What Appears Cannot be Found
Based on Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti
(Madhyamika-Prasangika Buddhism)
Tony Mortimer
Preliminary Note
The philosophy of the Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama approx. 500bc) represents something of a watershed not only in the history of Buddhist philosophy but in the history of philosophy as a whole. He claimed access to no divine wisdom, no unique intuition, no worldly or spiritual authority, and no super-human status of any kind. The philosophy he taught uproots the very beliefs and assumptions so easily resorted to in our attempt to understand the world. Among these assumptions are: the reality of solid inherent objects; the reality of an inherent self in people; and the reality of some ultimate Source or God.
This treatise is based principally on the Madhyamika and Prasangika schools. The principal teachers being Nagarjuna (200 A.D. Madhyamika school) often referred to as the second Buddha, Chandrakirti (600a.d Prasangika school) and Tsongkhapa (1300 a.d. Prasangika school). The original Buddha was Siddhartha Gautama (approx. 500b.c.).
In the philosophical environment in which Buddhism evolved, the concept of something inherent, unchanging, stable and permanent was very important. This is the cultural background against which Buddhism was working. The Buddha, with his investigation into the nature of human experience, basically came to the conclusion that something permanent, something inherent that underlies our experience is an entirely constructed concept. It cannot be found. Everything is in fact impermanent and in a state of constant change or flux. Nothing permanent, inherent or self-contained can be found anywhere, including a permanent abiding “self” in people. The claim of independence, permanence, essence and an abiding “self”, the Buddha says, is a misperception and this misperception, he says, is the root of all confusion an conflict.
I hope you get as much out of this as I did in compiling it. Just to encounter the Buddha’s teachings in one’s lifetime is most fortunate. Anyone who applies these teachings, the Buddha says, will be freed from suffering and will attain enlightenment.
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Contents
Suffering 7
No Self 11
Dependent Origination 17
Nirvana 19
Overcoming the Fear of Death 25
Emptiness 31
Self – a Convenient Label 37
Inherent Existence 41
Self is Not Necessary 44
Impermanence 48
Words and Language 50
Views 53
Anatta (Not-Self) 56
Objects 58
The Existence of God 60
The Two Truths 64
Empty Logic 67
Non-origination 68
Dogen’s Painted Rice cakes 71
No Beginning or End 73
Existence and Nonexistence 75
Cause and Effect 77
Interdependence 80
The Tathagata 80
Emptiness is Empty 82
Summary 84
Contemplation 92
Guided Meditation – Overcoming Anger 93
Guided Meditation – The myth of Self 99
Guided Meditation – Fear of Death 104
Suffering
The Buddha understood that the thing humanity was most concerned about was pervasive suffering. He also knew suffering is not an unregenerate condition; it can be alleviated. Hence, alleviating suffering is his primary goal.
The Buddha’s “Four Noble Truths” explains the process of suffering, namely: life is permeated by suffering; the cause of suffering is grasping or craving after mere transitory things; there is a remedy to suffering, the cessation of grasping; and consolidation of these facts on the path.
Also, the Buddha made three basic observations of the human condition which he called “The Three Marks of Existence”, namely: that all phenomena are impermanent and nothing can be counted on to endure; that beings cannot find lasting (permanent) satisfaction in mere transitory things; and because everything is impermanent, including people, he concluded that there could be no permanent abiding “self” residing in them. This is the enlightened perspective. Whereas, the unenlightened person believes that things are enduring permanent entities; that it is possible to find lasting satisfaction in these things; and that there is an enduring self or ego in persons. The Buddha says this is ignorance and is the root cause of all suffering.
Suffering, the Buddha says, is occasioned by grasping after things, be it the thirst for the pleasant or aversion to the unpleasant. This grasping or craving, having mere transitory things as its object, will always be frustrated because it can never be satisfied by transitory things. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, the ear is not fulfilled by hearing, and the mind is pulsating for more. Our frustration arises from and feeds our craving. This is similar to the frustration we experience in chasing after a mirage in the desert falsely believing the “water” will satisfy our thirst. We crave after things in the world in much the same way – material wealth, pleasures, power, and so on. Like addicts, we commit our whole being in pursuit of mere transitory things. We become trapped in a cycle of craving. Our continuous and unceasing attempts to satisfy our hunger by acquiring the objects of our craving are doomed to failure from the very onset. The objects do not possess within themselves properties that will satisfy our craving so the craving will, sooner or later, be frustrated. Thus beings become bound to their conceptions, bound to objects, and bound to cyclic existence itself.
We lay schemes large and small to protect to accumulate and to preserve. Over and over again, moment after moment we unwittingly fall into this trap, building a prison for ourselves, brick by brick. We seem to always be in pursuit of some new goal, some new object of craving. It a deep seated addiction and it generates attachment and hostility. ‘I like this and I don’t like that’, ‘I want more of this and less of that’, ‘I love this and require it to be content’, ‘I hate this and whenever it happens I am filled with dread and anxiety’. Numerous negative emotions (depression, anger, attachment, fear and ill-will) spring up when our cravings are not attained; we suffer greatly and unnecessarily because ‘I’ doesn’t get its way. This craving after what are essentially unsatisfying things leads us to waste our lives in their pursuit, or leads us to berate and hate ourselves for failing to obtain them. Reality cannot be something that fulfils wants or cravings.
Concluding remarks:
Confusion, born of fear, generates attraction and aversion. We create expectations that result in disappointment, frustration, and pain when these attachments are inevitably disrupted or lost. Attachment fuels a ceaseless cycle of craving as we chase after the pleasure linked to these attachments; pleasure which is necessarily fleeting, transient. Sometimes we get what we pursue, but it never lasts and we are dissatisfied again.
To see the truth of the transient nature of everything is itself the relinquishing of craving. Without craving there is no fear, no tremor or agitation, no anxiety, no danger from any quarter. One sees security everywhere.
No Self
The Buddha categorically states that there is no permanent “self” or ego in people. Since the body is impermanent there certainly can be no permanent “self” abiding within it. If there were such a self, it can’t even prevent the disintegration of the very body on which it depends. The false sense of an intrinsic “self”, he says, is at the root of all our problems.
Most of us have a compelling sense of a “self”; a “self” that is permanent like and unchanging. If you were to lose your hand, you still feel “I am the same old me”; or the me at age ten is the same me at fifty. Buddhist thought argues against the very notion of such a permanent enduring “self.” They claim that there is no such thing. That is, they deny that anything retains its identity over time; everything is in a state of constant flux or change.
Despite noticing that everything in the world is constantly changing and is impermanent and despite noticing that thoughts, feelings, perceptions and body sensations change every instant (we are all aging), we want there to be some kind of permanent, unchanging “self” within us that remains the same, something that will survive anything that might happen to our body and mind. So one holds on tightly to this identity of a self or me; either we assume there’s someone in control of this body and mind, or that our awareness, volition, feelings, and consciousness are a sign of something inherently real underneath everything. We may believe this someone we assume is present within us, or will disappear after our death, or that it will continue on in some way, but our conviction that we exist in this real and inherent way remains unshaken.
Of course we exist. We are living beings. We make choices and our choices make a difference. But at some level, for all of us, we cannot just leave it at that. To be real, to be alive, we feel that we must deep down somehow exist in a solid and independent way. Whereas, the Buddha teaches that we exist contingently dependently and not independently. We exist, but only dependently; dependent on our parents, our ancestors, our body parts, food, air, water, and on being perceived or identified by a designating mind. We could not and do not exist otherwise. Rather than seeing things as they are (dependent on other things) we project upon ourselves and on the things around us, a false independent permanent existence, a self-existence, an essential core reality, a centre, an essence or a self. That so called intrinsic self, that subject of experience and agent of action, that underlying essence or core (but which Buddhist philosophers argue does not exist) is the self that we all instinctively take ourselves to be and tenaciously protect and defend. Buddhism does not deny we exist conventionally as a person, what it denies is that we exist independently or intrinsically having an essence or core nature. So let us investigate and see if we can find or locate such an intrinsic self.
For example, if a self exists then we should be able to find it within our body our-mind or as something separate, like a detached witness. You should investigate from the hair of your head down to your toes. Could the self be the head, the legs, the torso, the skin, the heart, the brain, and so on. None of these body part candidates could be said to be an identical match with the self. Perhaps then, the self is the mind (such as, feelings, thoughts, perceptions, cognition, consciousness or awareness). But if the self is the mind, the mind is constantly changing, so which particular state of mind is it? Likewise, the self cannot be our awareness or consciousness because they are constantly changing like our mind. Nor can it be the combination of the body-mind parts because the combination of the parts encounters the same problems as the individual parts. And the self cannot be separate from the body-mind, like a detached witness, because the relationship is lost and there is no connection between them.
The sense of self or me seems like something in the background. For example, whatever could be named, say arm, leg, mind, suffering, and so on, was not me because it was “my” arm, “my” mind, “my” suffering. The “my” or “I” seemed to be something different from arm, mind, etc. But where was this “I” or “me”? It’s not as though we don’t have a strong sense of it, but no matter where we look, it can’t be found. What the teaching says is that within this human being, consisting of mind and body, and the mental attributes of feeling, perception, mental formations and consciousness, there is no additional entity called self which can be found to exist. There are perception, feelings, personality traits, physical parts such as hands, legs and heart; but no self. It does not sound right. Our experience seems to point back to someone in here, a me, or a self.
Despite our wish to be something lasting, something permanent we can’t help noticing that everything is impermanent and disintegrating. Our bodies are disintegrating moment by moment, right now. And though we desperately wish to believe otherwise, the truth is that beneath our ever changing minds and aging bodies there is nothing eternal, nothing permanent, nothing that remains unchanged. We are caught, as it were, between our want of something permanent something unchanging and the knowledge of the inescapable state of transience or impermanence of everything. This creates frustration, confusion and suffering. As the life story of the Buddha reveals, the Buddhist path was inspired by this very problem, and it offers us a way to resolve it.
Even when people develop high states of meditation, philosophy and mind training and who were very accomplished, they simply were stuck on this appearance of a permanent self. There was a centre to all this subjective experience. There was a self, a centre point, someone in there who is experiencing. All life’s experience is based on the “assumption” of an intrinsic self. There is a me and everything else are attributes of me – my house, my money, my body, my thoughts or my feelings. The me was the root of all these. So the Buddha in his teaching has burst the bubble and realised for himself that there was really no me, no self, no real point that was a centre, and he taught the teaching of no-self. There is no self to be found in this mind and body or outside of it anywhere. “No self – full stop.” But no-self does not mean nothing, non-existence, no personality, no conventional person. Of course you are you, the conventional every day person, which is not denied. There is a mind and body, there is a personality, but no self.
