A while ago, I asked Google Gemini (AI) about the easiest way to grasp Buddhism’s Three Marks of Existence. The answer started well, ‘a way of looking at reality exactly as it is, without illusions’, and then all seemed to go downhill, and rapidly. Perhaps I had hoped for some deep and profound insight into reality and how that reality shapes our existence and underpins ‘wisdom’, but I got something else altogether.

I’m not here, hoping to set out a treatise on the Three Marks – rather, I have everything to learn. Actually, I’m so short of ‘wisdom’ on the topic that it’s embarrassing. I’m obviously missing something fundamental because, as frequently presented, the Marks seem to represent:

• something so completely obvious that it seems hardly worth saying (impermanence),
• something that, as often exemplified, sounds so needy and shallow, I can’t imagine saying it aloud without wincing (aspects of unsatisfactoriness/suffering), and
• an issue that doesn’t much trouble the ‘modern mind’ to start with (the absence of a permanent, unchanging self).

That’s it? My initial reaction, confronted with these things, is to say to myself: move on; there’s nothing to see here.

I don’t mean to be flippant, but my original AI interaction ended with a question: did I want to discuss how to apply this ‘mindset’ to reduce daily stress? I closed my browser, rather than protesting that my aim was not to conflate an understanding of ‘reality exactly as it is, without illusions’ with a ‘mindset’. AI takes about 0.0001 seconds to reduce one of Buddhism’s central propositions to a functional aid to stress relief. But at least there wasn’t a link to a ‘sign tonight’ discount on a course that would persuade me to swap out awakening for a bit of secular flourishing.

So I’m perplexed:

• Impermanence (anicca) tells us that everything changes constantly. Everything is in a state of flux. Nothing stays the same. Well, yes, it’s obviously so.
• Unsatisfactoriness or suffering (dukkha) arises because we can’t get our heads around the idea that constantly changing things can’t provide permanent satisfaction. We suffer (actually, I don’t think I do, in that way) through an inability to catch water with a net, or face existential angst because we’re already bored with our new phone, and need to seek out a new distraction as the only path to peace of mind. Really?
• No-Self (anattā) tells me that I have no unchanging, permanent self or soul – but I’ve never thought that I had – and I suspect that a very high proportion of people (to the extent that they think about such things at all) would readily concur.

There must be more to the Marks of Existence than this? Or perhaps not. Awakening (and I’m making no implausible personal claim here) is meant to be accessible, within ready grasp, even already realised and just awaiting to be noticed – to be inhabited and to be lived. In the non-dual world of Mahayana Buddhism, Samsara is Nirvana – they are two sides of the same coin. Awakening is simply to see that – clearly, and not as a party trick. If you are wholly untroubled by the Marks of Existence, perhaps you are further down that road than you thought. Perhaps.

So I consider two questions:

• Are the Marks profound, or are they simply describing what a clear mind already sees?
• Is awakening a revelation, or the recognition that nothing was hidden in the first place?

I keep coming up against ordinariness. Perhaps I’m looking for profundity in the wrong register – in the dramatic, the mystical, the esoteric. Meanwhile, the Marks are pointing to the texture of everyday experience. Trying to dress it up with deeper meaning is to miss the mark, not to inhabit it. Perhaps the very absence of profundity is the profundity – and I keep tripping over it.

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Four – Seeing Clearly

1. Three Marks of Existence (1 Jul)
2. Four Noble Truths (15 Jul)
3. Emptiness (29 Jul)