Thank you for your comments. That a self exists in relation to a world does not negate that it is an autonomous self. An analogy is that a particle moves and that it is moving within a world does not negate its movement. Add to that analogy the reality that a person, a self, possesses will, motivations, and powers. Edith Stein spoke about this well, https://medium.com/inserting-philosophy/edith-stein-philosophys-saint-adc6c3884b71. There are also multiple forms, or layers of you will, of autonomy. That is a whole other issue, of course, but there is no good reason to deny human autonomy.

What the Buddhists who argue as you describe are missing is that the ontological problem of individuation is solvable when we no longer insist on an Aristotelian-style notion of substance. People partake of a type — human — but the type has no existence in itself. There is no Humanness, there are only individual humans. We must begin from the individual case for that is all that exists.

The metaphysical separation of existence into “ultimate reality” and “relative reality” has had so many derivations and complications in the history of philosophy that I cannot even hope to get into it. But it is alleged that the Buddha said that when you have an arrow in your back you do not care where the arrow came from, only that it is there in your back. In the case of human individuation, the arrow is that it is ontically obvious that I exist as an independent being who is aware of my existence as such. The question then is not how I got that way, but what am I to do about it.