In order to be free of this imaginary self we first need to have a sense of it before we can start actually refuting or eliminating it. For example, when someone calls you by your name, by the time you respond there is some kind of rough imagery of yourself before you answer. This self is something that seems to exist independent of your body-mind complex. It’s a sort of solid point, a fixed entity that is just there by itself. That sense of an inherent self becomes particularly clear when we’re angry or afraid. For example, after a false accusation (or a true one), a very palpable sense of an inherently existing self arises. Anger might arise, the stomach might get queasy. “How could they do that to me? I’ll show them!” This reaction, fired by the pain of indignation, seems to point to a self that is really there, that really exists, and at the moment, a very offended self. This sense of self (not the insulted-ness) but the self that has suffered the insult is a sense that feels like I or me is really there. Our reactions, disappointment and anxiety are a good indication of us clinging to a sense of self.
The misconception of self in persons is like when a rope is mistaken for a snake. It is easy to understand that there is not the slightest trace of existence of a snake in the rope. But the moment that a person thinks that there is a snake where the coiled rope lies, the appearance of a snake arises in that person’s mind. Similarly, we misperceive the mere aggregates of a person to be an inherent self. The self is nothing more than a conceptual abstraction. It has no intrinsic nature in itself. It exists only by imputation or label.
We are habituated that we have this intrinsic quality of “I” or “self.” It is a profound and compelling addiction. And on the basis of this addictive illusion we suffer immeasurable torment. We spend our lives protecting defending and satisfying this false sense of self through the accumulation of wealth, power, status, and through the pursuit of perfection and self-promotion. And what we experience – our fears, our anxiety, our insecurity, our uncertainty, what happens after we die, etc – we misperceive as happening to me, to “self”, which factually cannot be substantiated or found. We don’t think that the body suffers but rather that “I” or “self” suffers. The anxious self, worried about its own insufficiency, is at the root of our anxiety.
Summary:
Since everything is impermanent, including the body-mind complex, the Buddha concluded that there cannot be a permanent self that abides in people. What we misperceive to be self is simply the five body-mind aggregates and elements arising and ceasing. The label self is just a convenient way to refer to these aggregates or elements. It is ignorance and grasping that cause one to see a truly existent self in the aggregates. Yet, when examined, nowhere would there be found an organ or entity which was an actual “self” in this dynamic agglomeration of fluctuating elements. The appearance of the aggregates does not necessitate the existence of a “self” nestled somewhere within the aggregates. Thus, the Buddha concluded, beings are empty of a self, or “selfless.” He did not say that there was no appearance or experience of a person conventionally, but rather, that there was no actual inherent entity called self that can be found to act as a referent for the term self. We all use the label self or person conventionally and we all experience a person as an apparent subject of our experiences, but when we look for a core nature, essence or centre called self, nothing can be found. Wherever one looks, within or without, no actual self is found. “Not finding” such a self is the most important thing we could ever understand.
Since no persisting or permanent self exists, most certainly there can be no self that dies. The illusion of a persisting self underlies our fear of death. Buddhism argues that we only fear death because we suffer from an illusion of a persistent self. If the self does not exist, it is irrational to fear the death of self.
Dependent Origination
When the whole of the Buddha’s teachings and all of their implications are not just comprehended, but directly perceived, the goal of the religious quest has been obtained. What is this one truth? Most simply, it is dependent origination. The Buddha says the theory of dependent arising is alone sufficient to explain all perceptions of the world. The theory holds that: “On the arising of “that” condition, “this” effect arises. On the cessation of “that” condition, “this” effect ceases.” For example; on the arising of the conditions of a seed water and soil, a tree arises; on the cessation of conditions (say no water) the tree ceases.
Things appear or arise or show up, not through their own causal power, but by way of dependency. Things depend for their existence on a vast and incalculable array of fluid and ambiguous interdependent and interrelated conditions. Nothing is self-standing independent with its own nature. There is no first cause or beginning (and therefore no end). A tree, for example, depends for its existence on a seed, water, soil, sun, and so on; fire depends for its existence on the conditions of wood, spark, oxygen and so forth; a person depends for his or her existence on the body-mind aggregates, parents, water, food and air; and so on. Everything is dependent for its existence on something else. There are no independent things, no things that don’t depend on other things. Hence the reason we can’t find an essence or core nature that we can point to and say, this is that thing, this is the tree or “treeness.” What we arrive at is the “emptiness” of the thing, that is, the thing’s lack of essence or independent nature.
When we see some impressive object, a mountain or a large new building, we can see how this object arises dependent on underlying conditions. For example, a large school building depends upon earlier people having certain ideas about education. It depends upon a society in which shared values support the work that is done in the building. It depends on money raised by people. It depends upon people dreaming of this particular school, architects and engineers designing it, materials delivered, tradesmen assembling it. The wood depends on trees, which depend on water, earth and light. In other words, the school building is dependently originated all the way down and it is therefore impossible to specify precisely what it is upon which anything finally depends.
The school does not have any natural capacity to exist on its own. That is to say, it is empty of any natural power to be there. It would not be there without its underlying conditions. And it will vanish as the conditions supporting it change. The building on first impression does not appear so contingent. It does not show us how it really is. It presents itself as imposing, as an inherent substantial entity. This is true with all other phenomena. But when we analyse things they turn out to be dependently arisen. And dependently arisen things are empty of an independent self-sufficient nature. Nothing exists in itself.
Things don’t arise through some magical causal power but they arise dependent on conditions. Consider the example of fire. When conditions such as fuel oxygen and a spark come together, fire comes to be. But there never was an autonomous independent self-sufficient entity called “fire” in the first place even while it was manifesting and burning our finger because fire depends on other things – fuel, oxygen and a spark. Dependently arisen things do appear (like fire does appear) but they lack essence or independent nature. This explains why we can’t find an independent entity called fire or “fireness”, nor anything else we label for that matter.
An understanding of dependent origination or emptiness is like seeing the world without the glasses which impute intrinsic existence to things. It is like seeing a world that has no underlying ground but is supported by complex interrelations. When something is dependently arisen it depends on other things so it does not have its own nature and in this sense it does not really originate, somewhat like a reflection in a mirror.
Nirvana
There may be no single concept in Buddhism which has elicited more confusion and debate than nirvana. Nirvana is often translated as “freedom,” but it actually means “extinction.” A literal translation of “nirvana” is “blown out,” as in the extinguishing of a fire, or, “blowing out” of false thoughts and their attendant desires. Nirvana is not a state of transcendent eternal bliss, nor sanctified salvation, it is simply the clarity and peace that arises when the objects we have been identifying with are realized to be empty.
The Buddha eliminates various misconceptions about this state of nirvana. Nirvana is not something that can be “attained,” and not something that “arises.” It is not something that exists or non-exists. It is also not something that is permanent, and it is not something that can be possessed or relinquished, nor is it something that exists or non-exists. If it were permanent then nothing could change and nothing would relate to anything. We know of no such thing. The Buddha echoed the clear assertion that nirvana is neither transcendent existence nor posthumous annihilation. It can only be described in terms of a negation, a negation or absence of all our assumptions and conceptual elaborations about it. This “the end of conceptual elaborations” is how the Buddha refers to nirvana. “Ultimate serenity is the coming-to-rest of all ways of taking things, the repose of named things.”
The cause of the whole sphere of confusion and misunderstanding about the nature of nirvana or freedom is the human tendency to speculate and theorize. Were there not this tendency, then one would never perceive transitory phenomena as enduring in the first place, which would prevent one from developing passionate attractions and aversions regarding phenomena. Without such passions, the dispositions and cravings would not develop, and thus suffering would not come to be. Without these passions, one would not create the concepts of eternal life, existence or nonexistence, samsara or nirvana, Buddha or sentient being, heaven or hell, friend or enemy, pleasant or unpleasant, etc, concepts which the Buddha refuted. When one completely and utterly ceases to grasp onto theories words and perceptions, speculation comes to an end and dispositions are “blown out.” This is nirvana.
The fact that nirvana is spoken of as being “realized,” “attained” or “achieved” is not to be understood as implying that nirvana is a state of freedom or a tangible heaven or a “thing” which can be known or possessed. It is simply used as a tool for escaping suffering. The only way of reaching nirvana ‘the goal’ is to realise that in the ultimate sense there is no goal to be reached.
One substantialist notion was that the bound person partakes of the quality of bondage. Nirvana, then, would be the relinquishing of this nature and the adoption of a new and wholly disparate mode of existence – the freed state. This does not apply. There is not a person who partakes of qualities and freedom is not a concrete goal that can be striven for. An eternalist would hold that the state of Nirvana transcends temporality and the one who achieves freedom also becomes eternal. Nirvana is not such for it avoids the extreme of both eternalism (permanence) and transience (impermanence). It cannot be thought of in terms of arising and ceasing. It is not a “thing” that is obtainable, not a transcendent reality, and not, like the Hindu schools suggest, a single unified eternal truth or pure consciousness.
Madhyamika, on the other hand, describe Nirvana as follows. “The very same world is samsara or nirvana, dependent upon one’s perspective or attitude, for all else remains as it was. When one perceives the constant arising and ceasing of phenomena, one perceives samsara. When all reification is abandoned, that very same world and one’s mode of living in it, becomes nirvana.” What this is saying then is that samsara has no “thing” that distinguishes it from nirvana. Nirvana has no “thing” that distinguishes it from samsara. This does not mean that confusion and enlightenment are identical in conventional experience. Conventionally samsara and nirvana are very different. Samsara is confusion and suffering, nirvana is freedom from confusion and ignorance. But ultimately both are empty of inherent existence and in that sense they are not separate or different. That they are perceived as separate is made by the false supposition that they are two self-existent “things.”
To say that the world of suffering (samsara) is equivalent to the highest and most honoured of goals of Buddhism (nirvana) would seem to be flagrant blasphemy. It is only blasphemy from the standpoint of essentialism. If there is a self-nature in either, then the two would assuredly be different. Bondage, as a real thing, would have to be broken free from, and enlightenment, as a true state, would have to be achieved. The tendency to see them as concrete things actually would deny a person the possibility of ever releasing one and obtaining the other. If the samsaric process was real, having self-nature, and if one were bound within that process then one could never leave it. Similarly, if nirvana were a real attribute or essence, of which the unenlightened individual was not yet partaking, then it could never be achieved. Such a radical separation of nirvana and samsara severs any possible relationship between them. If this happens, then something bound can never become unbound, and someone who suffers can never hope for release. It is only because both nirvana and samsara, like all other phenomena, are empty of inherent nature that they can be said to be the same. As empty, they can each be said to lack self-nature, and are the same in that neither is real. Because neither samsara nor nirvana is real, both of them are worldly conventions. Inasmuch as nirvana is dependent upon the conception of samsara and dependent upon an illusory entity, nirvana also belongs to the realm of apparent truth.
