyata, or emptiness.
To clarify what emptiness means, Wright refers to the idea of interdependent arising, another Buddhist concept that boils down to the idea that everything is inextricably interconnected. Think of a tree—it seems like a distinct, independent thing. But it wouldn’t exist without soil, water, and sunlight, or without the complex web of microorganisms in its roots and the forest around it. In other words, the tree exists only in relation to everything around it.
Buddhists, Wright says, take this interconnectedness to mean that any seemingly distinct form (a tree, a house, a self) is “empty” of inherent existence. Since nothing can stand on its own, no “thing” is really there. So in thinking that the world around us is made up of distinct things, we see unclearly. The world of “things” isn’t really there.
(Shortform note: Wright’s ideas about emptiness parallel systems thinking—an approach that examines how parts of a whole interact rather than studying them in isolation. In The Web of Life, Fritjof Capra argues that modern science no longer sees the world as a machine made of separate parts, but as a complex network of interrelated phenomena. Like in Wright’s tree example, systems thinking holds that any seemingly independent entity exists only through its web of connections. Some systems thinkers, like Carlo Rovelli (The Order of Time), say this suggests that reality isn’t made of “things” at all, but of dynamic patterns and processes. In this view, a tree isn’t a thing but an ongoing process of nutrients flowing, cells dividing, and energy being exchanged with its environment.)
