You Share Atoms with the Buddha—and Warren Buffett
On being less separate than we think, in markets and in life
We all have Buddha nature within us.
Buddha nature is the capacity for awakening that is inherent in us all. It’s not something that we acquire, but something already in us waiting to be revealed.
It may sound abstract, but it points to something surprisingly tangible.
Atoms make up everything in the known universe: you, me, the couch I’m sitting on, the air we breathe. And these atoms get passed around constantly.
With each breath, I exhale billions upon billions of molecules. Some of those will be inhaled by someone else, taken and incorporated into their body. Over time, the atoms that make up “me” are gradually replaced. We’re far less fixed than we think.
Atoms on the Move
As writer Bill Bryson puts it:
“Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you...a significant number of our atoms—up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested—probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha...and any other historical figure you care to name.”
- Bill Bryson (from A Short History of Nearly Everything)
Which means, in some sense, we really do carry a bit of the Buddha within us — not in a mystical way, but in a physical one.
And if that estimate holds, then each of us has swapped atoms with market visionaries like Warren Buffett and Jack Bogle. But also with scoundrels like Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes.
The Same Pool
It’s a striking illustration of interdependence: we are all part of a vast, interconnected web. The same matter circulates endlessly, passing from one form to another, from one person to the next. We can’t separate ourselves from the world, no matter how hard we try.
And this same idea shows up in our financial lives. Index investing is built on owning small pieces of a very large, global market. My own broad-market ETF of choice, Vanguard Growth ETF Portfolio (VGRO), holds thousands of stocks and bonds. These very same securities are owned by millions of other people around the world.
We’re all dipping into the same pool.
When markets rise, they rise for all of us. When they fall, they fall together. Our fortunes aren’t nearly as independent as we might like to believe. We’re participating in the same system, just as we’re breathing the same air.
A Little More Kindness
There’s something quietly reassuring in that. Especially at a time when the world feels increasingly divided — wars, tensions, people pulling apart from one another. But we’re not as separate as it seems.
We’re all drawing from the same pool. Breathing the same air. Made of the same stuff.
And remembering that — even briefly — makes it a little harder to see other people as fundamentally different from us, and a little easier to be kind.
- The Buddh-ish Investor
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Take home points
You’re not as separate as you think. At the most basic level — atoms, air, and even investments — we’re all deeply interconnected.
Reminding ourselves of our interdependence can make it easier to be kind to those around us.
If you’re looking for more
As only she can, Joni Mitchell meditating on our atomic interconnectivity - “We are stardust, billion year old carbon”