Nirvana is none other than the non-establishment of anything in its intrinsic being. The Enlightened Ones do not perceive anything that is established in its intrinsic being. They do not apprehend things and their true nature rather they apprehend there are no things, per se. When such entities are analyzed with wisdom they are found to be like an illusory elephant in a magical show; non-existent in their intrinsic being. When one has understood the nature of entities to be unapprehended or without support, this is nirvana. Since everything is empty, then nirvana is just as empty as samsara and there is no real difference between them. Hence, all phenomena are similar to nirvana because all phenomena are devoid of intrinsic nature.
Since things originate dependent on other things, no independent or inherent thing originates. Hence the origination of entities is not an actual origination. Inasmuch as Samsara and Nirvana, like all other things, originate dependent on other things they are not originated intrinsically or independently, somewhat like what takes place in a dream. Since both are empty of intrinsic nature there is no difference.
The pragmatic value of equating nirvana and the cycle of birth and death is that it demonstrates the attainability of enlightenment. Freedom and bondage are not identifiable things with separate and distinct spheres of influence. To borrow a simplistic view of theism: “If the world comprised one plane and freedom another, then the feasibility of escaping one and attaining the other would be highly suspect.”
The Buddha’s declaration that freedom is the world and the world is freedom demonstrates that enlightenment is readily at hand. It is not the world that we have to change, but only our attitude. If the world were ultimately real, no power on earth could change it. The change is in our outlook. The unpleasant world is one constructed through ignorance grasping and dispositions. The pleasant (or not unpleasant) world is found simply by understanding the meaning of emptiness and ceasing to reify the phenomenal one. Seen from the unenlightened point, the cosmos is a cycle of birth and death characterized by suffering. Seen from the vantage point of dependent origination and emptiness, the cosmos is an ever-flowing, ever-changing empty process.
The highest awareness which is needed for release from samsara then is not the result of moving from the finite to the infinite but the release from ignorance about the empty nature of everything. Things are empty of independent nature because they depend on other things. Nirvana, then, is living in full awareness of dependent origination, full awareness of the empty nature of things.
The achievement of nirvana requires dependence, impermanence, and the possibility of change, all of which are grounded in emptiness. The point is that no ascription of any predicate to nirvana can be literally true. For such a predication would purport to be an assertion that nirvana is an ultimately existent phenomenon with a determinate property, but there are no ultimately existent phenomena, neither samsara nor even nirvana.
Samsara and Nirvana were demonstrated, not for Enlightened Ones but for ordinary people. Ordinary people, who do not see the emptiness of all things are attached to the world, and that is Samsara. To them, Samsara and Nirvana, are mutually opposed to each other; one of them is meant to be removed and the other acquired. But Nirvana (emptiness) is the opposite of worldly existence. Those who see emptiness are not attached to the world and Nirvana. They neither perceive Samsara nor Nirvana as intrinsic entities. Consequently, for one who has seen emptiness, there is no assumption of either Samsara or Nirvana.
Because nirvana can only be spoken of by contrasting it in some sense with samsara, and because there is no conventionally existent perceptible entity that could serve as a referent for the term, there is the terrible temptation when speaking of nirvana to think that it is an inherently existent thing or state and highly desirable since it is indeed characterized as liberation from suffering.
Nirvana is simply samsara seen without reification, without attachment, without delusion. From this vantage point there is not the slightest difference between them. To distinguish between samsara and nirvana would be to suppose that each had a nature and that they were different natures. But each is empty and so there can be no inherent difference. But if, as the Buddha argued, Nirvana is simply to see conventional things as empty and not to see some separate emptiness behind them then nirvana must be grounded in the conventional. The conventional is the very gateway to the reality (nirvana). To see the conventional as merely conventional and not to superimpose something inherent or intrinsic onto it is what is called nirvana. To be in samsara is to see things as they appear to deluded consciousness (inherent entities) and to interact with them accordingly. To be in Nirvana is to see those things as they are, as merely empty, dependent, impermanent, and non-substantial, but not to be somewhere else seeing something else.
Nirvana does not exclude samsara. We don’t escape from samsara and nirvana because nirvana is not someplace else. Nirvana is a way of being here. Nirvana arises when there is no distinction of samsara and nirvana.
“Jewel-Seal-in-Hand” says: “To like Nirvāṇa and to dislike the world makes dual. If one does not like Nirvāṇa nor loath the world, then there is no duality, no distinguishing one thing from another. Why is this so: because if there is bondage then there is liberation? If from the beginning there is no such thing as bondage, who would ever seek for liberation? One who realizes that there is no bondage and no liberation will have no likes or dislikes.”
Overcoming the Fear of Death
Fear of death arises from the belief in a permanent subsisting self that wants to be preserved. Death appears as the ultimate catastrophe. The fear comes from the mistaken assumption that something real is about to be annihilated. The belief in the reality of self is what is subject to the fear of death. The fear is that “I” or self will die. So let us examine and see if we can find the self that will die.
Is the self the body? Scan your body slowly. Is the self your hand? Your face? Your brain? If it were, losing a part would mean losing the “self” completely. But that’s not how it feels.
Is the self the mind? Now look at thoughts. A thought appears… then disappears. Ask: Is the self one of these thoughts? If yes, which one? The last? The current? The next? Notice: thoughts are changing constantly but self feels continuous. So, the self can’t be any single thought?
Could the self be separate from body and mind? Look directly. Can you find the self outside sensations and thoughts, some observer or witness that is independent? Usually, you’ll find only more thoughts, only more sensations. And furthermore, if we mentally strip away all the parts of the body-mind we should find a “self” left over. This is not the case.
We can only conclude that when we search for a solid real entity “self” or“I” that fears death, nothing is found in the body, the mind or separate from them. The “self” we are afraid will be annihilated at death is revealed to be a misconception. The fear of death stems from the deluded belief in a substantial self that one wants to protect and that one fears will be destroyed. Demonstrating there is no inherent self to protect diminishes attachment that fuels the fear of death. Death is no longer seen as a catastrophic annihilation of a real entity but as a natural process of change or flux. Furthermore, since the “self” that fears death lacks inherent nature, the death that is feared likewise lacks inherent nature. This radically releases any lingering belief in a truly existing self that fears death and a truly existing entity called “death” that is feared.
Peace is not achieved by belief in a pleasant afterlife, nor is it achieved by eliminating death (which is impossible) but by eliminating the mistaken view of an inherent self that fears death. The entire basis for suffering, including the fear of death, is a misunderstanding of reality. Peace is attained by seeing death for what it is, empty of inherent existence.
“Just understand that birth and death is itself nirvana. There is nothing such as birth and death to be avoided. There is nothing such as nirvana to be sought. Only when you realise this are you free from birth and death.” Dogen.
If death truly existed its essence would be findable under analysis. But when we go to “the side of death” looking for an inherent entity, an essence, something we can single out and demonstrate; it simply cannot be found. Death is a mere label that is designated or imputed by mind. The fear of death arises from the misconception that the mere label death is a real entity. If death were a real entity, it would be findable but when we look for a real referent that matches the label death, nothing can be found. When you think about it, everything is like that, mere labels, death is a mere label, self is a mere label, but there is no inherent entity that corresponds to the label.
Fear of death is exactly the kind of clinging Madhyamaka was designed to undermine. Fear of death dissolves, not by comfort stories, but by insight. Fear of death comes from reifying the self, treating “me” as something enduring or inherently existent. Death then appears as the annihilation of a real entity (self). That’s terrifying if such a self existed. But Prāsaṅgika says that such a self has never existed in the way you think it has.
You can use the term self in a conventional sense. You exist conventionally, not ultimately as some inherent, permanent, unchanging entity. Conventionally there is a person, a name, continuity. Ultimately there is no independently existing “core” that can be destroyed. Fear of death assumes a solid core self before death and its destruction by death. Prāsaṅgika demonstrates there is no inherent or independent entity with a core nature, essence or “self” that exists or that can be found so there is no inherent thing called “self” that dies. Death is only frightening if existence is solid and cessation is absolute. Prāsaṅgika denies both.
For Prāsaṅgika, life is dependently arisen, death is dependently arisen. Neither has an independent essence. So death is not an inherently real event nor an an inherently real end. It’s a conceptual designation, a mere label on a changing continuum of causes and conditions coming together.
Fear of death relies on this thought: “Something truly real is about to be lost forever.” Prāsangika insight replaces it with: “There was never a truly real thing to lose.” Prāsangika dismantles every position the mind tries to stand on.
Fear of death usually assumes three things: There is a solid independent “me”. This “me” possesses life. Death destroys or annihilates this “me”. Prāsangika dismantles all three. When you look for the self, it cannot be found at all. Yet… experience still functions, conventional reality continues as normal. The self exists conventionally, but is utterly empty of inherent existence. So what is death threatening to destroy? Something that was never established to begin with. Our concerns of death, and other things, is much like our concerns of how wide and deep is the lake (mirage) in the desert.
Fear of death is based on unfounded suppositions: “I truly exist, so death is terrifying. I will be completely wiped out.” Prāsangika says: because a self is dependently arisen it is empty so nothing solid can be annihilated. Death is simply the cessation of a label, not an inherent entity. No owner. No core. No catastrophe.
Life is not a possession. Death is not a loss. Continuity does not require a self. The fear collapses because there is no inherently existent “someone” standing in danger of nonexistence. What dies is like a flame that dies when the condition (say oxygen) is removed. This is not annihilation but a natural part of flux. Nothing tragic, nothing violated.
What is death, really? Death has no inherent existence, just like life, self, or mind has no inherent existence. No permanent self dies. Prāsangika rejects an inherently existing “I.” What we call a person is a dependent process (dependent on body, sensations, thoughts, causes). Death is a conceptual designation. “Death” exists conventionally (it happens) but not ultimately. There is no fixed essence that transitions from alive to dead. We suffer because we reify a solid self and also a solid moment of ending.
Death is the collapse of a mistaken designation. From this view, death is not the destruction of a self, because there was never a self there to destroy. Death is the cessation of a particular causal continuum of aggregates. It is not annihilation of an entity, or transition of a soul. Death is simply a change in dependently arisen conditions upon which the label “person” was imputed. What ends is designation under certain conditions, not an inherently real thing. And since death is not inherent, the notion of a final end does not apply.
