In contrast, the Buddha taught that perceiving and knowing happen through a convergence of factors, namely a sense organ, a sense object, and the contact between them. Knowing is transactional. Like a fire that cannot burn without the wood or dried grass on which it feeds, all consciousness requires an object.

For all knowing is relative to the perspective of the knower and conditioned by his past experience.

The impossibility of arriving at ultimate formulations of reality does not represent a defeat for the inquiring mind. So long as we claim no authority beyond our own experience, what we speak has the ring of truth.

All aspects of our world and all factors of our lives subsist, he saw, in a dynamic web of interdependence.