This piece was originally published on Buddhistdoor Global (BDG). I warmly invite fellow seekers on the path to share your honest thoughts and reflections in the comments.
In defense of the “chronic truants” of the universal school
The Saha world in which we live can be seen as a vast universal school. However, the rules of this school are chillingly simple and relentless: survive and reproduce! This is the biological algorithm at the heart of existence. The universe seems to assign us a monumental task: to replicate our genes and maintain the system.
The algorithm whispers that continuation is success and deviation is failure. If we neglect or reject this biological assignment, something within us feels exposed. Loneliness arises. Anxiety appears. Society asks, sometimes gently and sometimes harshly, “Why aren’t you living like everyone else?”
Within this universal school, there are those who do not follow the standard track, who defy the rules. They hesitate. They question. They step aside.
Let us call them the chronic truants.
Forbidden rebellion: those who step outside of the script
The hierarchy of this school feels rigid. The homeroom teacher, named Survival Instinct, monitors us constantly. Hormones, social expectations, family pressures all reinforce the same message: become someone, build something, continue yourself.
The wheel of samsara turns efficiently through craving and habit-energy.
And yet, some create space within this momentum.
Those who create cracks in this structure of expectations are the “troublemakers” like us. The unmarried are passive rebels. Members of the LGBTQ+ community, especially in cultures that rigidly define family through reproduction, live lives that do not neatly conform to inherited biological narratives.
Finally, monastics and dedicated practitioners are the chronic delinquents who have leapt over the school walls. We are proud outsiders who have conspired to take an even more radical step: renounce household life and the promise of lineage altogether.
From the perspective of social conditioning, this can look like noncompliance. From the perspective of practice, it can be the beginning of inquiry.
But let us be careful. Social nonconformity is not yet liberation; it is only an opening.
The Buddha and the hidden ledger
The greatest revolutionary in human history was Shakyamuni Buddha. His departure was of a different caliber altogether. He didn’t just walk out of the school; he broke into the principal’s office where he discovered a hidden ledger detailing the code that binds sentient beings to this school: the Twelve Nidanas or Links of Dependent Origination.
Within this code, the Buddha identified a critical hinge: craving (Skt: trishna) and clinging (Skt: upadana). We taste sweet candy of love and attachment, and the moment we bite, the engines of becoming (Skt: bhava) and birth (Skt: jati)—the fires of suffering—are ignited.
The Buddha slapped his knee in realization: “Ah! We are suffering not because we broke the rules, but because we were blinded by ignorance and became slaves to the simulation!”
Ignorance (Skt: avidya) conditions these formations. Formations condition consciousness. And the chain unfolds with birth, aging, and death, again and again.
This was his great discovery, the ultimate hack of suffering itself.
A quantum mechanical interpretation
At this point, we could draw parallels between the Buddha’s enlightenment and modern quantum mechanics.
In the quantum world, subatomic particles are described as waves of probability until measured. In other words, nothing is fixed. However, the moment we grasp and solidify experience through ignorance, the wave function collapses into a particle, fixing it to a specific reality.
Without forcing metaphor into doctrine, we can say this much: what we perceive depends on how we perceive.
Our lives are the same. When we observe the world through the eyes of ignorance—the illusion that a fixed “self” exists—the universal school’s program begins to run. We view the world through the filters of craving and clinging, and the empty universe transforms into a detention hall of suffering and attachment. Gain and loss become absolute. Identity becomes something to defend at all costs.
The Buddha hacked the very method by which we observe the world. When the observer stops clinging to the object, fixed particle-based reality scatters back into a wave form of infinite possibilities.
This is the “system shutdown” button found by the Buddha. He did not destroy reality; he transformed the way of seeing.
Toward the Buddha’s emptiness
Having discovered the hidden ledger, the Buddha kicked open the back door to the school and walked out. Beyond lay freedom: the world of emptiness (shunyata). Emptiness does not mean nothingness. It means that nothing exists independently, permanently, or as a fixed self. When this is perceived directly, the narrow classroom walls collapse. The dualistic distinctions of“normal” and “abnormal,” “success” and “failure,” “you” and “I,” evaporate.
The struggle for survival and the social obligation of reproduction are recognized only as natural processes. They are not commandments that determine our worth. The Buddha did not step outside the universe; he stepped outside delusion.
Leaving the back door open, the Buddha calls to us: “Throw away that fake homework and come out here!” We may live as celibates or walk the path less traveled—not because we are lagging behind; we are revolutionaries following the Buddha to recognize our true existence free from the confines of rigid categories and classifications.
Be proud and enjoy your truancy
If you find yourself outside of society’s script —unmarried, childless, unconventional, walking a contemplative path—do not be discouraged by social judgments or biological pressures. Do not assume you are deficient.
If you are rejecting inherited expectations and walking your own path, you are already a descendant of the Buddha who uncovered the hidden ledger of the universe. Thus, true study is not found in outdated textbooks inside a classroom. It is in the empty fields outside the school—the radiant ocean of emptiness’
The real truancy the Buddha invites is freedom from ignorance.
The real rebellion is against clinging.
I hope you enjoy your truancy today and become a magnificent rebel, boldly eyeing that back door to liberation. Your profound step is, in itself, the great practice of dismantling that which binds us.
May we have the courage to examine the ledger of our own minds. And may we walk—steadily, quietly, even boldly—toward the freedom revealed by the Buddha.
-Zen Seeker on the Path