Death is dependently arisen, a mere label, designated by mind, empty of inherent existence. Even though death lacks inherent existence, it is not completely nothing. Death appears conventionally but is empty. If death were truly nothing, it couldn’t even be labelled. It functions conventionally. It has causal efficacy (grief, fear, karma, ethics). From this perspective you could say death is not an inherent event, not an absolute cessation (nihilism), not an inherently existent transition. Contemplating death is not irrelevant it makes life meaningful, not gloomy. It cuts procrastination, weakens attachment and anger, strengthens compassion. Death is a transition, not annihilation.
The idea of a self that survives the death of the body is based on the assumption there is such a self in the first place. If there is such a self, Prāsangika teaches, then it is either the same as the aggregates or different from them. These are the only options. If the self is the same as the aggregates then when the body disintegrates, the self must disintegrate. Survival becomes impossible. On the other hand, if the self is separate from the aggregates, then it should not depend on them, it should exist even before birth and it should be unaffected by bodily or mental change. This is absurd. Since no self is found the question is asked: “What exactly would be surviving the death of the body?”
The self exists only conventionally as a dependently imputed designation not as an independent entity. So before death is even discussed, the groundwork is laid: there is no self or soul that exists “in its own right” at all. The idea that “something must survive” is based on preserving a designation (a label) as if it were a thing. And further, since a self that survives death is absurd, since a self cannot be found in the first place, a self that is annihilated at death is also absurd. Prāsangika cuts both extremes: “existence” and “non-existence.”
Concerning death, psychology focuses on fostering coping mechanisms, like acceptance and emotional management of fear of death. Prāsangika dissolves the illusion of a self that is supposed to die. Both the self and death are seen as empty. Psychology does not try to dismantle the idea of a self, it treats the symptoms but preserves the illusion.
Death is not the end of you because you were never an inherently existent entity. And life was never owned. So death becomes just another empty appearance arising and ceasing – nothing to resist, nothing to cling to, nothing to fear. Peace is not courage in the face of destruction. It is the calm that comes from realizing there was never anything that could be destroyed.
When we analyse looking for “who is afraid?” “what exactly will die?” “where is the self that needs protecting?” and find nothing whatsoever, fear loses its footing. The key is not in “finding” but “not-finding.”
The Buddha categorically states that there is no permanent “self” in people. Since the body is impermanent there certainly can be no permanent “self” abiding within it. Since no persisting or permanent self exists, most certainly there is no self that dies. Buddhism argues that we only fear death because we suffer from an illusion of a persistent self. If the self does not exist, it is irrational to fear the death of self.
Confusion, born of fear, generates attraction and aversion. Our aversion to that which we find distasteful (death) is a reaction to the fact that it reminds us of our own impermanence and vulnerability. Our aversion is a way of warding off the fear of interdependence (change), of being out of control, of being subject to the natural laws of causes and conditions that issue in our ageing, infirmity, and our eventual demise. When one becomes truly aware of the anxiety and suffering entailed in trying to ward off impermanence, this generates the impulse to take refuge and strive for awakening.
Emptiness
The most important characteristic of a thing is its dependence on other things and hence the impossibility to exist individually and independently because an independent thing cannot be dependent. This lack of independent identity is the meaning of emptiness.
The Buddha is most famous for his teaching on “emptiness” and “dependent origination”. But first, there is a traditional caveat given to those desiring to study the teachings on emptiness. The caveat, which is given in most texts and scholarly commentaries on the subject, warns that emptiness does not entail utter non-existence or psychological depression. A crucial distinction must be drawn between nihilism and emptiness. The emptiness of phenomena does not imply that nothing exists at all on any level, that there is no path to follow, and no ethical values one should abide by. The reason for this is to prevent a nihilistic approach to life and the Buddhist path.
It is important to clarify that the Buddha’s philosophy, far from being nihilistic, is in fact tremendously life-affirming Emptiness is not independent of human interests and concerns but is intricately bound up with such concerns. If there were no human minds who mistakenly read the existence of fixed essence into phenomena, which lack it, there would be no point in having a theory to correct this. Emptiness does not negate everyday conventional life but simply reveals its true nature as being empty. The conventional is precisely where emptiness is. Thus the ideal is not dissolution of the structures of existence but to realize that these structures are empty. Things in fact lack essence, they have no fixed nature and indeed it is only because of this lack of essential immutable essence or being that change, liberation and spiritual progress is possible.
All is possible when emptiness is possible. Nothing is possible when emptiness is impossible.
The word emptiness has powerful negative connotations. It suggests at first quite the opposite of a liberating spiritual path. It may suggest deadness or nothingness. Emptiness translated does actually refer to some sort of lack or absence in things. But it is not a lack of meaning or hope or existence. It is the lack of the exaggerated and distorted kind of existence that we have projected onto things and onto ourselves. It is the absence of a false essential nature with which we have unconsciously invested everything. Emptiness reveals an absence of any substance. It can be quite frightening as we start to have doubts about the lack of essential nature in things. We will feel that things cannot exist at all if they do not exist in the solid way we are accustomed to seeing them. Consider, however, that if things actually did have a very solid permanent kind of existence or essential nature it would mean that those things could never change, they would always be exactly that. There could be no life everything would be static and frozen. But such frozen, stagnant, unchanging self-nature in things is precisely what things are empty of. Recognition of this absence of a fixed self-nature in things is referred to as the perception of emptiness.
Empty of what? So what do you mean by empty? Everything is there: there are people, and there are their insides, guts and their bones and blood and everything is full of stuff; and the mind is not empty either, it’s got ideas, thoughts and feelings. The only thing that is empty is the emptiness of an entity, essence, or independent nature. Emptiness is a negation of self-existence or independent existence or inherent existence. Things still appear or show up but there is no specific entity or core nature in anything. That is emptiness.
Synonymous with emptiness is dependent origination. Dependent origination describes interdependence. No “thing” exists apart from its relationship with other ‘things’. They are, by definition, relative. That is, they only have identity in relation to other things. There is nothing which exists independently, things only exist dependently. For example, fire exists dependent upon conditions such as fuel, oxygen and a spark. If these conditions are cleared away or even one of them such as oxygen, there will be no fire left burning. Therefore, apart from the conditions of fire, there is no fire. Fire is not an independent element but it arises dependently. It has no essence of its own, no core nature that makes fire hot. It is in this sense that fire is said to be empty, empty of essence. But fire is not empty of appearance or conventional existence; it will burn your finger. Conventional reality still exists, table exists, a person exists, suffering exists, but only dependently, not inherently.
“Because of emptiness there is appearance. Without emptiness there could not be appearance.”
Since everything arises dependent on other things there are no independent things. If something arises, or appears, or can be identified, then its appearance depends on other things so we know immediately it is empty of independent nature.
“Because mountains and rivers are empty is precisely why there are mountains and rivers.”
“All phenomena are empty of essence but exist conventionally, interdependently and impermanently.”
My appearance as a person doesn’t stand alone. It depends on a body, a mind, parents, air, food, and on being labelled as a person. Apart from all these things, there is simply no person or self to be found. Everything is empty in the same way – rocks, trees, bridges, planets, minds, thoughts, emotions, pain and suffering, joy and happiness. They are empty of essence or independent nature. Things arise not by their own power but by depending on conditions leading to their coming into existence. They are not self-created.
Because phenomena depend upon innumerable ever changing conditions they are not the fixed entities that they appear to be. Buddhists deny that anything retains its identity over time (the doctrine of impermanence), and that even at a given moment, there is no unchanging entity. What is perceived to be an unchanging object is, on the contrary, an instantaneous, indivisible movement of disintegration and formation, even though this transience or impermanence is imperceptible in the short term.
Impermanence means that everything is in a state of constant change. Change is at work every moment on everything. In other words, there is no static moment in “duration” for anything. This is what “impermanence” means: no lasting reality. The very moment that something “is” is the moment when it no longer “is”; its “existence” is cancelled out. There is no candidate for permanence (such as an eternal God figure or Brahman). If there were such a permanent self-reliant thing it would remain indefinitely, immortally, not depending on anything. We know of no such thing. The Buddha himself was only transformed because of dependent arising and so he was open to being transformed.
The constant changing, arising, and passing away of things is precisely what demonstrates the emptiness of those things. There are no fixed, static entities in the world that remain the same. No entity retains all of its properties from one moment to the next (cells change); no entity endures from one moment to the next. The flame from a candle is a different flame from one second ago. The candle grease is different from one second ago. Any identity over time (a continuum) is a fiction. The world is a state of continuous flux so nothing can have a fixed unchanging nature. Phenomena are therefore best characterised not by “being” but “becoming”. Also, we cannot pinpoint a static moment where we can say: “this is an adolescent, this is an adult” or “this is a shoot, this is a tree.” These obscurities are, for the Buddhists, proof that there are no such fixed natures or essences to begin with.
“It is not possible to step into the same river twice.”
“The only constant is change.”
Dependent origination simply is the explicability and coherence of the universe. Its emptiness is the fact that there is no more to it than that. When we look for an essence we literally come up empty. Dependence is the very antithesis of essence or intrinsic existence.
Since all things are empty, all things lack any self-nature or core, which is what an inherent entity would require. Self-nature, or essence, is just what empty things are empty of. In fact, all things cannot but be empty, it is their very nature. There is no other mode of existence of which they are capable.
To say that all things are empty does not mean that all things are non-existent. Things still appear. For example, a mirage does appear or show up. Mirages really are mirages, but are not really water, though they might appear to be water. So conventional phenomena really are empty, dependently arisen, nominally real, but are not substantial, inherently existent phenomena, though they might appear to be.
No phenomenon is denied or invalidated by the fact of being empty; it is empty in the very moment of its appearance. Take for example the moon reflected in a lake. The moon appears on the lake while being empty and its emptiness does not necessitate the exclusion of its appearance. If there is no appearance, there is no emptiness, for emptiness and appearance depend upon each other. When emptiness arises as an appearance, we are confident that appearance is empty.
Emptiness does not deny the existence of things but says that all things have no intrinsic essence. In other words, nothing exists on its own divorced or separated from other things. Therefore, everything is interconnected and cannot exist without something else existing. This is the meaning of emptiness and this is dependent arising.
“If something is dependent on something else to manifest it is empty of self-existence or independent existence.”
Take the example of intelligence. Intelligence is not a static, independent fixed thing. It is not “ours” we cannot take credit for it. It is dependent on other conditions: gifted teachers, knowledge passed on to us from past generations, and so on. So there is no reason to cling to it. It is the same with other traits; our kindness, our beauty, our courage, our strength. All of it is dependent on underlying causes and conditions and will vanish as the conditions change or vanish; none of it is ours. We can’t claim it as our refuge.
