More than the story we tell about ourselves

We spend a great deal of time protecting an idea of ourselves. I am the kind of person who does this. I would never do that. This is who I have always been. And when someone challenges that story, even gently, it can feel like an attack.

Buddhism asks a question that can sound unsettling at first: what, exactly, is the self we are trying so hard to protect?

I encountered this when I first began learning about Buddhism, and my initial reaction was, “I am an atheist. People know me for being an outspoken atheist and critic of religion. I cannot be a Buddhist.”

What I meant was not that I could not be a Buddhist because I was an atheist. Rather, I thought I could not be a Buddhist because of my sense of self and how I identified. What would I be if I were not the atheist I thought I was?

But as I learned more, I began to let go of those attachments. Why was I so attached to being labeled as one thing or another, or anything for that matter? That is not to say labels do not matter. I think they do. Who we are and how we identify have real-world implications. But those identities and that sense of self should not stop me, personally, from growing.

It was through this willingness to examine attachment that I stumbled into the teachings of emptiness. One story from the late monk Thich Nhat Hanh put something important into perspective for me.

In talking about interdependence, Thich Nhat Hanh teaches that nothing exists apart from the causes and conditions that allow it to arise. He starts with a piece of paper.

A piece of paper is not nothing. It is real enough to hold, write on, fold, tear, or hand to someone else. But it cannot be understood as a thing that exists by itself. Inside it are the cloud, the rain, the tree, the sun, and the people who grew, cut, transported, and processed it.

When you break down a piece of paper into its elements, its atoms and molecules, there is no single thing you can point to and say, “This is what makes it paper.” But when all those elements and conditions come together, we give the thing a name: paper.

Perhaps we are like that too. Not unreal, but relational. Not empty in the sense of blank or meaningless, but empty of the independent, permanent core we keep assuming must be there.

I am the result of countless causes and conditions. There are my parents and their parents, the food they ate, the water they drank, the decisions they made, and the people who helped them. The list can keep going. All of those things had to happen for me to be here, right now.

The problem is that many people hear this view, and Buddhism more generally, as nihilistic or depressing. If the First Noble Truth tells us that life includes suffering, and there is no permanent, independent “you,” it can seem kind of bleak at first glance.

Thankfully, it is anything but.

If I am not separate from the conditions around me, then the way I speak, lead, parent, coach, vote, work, and respond to suffering is not happening in a private moral universe. It becomes part of the world other people inherit. In that sense, karma, our intentional actions, helps shape what happens next in the world. So do the actions of everyone else.

There is something freeing in realizing that I do not have to spend my life defending a fixed version of myself. I can be wrong and learn. I can carry old habits without being condemned to repeat them. I can feel anger without becoming an angry person. The self is not a prison sentence. It is an ongoing process, shaped by conditions, and conditions can change.

No-self does not ask me to deny my life. It asks me to stop mistaking a moving, changing, interconnected life for a fixed object called “me.” The self I experience is not a single, independent thing hidden somewhere inside me. It is an ongoing process: a shifting collection of memories, habits, perceptions, relationships, and stories I tell about who I have been and who I am supposed to be.

That story is not false simply because it is constructed. It can help me make sense of my life, keep promises, love my family, and take responsibility for my actions. The problem begins when I treat it as permanent, complete, or separate from the countless conditions that made it possible.

Like the cloud in the paper, we are not less real because we are connected to everything else. We are real in, and because of, that connection.