A while ago, I asked an AI agent about Buddhism’s Three Marks of Existence. The answer started well: ‘a way of looking at reality exactly as it is, without illusions’, but then it seemed to go downhill rapidly. Perhaps I had hoped for an answer that could deepen my understanding of reality, how that reality shapes our existence through the eye of ‘wisdom’, but instead I got a rather glib summary of a mindset that might have been penned by any branch of the wellness industry. I should have seen that coming.

My 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 took about 0.01 seconds to reduce one of Buddhism’s central propositions to a functional aid to stress relief.

I’m neither qualified nor competent to set out a treatise on the Three Marks. Perhaps I’m even 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 is often exemplified by our inability to be satisfied with new gadgets or experiences, sounding needy and shallow (unsatisfactoriness/suffering arising from clinging to impermanent things), and
• an issue that doesn’t much trouble the ‘modern mind’ to start with (the absence of a permanent, unchanging self).

My initial flippant reaction was to say to myself: move on; there’s nothing to see here. That must be an error, but I remain 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 impermanent things can’t provide permanent satisfaction. I’m not sure that I do suffer in that way, very much; but to make a connection with the product lifecycle of consumer durables is to trivialise the issue, surely?
• 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? Well, 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 it keeps tripping me up.

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Four – Seeing Clearly

1. Three Marks of Existence (1 Jul)
   • You look at impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and no‑self with modern honesty: they seem obvious, overstated, or already accepted – so where’s the profundity? You explore the possibility that the Marks aren’t mystical at all, but simply the texture of ordinary experience. Awakening may be less revelation than recognition: nothing hidden, nothing dramatic, just reality seen without dressing it up.
2. Four Noble Truths (15 Jul)
   • A critical, modern look at the Four Noble Truths: you set aside metaphysics and monastic authority, treating the Truths not as propositions to believe but as a doorway into practice. Zen’s refusal to “believe,” Batchelor’s Four Tasks, and the traditional formulation all serve the same function – orienting attention toward the Eightfold Path, where the real work of ethics, meditation, and clarity begins.
3. Emptiness (29 Jul)
   • A plain, modern explanation of emptiness: nothing has a fixed essence, everything exists dependently, and “thusness” is simply things as they are when grasping falls away. Not nihilism, not metaphysics – just the absence of independent existence in all phenomena. Seeing this clearly reshapes everything, not by adding insight but by removing insistence.