Summary:
Nāgārjuna’s fundamental conception is that all phenomena are empty of intrinsic nature or independent nature because they depend on other things. Because they are empty they can interact with each other to generate the effect, which, being dependent and impermanent cannot but be empty as well. The myriad things are interdependent, ever-changing, and empty. Significantly, things are empty because they are devoid of any fixed essence or permanent nature. That things are ever-changing also indicates that they are devoid of any fixed identity. Ultimately, we cannot say what things are because they do not exist in and of themselves.
Because things are interdependently co-arisen, the Buddha says that inherently existent things cannot be found, so in absolute terms one could say that phenomena as events are ultimately unfindable. This absence or “emptiness of phenomena” is called Sunyata. It is actually quite subtle: there is nothing, not one single thing in the realm of phenomena that can be either pinned down or grasped in any way. Insubstantiality, ungraspability and complete unfindability are the ultimate characteristics of experienced phenomena. They are utterly pure from the very beginning. They are beyond all conceptual constructs. They are beyond the discrimination of acceptance and rejection and because they have no objectifiable essence, they never really come into existence, nor do they go out of existence either. Every phenomenal event is entirely elusive and ephemeral. It is like trying to grasp an image in a mirror.
Self a Convenient Label
In western philosophy we all have a sense of a truly existing self. This is exemplified by Rene Descartes’ assertion: “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes believed that humanity is defined by thinking and this in turn assumes a stable continuous self who thinks. But does that singular “I” or “self” really exist? Where Western philosophy explicitly assumes that it does, Eastern philosophy, and particularly Buddhist philosophy, makes no such assumption. Upon investigation, an intrinsic independent self (a self that can be identified separate and apart from the body-mind aggregates) cannot be found and therefore they conclude does not exist. All human suffering, they say, can be attributed to the illusion that it does exist. Furthermore, they say that appearance of the aggregates does not necessitate the existence of a “self” within them. If we look for such a self, trying to pinpoint an essence, something objectively real that exists as a valid referent of the term or concept “self”, we will fail to find anything at all.
The Buddhist doctrine of no-self (anātman) simply aims to deflate the grasping ego and thereby undermine anxiety and live more peaceful lives. Therefore, the teachings of the Buddha have one core purpose: to eradicate dukkha, a Sanskrit word often translated as ‘suffering’, but perhaps stronger than this: “is all of life’s dissatisfaction, disappointment, unfulfilled hopes and unhappiness.” One of our most prominent and damaging misconceptions about reality and that causes us great suffering, the Buddha thinks, is our confused notion of ‘self’. Belief in a permanent self, he says, is the most dangerous and pernicious of all errors, the most deceitful of delusions
Although the Buddha clearly affirms the concept of no-self, there’s a lot of misunderstanding about what the Buddha really means here. The Buddha explains that the referents of ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘self’, don’t really exist in the way we think they do; that is, as real, permanent, unchanging, inherent entities. Why does the Buddha hold this position? Because, when you think about it, no part of us ever stays the same: we are changing every second of every day, our thoughts, desires, moods, memories, the hair on our heads, the nails in our fingers and toes, the cells of our bodies — all is in flux. According to the Buddha, ‘self’ refers not to some permanent substance; it’s simply a convenient name, a designation or a label to refer to the myriad collection of ever-changing body-mind aggregates and processes.
For example, consider anger arising. A thought labels it “mine.” But where is the owner (mine) separate from the anger? You’ll find anger is experienced. Ownership (mine) is added afterward. Mine or “I” or “self” is just a conceptual designation, a label. It’s not an inherent entity hiding somewhere deeper.
This is similar to what we call “tree”. The word or label or designation “tree” refers not to some permanent substance; it is simply a convenient way to refer to the aggregates (trunk, branches, leaves, and so on). Take the individual parts away and no “tree” remains. So it is with the self. We use individual names like ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘they’, ‘self’ and we may think that in using such words or labels we are referring to an individual persisting entity. But when we strip away the body parts, no ‘I’ or ‘self’ is left over. Self is nothing more than a mere label.
A famous Buddhist text that illustrates such thinking is the analysis of a chariot by 7th Century Sage, Chandrakirti. Instead of analysing a chariot we will analyse a car. So what is it that makes a car a car?
Chandrakirti asks: Are the seats that are the car? The answer is no. Is it the wheels, the engine, the windows that are the car? No. Then is it all the parts combined that are the car? No. Is there anything outside the car that is the car? Still the answer is no.
Thus, we can find no independent separate entity like ‘carness’ that is called ‘car’. Just as ‘car’ is nothing in addition to all its parts, so the ‘self’ is not some extra thing in addition to its aggregates or parts. Like car, self is simply a convenient fiction, a shorthand reference for the many different parts (mental and physical) that make us up. Its existence is based in convention rather than in some persisting underlying entity. And given there is no essence in a person that can be found, there is no necessity for something to be essentially a subject of experience.
So we exist in a conventional sense; we just aren’t what we think we are in an ultimate sense. “Self” is a constant flow of various factors or conditions coming together. When we refer to individuals, we are not referring to an actual self but to various factors or conditions coming together (parents, food, water, air, aggregates, mind, and a label). There is no additional factor called self. Self is simply a name which is used to label the coming together of these various conditions. And these conditions are also dependent on the coming together of other conditions. Because self, and all phenomena, depend for their existence on other things, they are empty of independent or inherent nature.
There is no persisting self, nothing about us that remains the same at all times. The self is just a convenient way to refer to the aggregates. However, if we start believing the self is actually real – some kind of independent persisting substance as opposed to a convenient label – the danger is that it encourages us to view everything through its lens. We feel so intimately connected to this self. We are driven by the core thought “I am most important, my happiness is paramount.” We then judge reality only by how it impacts this fictional self, which leads us to develop certain attachments and aversions. ‘I like this and I don’t like that’, ‘I want more of this and less of that’, ‘I love this and require it to be content’, ‘I hate this and whenever it happens I am filled with dread and anxiety’. Numerous negative emotions (depression, disharmony, anger, attachment, dissatisfaction, jealousy, pride, and ill-will) spring up when our desires are not attained; we are left feeling dissatisfied because ‘I’ doesn’t get its way. Worse still, we become hung up on the fact that our enduring self will one day end. “We” will one day die. And this spirals into existential suffering.
Self is a false belief which has no reality and it produces harmful thoughts of ‘me’ and ‘mine’, desire, craving and attachment. We become enslaved by the self’s demands, which traps our thoughts and feelings in ego. We view the world through the lens of desire, which creates attachment and aversion. And as the world is fundamentally transient and rarely accords with the hopes and desires we place on it, bad things happen to our sense of self, and good things always end. We base our lives on the assumption that we have a permanent self and then suffer when our mortality shows this assumption to be false. As long as we continue to view reality through the lens of illusory self, as long as we continue to grasp after things this imaginary ‘self’ wants, we set ourselves up for perpetual suffering.
Buddhism aims to fix this misconception of our identity not by showing us the ‘correct’ identity, but by claiming that we do not have an identity at all. Self is an imaginary false belief which has no corresponding reality.
Buddhism rejects the idea that there is any unitary self that persists throughout the lifespan. They argue that what we are is a continuously changing array of five psycho-physical aggregates (the physical body, sensation, perception, intellect, and consciousness) without an inner core or inner self. The aggregates are here for only an instant before causing a different series of aggregates to arise in their place. None of these momentary parts is a self and none of them lasts from one instant to the next. There is not and cannot be a permanent “you”. Any concept of a distinct, personal identity is a misperception and it is this misperception that leads to all the suffering and pain in the world.
Inherent Existence
It is taken for granted that the appearing phenomena are just there: solid, independent, permanent like and not dependent on anything else. In other words, they inherently exist. So let us analyse this concept of inherent existence. If things did inherently exist as solid entities then they would be permanent, unchanging, unaffectable and independent. This would mean that everything would be frozen, isolated, unchanging and nothing would relate to anything or affect anything else. Nothing could come into existence or cease. We could never become enlightened; we would be stuck permanently in our current unenlightened state, and suffering could never be ended. Hence the “misconception” of inherent existence is the root of all confusion and suffering.
But inherent existence or independent existence is not our experience. Things depend on other things, and everything is in a state of constant flux or change, so how can we claim that an inherent independent unchanging entity exists at all? If it did exist then it should be findable. This has not yet been achieved. Inherent existence is a misperception, like perceiving something that is not there. This is similar to a coil of rope mistaken as snake. The snake simply is not there. Inherent existence is an impossible mode of existence (like the hairs on a tortoise).
When we become angry, upset, jealous, or excited, or when we crave for or cling to something, the grasping at inherence existence is present, and in particular, grasping at the sense of I or self. We need to look at the way the “I” appears to us at those times. For example, if someone comes along and accuses you of having caused some great harm when in fact you are entirely blameless, at that time you are likely to have a very strong sense of I. You may think to yourself “I didn’t do that. Why are they blaming me?” At this time you can clearly observe the inherently existing “I”. You can also clearly observe the mind grasping the emotions and dispositions as inherently existent.
The sense of an inherent “I” or “self” is like something in the background, something subjective. From this perspective it’s not so much that we are the body, but rather, that we have a body. When we are angry we don’t believe our body is angry, but “I” am angry. Other examples, such as, “I” am tired, “I” am sick serve to focus our attention on this imaginary “I.” It is this false inherent sense of “I” that is the cause of all our woes. It is false because it cannot be found when looked for. The “I” exists only by label or mental imputation.
The following example illustrates the illusory nature of an inherent “I” or self. When I was about ten years old my friends and I would throw stones at each other. I came to realize that no matter where a stone hit me (arm, leg or even the head) it did not hit “me” but hit only my arm, my leg or my head. There was no place a stone could land that I thought was truly me. In fact, whatever could be named, such as arm, was not me, because it was “my” arm. The “my” or “I” seemed to be something different from arm. But where was this “I”? It’s not as though I didn’t have a strong sense of it. But no matter where I looked, it seemed to keep shifting as though it was always in back of me! The inability to find the “I” really did begin to weaken my sense of its reality.
Here’s another good example. When our emotions are triggered, such as our soccer team losing, the clinging to a sense of a solid inherent self or I is clearly displayed. A few things quietly happen. Your identity subtly fuses with the team: we lost, I am diminished. The pain isn’t really about the score it’s about a threatened sense of self. You expect lasting satisfaction from something that is impermanent and dependently arisen. When reality doesn’t comply, suffering shows up.
So what’s happening when your team loses? You impute reality: “team,” “loss” “humiliation” “hope” “betrayal” “stress” – these are all mere designations or mere labels laid on top of events. But in the moment, they feel objectively true as if the pain were baked into reality. The “self” sneaks in as unquestioned. But when we carefully look, it can’t be found.
