In his acceptance address for the Nobel prize in literature, Alexander Solzhenitsyn cited a Russian proverb: “One word of truth outweighs the whole world.” He also quoted Dostoyevsky: “Beauty will save the world.” If one word of truth outweighs the whole world, the world must be very false. But this truth is unpalatable, given the extent of beauty in this world. So much is this so that we cling to the beauty of the world, even when we are told the simple yet profound truth that it will not endure. How then will beauty save us, when attachment to it seems to be the cause of samsara, suffering in rounds of repeated birth and death?

The Buddha taught that empirical observation of experience with the ultimate goal of seeing and realizing the truths of impermanence (anicca), no self (anatta), and suffering (dukkha) inherent in experience, leads logically to the relinquishment of clinging to experience. While Buddha’s rejection of a self seems counterintuitive, his rejection of any sense of an eternal self is perhaps less so: he did not experience an eternal atman; it was not empirically observable to him; he reasoned that hoping for such was rooted in suffering.