Without a self to protect and defend thoughts feel lighter, less “owned”, emotions arise but don’t define a solid “me.”
It should be emphasized that the object of negation is not the everyday conventional person, but the false sense of a solid inherently existing self, a self that is unchanging, self-sufficient and not dependent on anything else. When we put it in this context it becomes pretty obvious that there is no such thing. The conventional self still appears but what disappears is the false sense that it inherently exists.
Having refuted the inherent self, one will see something new begin to happen. Persons and phenomena will be conceived as conventionally existent but lacking inherent existence. This is the end of the misperception of inherent existence and the end of painful and afflicted arising such as: “How could she do that to me? That is absolutely not permissible! I have done so much for her and this is the gratitude I get!” To pierce through the mental fiction of inherent existence is critical because it is the root error that leads to the endless grasping and aversion that underlies all suffering.
Insofar as conventional phenomena present themselves as more than conventional as inherently existent, they deceive us. Take for example, the phenomenon suffering. When one perceives suffering to be an inherent entity then one is asserting it is not dependently arisen from conditions. If this is true then suffering would exist inherently in which case, there are no conditions in the absence of which it ceases to exist and hence liberation from suffering is impossible. Likewise, if one thinks that, say anger exists inherently, one will be unable to account for its dependent arising and hence liberation from anger is impossible. The same goes for such things as, anxiety, prejudice, stress, depression, and so forth.
Summary:
Everything we encounter depends on other things. There are no distinct inherent entities. When we look for an essence in things, nothing is found. This is the emptiness that we need to establish. Phenomena are empty of the inherent existence that is projected onto them. Inherent existence is precisely what is not found, just like an inherent snake is what is not found on the rope. This very subtle thing (inherent existence) is what is not there. Due to ignorance we have a pervasive sense that things exist just as they appear. Pleasant objects seem truly desirable, unpleasant objects seem truly threatening, self seems solid and vulnerable, loss seems catastrophic, insults are deeply wounding and death feels like annihilation. This is the most subtle and pernicious form of ignorance, it is the source of primal confusion, the root of vicious attraction and aversion and of all vice. All our afflictions that hold us in cyclic existence are built on this misperception, this ignorance. If we don’t allow our minds to investigate the misperception of inherent existence, since we do not encounter that ignorance we cannot eliminate that great fault.
Ignorance is like wearing sunglasses twenty four hours a day. Everything we see is coloured or shaded. That’s all we have ever known. We have never known that there are things that “lack” being shaded or coloured or lack inherent nature. We’ve never seen that. So what is it that the wise see? The wise see the “lack” of inherent existence. The wise do not have this ignorance. There is no mistaken layer of “this truly exists”. Grasping things as truly existent has ceased and therefore ignorance has ceased. Without grasping there is no foundation, no final substance, no ultimate reality that one finally lands on. The sense of intrinsic grounding disappears. This is the dissolution of clinging. You can’t go any higher.
Self is Not Necessary
We all know the power of visual illusions to trick the mind into perceiving things incorrectly but the most powerful illusion is the sense that we exist inside our heads as an integrated, real, unchanging, coherent individual or self. Buddhist’s endorse the doctrine that there is no such self (ānatta). They claim that the “self” is not simply a false idea but a fundamental illusion. This illusion, the Buddha says, is the underlying basis for suffering (dukkha) and whose dissolution is necessary for liberation.
The illusion of self, Buddhism tells us, is a mistaken interpretation of experience. The root of this “mistaken interpretation” involves mistaking a set of impermanent psychophysical aggregates and processes (material form, sensory perceptions, feelings, emotions and consciousness) for a permanent persisting “self”. The point is that we wrongly assume that these fluid contingent ever changing psychophysical aggregates and processes must necessitate the existence of a fixed static self or “I” that experiences them. But self is simply a convenient label used to account for the sum total of these contingent psychophysical processes. We then mistake the mere label “self” to be an unchanging independent and unitary entity. Somewhat like a background agent that controls my actions, desires and thoughts, the one part of the person that must always exist as long as the person exists. What we intuit or feel, all of what appears to our consciousness we misperceive as mine and controlled by me. This is called the “I” sense, or the phenomenal sense of self. The belief that we have such an inherent self is, for Buddhism, a cognitive illusion.
The purpose for denying a self in Buddhism is based on freeing us from dukkha, often translated as suffering, but which is better understood as a sense of unsatisfactoriness which pervades human life, an existential unease which continues to exist even in moments of pleasure and joy. For Buddhism, the proximate cause of this suffering is craving and attachment, which, in turn, is generated by the belief in self, a self that craves things. Thus, the possibility of freeing ourselves from dukkha requires that we extinguish this belief.
A criterion for something to qualify as a self is that it must be permanent like and subsisting. We think of the self as unchanging that stays the same, that is always there; like the me at age ten is the same me at fifty. But this criterion (permanence) cannot be fulfilled, since, for Buddhism, everything is impermanent, and this includes the body-mind aggregates that constitute the person. None of the aggregates either individually or collectively are permanent. Questions like the following are asked: Is the body a self? Are our sensations and feelings a self? Are our thoughts, intentions, or desires a self? Is our awareness or consciousness of these processes a self? The answer to all these and other similar questions is no, since each of these physical or mental processes is constantly changing and the basic criteria for being a self is that it be permanent, unchanging. The question is then asked, can the totality of these processes be a self. But here again, the answer is no, since the totality of these physical and mental processes are also constantly changing. Furthermore, if there were such a self, it can’t even prevent the disintegration of the very body on which it depends.
Having established the self is not the aggregates, could the self be something beyond the aggregates, something detached that witnesses the aggregates? In traditional Brahmanic (Hindu) thinking, this is the Atman, the true self, something which transcends the aggregates, like a witnessing consciousness. But when we investigate, no such transcendent entity, true self, detached witness, or Atman can be found or observed. Philosopher David Hume noted: “We do not, through introspection, directly observe a self which is separate from the stream of our psychophysical experiences. He says: when he looked within all he ever found were those experiences (sensations, perceptions, seeing, thinking, and so on) each of them fleeting and never an enduring substance or agent that has them.” Therefore, the self as an enduring subject of experience is a mere inference. Such inference argues that while the self cannot be directly found it is something which we must assume in order to account for our psychophysical experiences.
One of the main forms of inference which is thought to establish the existence of a “self” arises from the need to explain the apparent continuity of the stream of psychophysical experiences (form, thoughts, feelings, sights, sounds, etc). If there is no substantive agent or “self” behind the stream, what is it that keeps the stream going? The Buddhist answer is to be found in the doctrine of dependent origination. All phenomena are dependent for their existence on other phenomena in a complex causal chain. For example, the stream of body aggregates is kept going by causes and conditions such as: a healthy diet, water, air, shelter, a stable and safe environment, healthy heart, and so on. In other words, the “stream” is kept going by the causality of the conditions or processes themselves. The body aggregates, as well as the aggregates of seeing, feeling, hearing, thinking, consciousness, heart beating, food digesting and so on(which constitute the stream) can be there and can operate in a very intelligent fashion without there being a “self” who controls and orchestrates the stream. Thus, to explain the stream there is no need to posit a “self” behind the stream that keeps it going, like a self that keeps the heart beating and food digesting. This is absurd. Since the stream of experience can be explained without the necessity to posit an inherent self, we conclude that there is no such self. Such an agent “self” is superfluous, an additional entity for which there is no need.
Just like life functions without a “self” being involved, similarly a car functions even though it is just parts without a “carness” essence. Also, a river flows without the necessity of an essence, like “riverness”. Life functions precisely because things are empty, not because they are inherent. If they were inherent entities they could not function, they would be fixed static and unchanging and would not relate to anything.
The fact that a self or “I” seems to exist and endure over time still seems to be a compelling argument of the existence of a self. For example, memory seems to suggest an enduring persisting entity over time, like the me I remember at age ten is the same me at fifty Yet memory is part of the psychophysical processes. There is no need to posit a separate me that “remembers.” Likewise, there is no need to posit a self or me that perceives, that desires, or that experiences. These psychophysical aggregates perform quite successfully without an agent “me” involved. The need for an observer self is the product of a powerful illusion that mistakes the psychophysical aggregates and processes of a person (form, perceptions, etc) to be an autonomous, independent entity called self.
The important point here is that the psychophysical processes or aggregates are all interrelated and are constantly changing to create the experience of being “me” or “self” in a purely conventional sense. The point of saying that the term “person” or “self” is a conventional designation is that we have, for the sake of simplicity, a single term “self” which refers to the totality of psychophysical aggregates and processes. We then wrongly assume that the use of the term “self” entails the existence of an inherent entity (agent or self) separate and apart from the psychophysical aggregates to which the term refers. Self is simply a label applied to the selfless aggregates.
Part of the stream of psychophysical aggregates and processes is the mind aspect or consciousness or awareness. Hence, one is aware or conscious of life events. But being aware or conscious does not mean that there is a separate self who is aware or who is conscious. When we look for such a self, it can’t be found. What we encounter is sensations, perceptions, consciousness, etc, but no additional entity called “self.”
Philosopher David Hume clarifies this further. “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call my “self”, I always stumble on some particular perception or sensation – hot, cold, wet, hardness, stress, etc. I never can catch my “self” at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.” This analysis by Hume serves well in negating an inherent subjective agent self who perceives. But Prasangika goes further; it negates not only an inherent perceiver but also an inherent act of perceiving and an inherent object that is perceived. All are empty.
Impermanence
We assume there is a permanent essence of “me” that inhabits our bodies throughout our lives and perhaps even beyond. We also tend to see the things around us as permanent, autonomous, independent entities. Whereas, the Buddha demonstrates that all things are impermanent, contingent and constantly changing. Permanence, the Buddha taught, is an illusion that in time can only lead to pain, disappointment and affliction. He says that all phenomena arise dependent or contingent on other things meaning, they are momentary, unstable, temporary, lack any self-nature and are in a state of constant change and decay as the underlying conditions change.
Since everything is in a constant state of flux or change nothing can have a fixed unchanging nature. Yet despite the overwhelming evidence of impermanence we want things to be permanent rather than impermanent. Failing to accept the changing nature of things makes us cling to things, cling to our sense of self, cling to pleasures, cling to our youth and cling to our possessions. To cling to anything is to aim at protecting and preserving it. Yet to make such an attempt is to run smack up against the very nature of everything – their impermanence. Whatever comes to be must pass away. Maybe sometimes we get what we pursue, but it never lasts and we are dissatisfied again. This perpetual seeking and grasping entraps us in ego.
Confusion, born of fear, generates attraction and aversion. Our aversion to that which we find distasteful is a reaction to the fact that it reminds us of our own impermanence and vulnerability. Our aversion is a way of warding off the fear of interdependence (change), of being out of control, of being subject to the natural laws that issue in our ageing, infirmity, and our eventual demise. When one becomes truly aware of the anxiety and suffering entailed in trying to ward off impermanence, this generates the impulse to take refuge and strive for awakening.
Accepting impermanence, the Buddha says, means being transformed (changed) at every moment. Everything is impermanent or in a constant state of change – our body, our emotions and our perceptions. Our anger, our sadness, our happiness, our hatred and our consciousness are also impermanent. And past negative actions do not define us permanently, they are subject to change. So there is no permanence to be guarded against this flux of impermanence.
This impermanence naturally extends to the self. Since the body-mind aggregates are impermanent there certainly can be no permanent “self” abiding within them. In this framework, there is no such thing as a self, so there is certainly no such thing as a self that dies. The illusion of a permanent persisting self, Buddhism says, underlies our fear of death. Buddhists argue that we only fear death because we suffer from an illusion of a persistent self; if the self does not exist, it is irrational to fear the death of self. Therefore fear of death should be alleviated.
The appearing phenomena that we perceive, feel, understand and react to, is nothing but a temporary construction which changes as different conditions change. Recognizing this impermanence we are less likely to cling to possessions, status, or our own self. We cannot only accept, but even embrace and find joy in the impermanence of ourselves and everything around us. And most relevant, impermanence reveals that the most difficult problems we face: fear, suffering, anxiety, grief, loss depression, are also subject to change and thus can be liberated. If you are feeling disappointed, depressed, or anxious, recognize it is impermanent and is thus subject to change so it will soon pass.
Someone once asked Stephen King (the author of Carrie, The Shining, and hundreds of other horror stories) what people are most afraid of and his answer surprised. He didn’t say serial killers, cancer, war, or even death. He said that people’s greatest fear is change (impermanence). Change itself, in all its forms, is what we fear the most.
Its not so much impermanence itself that causes us to suffer, it’s our resistance to it that causes us to freak out. What we resist persists. Giving up our resistance to impermanence enables us to accept that everything will change. To see this truth, that everything is impermanent, disintegrating, and bound to perish, is to turn away from clinging. This does not leave us barren and empty-handed for though we dwell in the midst of aging sickness and death, there is no fear, no tremor or agitation, no dark winds of anxiety, no danger from any quarter. One sees security everywhere.
Words and Language
Although words and language can be deceptive, and are inadequate in describing the ultimate nature of things, nevertheless, they serve a useful purpose conventionally and so should not be discarded. Nagarjuna himself used language. Many teachers, however, start with the assumption that reality cannot be explained in words and tend to disregard words altogether. But such an excuse is accepted too easily and so questioning thinking and enquiring on the path is put to an end.
Language is often associated with conceptuality and duality and so is regarded as deceptive, as in need of transcendence. Indeed language is deceptive and is another aspect of that complex fiction called samsara. But language is also indispensable, more than just a necessary evil. It is a valuable tool to be utilised on the path. Language itself need not be transcended, only deception by it.
The Usefullness of Language:
The goal of Buddhist philosophy is liberation from suffering. But liberation can only be achieved by insight into the ultimate nature of things, their emptiness. But this insight can only be gained through reasoning and hence through language and thought, which can only be interpreted literally at the conventional level.
The whole of Nagarjuna’s philosophy presupposes the perception of conventional reality. Conventional discourse does not posit any claims over and above conventional existence because all that can be shown to exist, exists on the conventional level, which includes language and thought. So language is a useful instrument; it is not an ultimate truth.
We do not have to pass over into silence despite the limits of language, nor refrain from conventional or conceptual thinking. In fact, to explain emptiness, the ultimate nature, one must use words and concepts and explain such things as interdependence, impermanence, etc. And all of these are conventional phenomena. Conventional truth must be utilised.
In searching for the ultimate meaning some schools point to the insignificance of words language and mundane existence, and instead, seek for a reality that transcends words and the mundane. Nagarjuna tries to discourage looking for some transcendental dimension by assuring us that whatever meaning there is to one’s existence must be found within the confines of our human world which once again includes words language and mind. Nagarjuna had no choice but to explain his insight into the nature of reality in philosophical terms, theories and language. Language was a necessary limitation. Nagarjuna’s brilliance lay in his ability to explain things so clearly and then to build such effective safeguards against excessive philosophizing into his system.
Nagarjuna recognizes the conventional nature of language and says that his ultimate category, “emptiness,” should not be understood as anything other than a convention. The term “emptiness” does not stand for a transcendent metaphysical reality whose meaning we can grasp by apprehending the reality behind the name.
Furthermore, there can be no such thing as ultimate truth, a theory describing how things really are independent of our conceptual resources (mind) employed in describing it. All we are left with is conventional truth, commonly accepted practices and conventions. Conventional truth is all we arrive at when viewing the world through our linguistically formed conceptual framework. Conventional truth is all the truth there is. This is an ultimate truth.
The deceptive nature of words and language:
Words and language certainly are deceptive and are quite misleading. Words implicate inherent existence but everything exists conventionally or dependently. Nagarjuna warns: “words do not refer to inherent things.” The Buddha might conform to worldly linguistic usage and say: me, you, house, nirvana, but there are no extra linguistic realities that stand behind these terms or labels. “Words have no essence. Whatever is expressed by them is also without essence”. And how do we know this? By words and language. Words still serve an essential role.
Most philosophers agreed that if words do not correspond to objects, they are thought to be unreliable and false; only if they correspond to distinct objects are they thought to be reliable and true. This claims that the meaning of a word is an extra-linguistic object for which it stands and consequently that a word is meaningful only if it stands for an object. For example, we ordinarily think of language as literal. It cannot be, since, given that all things are empty of intrinsic nature there is no literal underlying reality to which such words might refer or match. Since there are no literal real things all reference to things must be merely figurative. A word is used figuratively with regard to something which is not there. The presence of a name “car” does not mean the reality of the named. A car is so named by taking into account its parts – like wheels, engine, etc – it does not mean that the word car refers to some intrinsic entity. That sentences bear some special relation to an intrinsic object is simply to misunderstand. The pretence language that has to somehow mirror the world or deliver truth is just that, a pretence, a deception to be seen through, not one in which we should participate.
Another problem with words is context. For example, the meaning of the word God may vary anywhere from God being perceived as a loving forgiving father figure to an all-powerful deity who is to be feared and who punishes evil. The most important thing with words is to realize words have no referent, no underlying reality that matches the word.
Nagarjuna’s dialectic aim was to show that words are really empty. But philosophers often fail to see the empty nature of words and believe they stand for some “thing”. Emptiness is a device to cure the disease of conceptual thinking by showing that all things, all words and all linguistic phenomena are empty. This frees one from metaphysical speculation.
In using language one cannot avoid using words that apparently commit one to accepting the presuppositions upon which language rests. It is the task of the Madhyamika philosopher to expose those presuppositions as untenable, to see that language is not grounded in realities, that words used in sentences have no referent as nothing in the world literally exists as it is described in language. Words can liberate or they can bind.
Words and language still serve a useful purpose. There is no way of investigating the world apart from our linguistic and conceptual practices, if only because these practices generate the notion of the ‘world’ and of the ‘objects’ in it in the first place. Our way of investigating the world is inextricably bound up with the linguistic and conceptual framework we happen to employ.
Views
The thrust of Nagarjuna’s teaching is not to create another viewpoint but to negate all viewpoints, thereby destroying all speculation and theorizing. A view, because of its restriction, inclination and determination, carries with it duality, the root of saṁsāra, from which attachment and aversion and all vices spring up.
We cannot help being attached to our view and reject others. But every view contains contradictions. They do not contain an unquestionable truth or reality.
Asserting one’s own viewpoint causes attachment and ill will to arise. There occurs the wish to demonstrate the facts which are accepted by oneself and the desire to defend these facts. There also occurs the desire to debunk what is accepted by others if it is contrary to one’s own view.
The grasping of views is the basis from which attachment, disputations and all discriminating conceptions arise. Attachment to one’s own view will lead to pride and arrogance. Ill will toward the views of others will occur in its turn. Fuelled by inclinations and likes, views produce afflictions.
Far enemies and near enemies:
Grasping a view necessarily creates an opposite (an enemy) to arise and confront that view. The enemy is categorized as either the far enemy or the near enemy. Far enemies are often very obvious because they seem to be the total opposite of the beneficial qualities we are intending to cultivate. For example, the far enemy of good is evil; the far enemy of loving kindness is hatred.
Near enemies, on the other hand, tend to be subtle because they appear similar to the beneficial qualities on the surface. Its only upon closer examination we discover they are not the same. Near enemies often involve elements of insincerity, distortion or even hypocrisy. Take the example friendliness. The far enemy of friendliness is its exact opposite, ill will or hatred, which is unmistakable in ourselves and others. We can spot this aversion fairly quickly and apply the appropriate antidote. The near enemy of friendliness is attachment or partiality – this is harder to spot. We extend our friendliness to those close to us and those we like, but not so much to those not so close and those we don’t like. This is egocentric friendliness or partiality masquerading as loving kindness. It is based on “what I can get out of this” or “what benefits me.
Even compassion has near enemies as well, which includes sympathy, despair and pity, as though others are disadvantaged, unfortunate, separate or “less than” in some way. Sorrow is a near enemy to compassion. It feels like empathy but can paralyze making us feel that we can’t make a difference. The near enemy of equanimity is callousness or indifference or partiality. True equanimity is one that is free of the poisons of attachment and aversion. It embraces those we like and don’t like, the agreeable and the disagreeable, pleasure and pain.
Take another example say, fairness and non-racism. The far enemy, non-fairness and racism, is obvious and easy to spot. The near enemy, partiality, is more deceptive. Our empathy, our fairness and our non-racism is extended only to certain people and groups, so its not true empathy. Grasping a view of fairness and non-racism becomes another object of attachment which generates pride, hostility and aversion. This is the exact opposite to the virtue and empathy we were intending to cultivate.
For example: If we grasp the view fairness, then we will also be preoccupied with unfairness; that is, with avoiding it, ironically, often creating more unfairness in the process. If we grasp the view non-racism, then we will also be preoccupied with racism; that is, with avoiding it, ironically, often creating more racism in the process.
Modern “Woke idealogy” and “Climate change activism” have fallen into the trap of near enemies. By asserting even so called “virtuous” views such as: “good” “justice” “truth” “fairness” “non-racism” often results in creating the exact opposite to such “virtuous” intentions. Prāsaṅgika’s are not “anti-left” or “anti-right.” It’s anti-essentialism, anti-clinging, and anti-moral absolutism. Woke ideology often assumes fixed identities (race, gender, oppressor versus oppressed). Guilt or virtue is perceived as inherent. Prāsaṅgika says: identities are conceptual imputations, not inherent entities. Treating identities as real reifies suffering rather than liberates it. Modern woke ideology often divides people into morally pure versus morally corrupt and uses shaming as a corrective force.
Moralistic virtue is used as a hammer. Fixating on moral purity increases ego-clinging, not compassion. The more one clings to being “on our side,” the more solid the self becomes. Attachment to virtue is still samsaric bondage. This doesn’t mean “ignore injustice.” It means: treat injustice as empty of inherent nature, not an evil essence.
Concerning climate change, Prāsaṅgika does not deny conventional phenomena – rising temperatures, species loss, and so on. But these things, like all other things, depend on causes and conditions so they are not the independent inherent realities they are assumed to be. This avoids slipping into moralized blame: “humanity is a virus” and sacred values, “the planet” is almost conceived to be a divine entity. This kind of discourse reifies both villain and victim, creating despair, guilt, or righteous aggression.
Climate change: Is real enough to act on, empty enough not to despair over. Not a stage for moral self-construction. The problem is not that people care too much but that they care with clinging.
Whatever views we actively pursue – even pursuing noble views or ideals concerning injustices, inequality, unfairness, racism, and so on – if we pursue such ideals from a place of anger or hatred or from an egocentric point of view where the primary goal is to benefit me, such pursuit serves only to feed the enemies of anger, hatred, ego, pride, arrogance, contention and confusion.
The remedy to enemies, near and far, the Buddha tells us, is to see all things, all viewpoints, as empty. When views are seen as empty then attachment to what is desirable, aversion to what is undesirable, attachment to views and attachment to disputation can also be eliminated. One comes to a state of freedom, for nothing has been established as “one’s own position.”
Nāgārjuna had written that he has no thesis to advance, nor hold any position or have any viewpoint of his own. He had also written that he apprehends no objects at all and therefore has no need to affirm or deny anything. He makes no claims that anything exists (is) or does not exist (is not), or that things are true or false. He does not put forward counter positions in opposition to the claims of other philosophers rather he merely exposes the absurdity or contradiction implied in an inherent view.
“By taking any viewpoint whatsoever you will be snatched by the cunning snake of the afflictions. Those whose minds have no viewpoint will not be caught.”
Anatta (Not-Self)
What is the self? The self is often seen as a background agent, as essentially unchanging, a sense of ownership, a centre or first person perspective, or an essence that inhabits our body throughout our lives. And we may believe that at death this essence continues to exist in some form, either in an afterlife or by transmigrating to a new body to live another life. Yet, despite the fact that our mind and body is in a state of constant change or flux, we are habituated to believe in an essential core subject self that stays the same that persists from childhood through old age. “I exist to the extent that my self exists.” For in countless ways this view creates the need to protect and defend this self against the threat of others, thus creating undue conflict, fear and suffering. In short, to this false view can be traced all the evil in the world.
Buddhist philosophers have offered a different, surprising answer. There is no persisting self, nothing about us that remains the same at all times. This view regards self or me as a continuously changing array of five psycho-physical aggregates (the physical body, sensation, perception, intellect, and consciousness) without an inner core. If we look, we do not find such an inner core. This denial of an intrinsic self or core nature is known as anattā or not-self.
Anattā doesn’t deny you exist, or deny you have a personality, or imply you shouldn’t have an “ego.” It does not claim that there are no human beings or that the person who delivers your mail is really a robot or a ghost. Rather, anattā is a denial that your existence is some sort of deep special fact, a unified persisting being, separate-unto-itself, and unchanging.
Specifically we think that our self has some sort of essence. The essence of something is its core defining characteristic without which the thing could not exist. If our self has an essence, then this essence is what makes us, us. If you lose your essence, there is no longer any you. But as long as your essence exists – whether that essence is a body, a soul, a mental state, or something else – you exist.
According to anattā, the idea of an essential existing self is mistaken. Rather, the self is just the collection of constantly changing features, like the physical body and the sensations and perceptions. There is nothing else about us, nothing permanent that persists through these changes.
In any given moment or succession of moments we can observe an ever-changing flux of sensations, sounds, smells, thoughts, images, memories, but we don’t observe a self. Insight reveals a world of sense objects and a process of thoughts and feelings, but nothing solid we can call a self.
The no-self theorists argued that our sensations never include a distinct sensation of the self. Philosopher David Hume (18th cent) says we experience particular sensations, like the taste of a carrot or the sound of thunder or the warmth of a fire. But Hume and the no-self theorists claim that we only ever experience these particular states or sensations, we do not have an additional experience of the self on top of these other experiences.
He writes: ”For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch my “self” at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.”
The simple statement “I see”, “I think”, “I am happy” implies an I or me that sees, that thinks, and so on. It is so interwoven into our thinking about ourselves that it is taken for granted. Language is used to reinforce such an I. But when looked for it can’t be found.
Buddhism eliminates the notion of subjectivity by maintaining that the body-mind aggregates do not amount to a personal self, just like the aggregates of a coil of rope in a dim area do not amount to a snake. The self is the manifestation of ignorance; it appears as long as it is not examined. It does not exist in and of itself. It is no more than a misconception and misconceptions are subject to correction.
Objects
We live in illusion. The world does not exist the way it appears. Appearances are deceptive. Our sensory, cognitive process delivers a view of life as a landscape of independent objects. There is a felt sense that things are somehow really there, solid, independent, separate from us and somehow casting themselves towards us. Things seem to be self-sufficient and independent. Language is involved in this reification, deepening the sense of an independent identity in what is named.
Our experience of the world is populated with a wide range of phenomena – physical objects, emotions and people – all of which appear to be substantial entities that exist in a very real sense. For example, I am here, you are there, the tree is over there, this is my body, etc. The relationships between these things seem clear; we maintain rigid distinctions between them, and we conceive of them as separate and independent phenomena, each deserving its own ground. This form of realism is founded on the assumption that all phenomena possess at their core some essence, some immutable substance in which the phenomena’s intrinsic identity is contained and which serves as the bearer of whatever attributes the phenomena displays.
This assumption is understood in Buddhist thought as the deepest and most tenacious delusion to plague the human mind. This misconception is hard-wired into us. Both external and internal phenomena seem real, solid and substantial. They deceptively appear to have their own independent natures, yet, when we search for the real state of their existence, their essence, we find that all phenomena, everything from galaxies to atoms, to people and their thoughts and suffering are ultimately empty of the identities we ascribe to them. There are no core natures hiding behind these things, like “weather” hiding behind wind blowing and sun shining, or like “self” hiding behind the body-mind aggregates. Phenomena do not exist as independent entities that can be isolated but rather as momentary forms whose existence is entirely dependent on their relationships to other phenomena.
For example, a tree depends for its existence on a seed, water, soil, sunlight; on its parts, like branches; and on conceptual imputation. Since the tree exists dependently we can say that it is empty of independent existence or inherent existence, which explains why we can’t find such an inherent tree. Inherent existence has been falsely foisted onto the mere aggregates of the tree and it is precisely this false sense of inherent existence (ignorance) that is the target to be refuted. Failure to investigate the misperception of inherent existence means we do not directly encounter that ignorance and so we cannot eliminate that great fault. To see through the deception of inherent existence is critical because it is the root error that leads to the endless grasping and aversion that underlies all suffering.
Inherent existence is exactly what things lack. Nothing can ever be isolated and identified as a separate distinct thing. For example, there is no fixed boundary between the existence of a seed, the tree to which it gives rise, a piece of wood from that tree, and a table fashioned therefrom. Any designated entity is but an arbitrary stage carved out of a vast continuum of interdependent phenomena. And we cannot say at what stage a thing becomes a thing. For example, take a tree and begin to pluck off leaves and saw off branches. So when in our process of sawing off the branches does the tree stop being a tree? The difficulty in pin-pointing an essence which we can unequivocally identify as “treeness” is one reason for believing there is no such essence to begin with. This implies that what we take to be things that exist in their own right are actually empty of any such inherent existence. In fact, if things did have inherent existence, the more they are scrutinised the clearer they would become. But as the example of the tree shows, the opposite seems to be the case, namely, the more something is analysed, the vaguer it gets, until it is lost altogether.
Perceiving things in terms of inherent existence creates great ontological problems. This is not surprising because inherent entities are not real. The seed and sprout example illustrates this point. If we perceive an inherent seed producing an inherent sprout at what point does the seed become a sprout? No one can say. This is so because there are no inherent entities called seed or sprout to begin with. They are designated by label. When the label “seed” is no longer a valid basis for seed the label “sprout” is imputed and that object is perceived to be a sprout.
Concluding remarks:
Sentient beings are habituated by a profound delusion that causes them to experience the world in a false and distorted way. This delusion is a “pervasive sense” that the appearing phenomena are solid inherent entities and exist just as they appear. This “addiction” is what is to be seen-through and abandoned.
Our coming to this realization has profound implications for us. As our perception of inherent existence falls away, we begin to regard ourselves as contingent beings inextricable from a reality that we shape and which in turn shapes us, rather than as beings that are inherent, static, unchanging and detached from everything else.
Only by jettisoning the deeply ingrained tendency to search for some ‘essential’ self-existent nature to things can we find liberation. This obsessive delusion we have in thinking that we are dealing with self-existing real entities is ignorance as all we really have is a construction of our mind.
Self-existence: substantial and nondependent. Dependent arising: insubstantial and of dependent nature. How, without contradiction, could these two ever come together?
The Existence of God
Madhyamaka’s deny anything self-existing, transcendent, noumenal, creator, or God. There is no room for an inherently existing creator or God in Madhyamaka’s argument for the emptiness of all things. Besides, on analysis no inherently existing creator or God can be found empirically, logically or by fact.
Madhyamaka’s analysis simply points out absurdities or contradictions. Consider, for example, the proposition “whether or not God exists”. If God created all things, then who created God? Not God himself because nothing can create itself. Also, if God was created by “another”, God would not be self-existent. Moreover, if God had a cause and came from another then the burden of proof of the existence of God is transferred in its entirety to this other. Then this other would come from still another. There would be an infinite regress.
The assumption that God exists is also the fallacy of “begging the question” meaning, that an argument smuggles its conclusion in among its premises. Here is a stock example. “Of course God exist, it says so in the Bible. And everything in the Bible is true since it is the word of God.” This argument begs the question by including a premise “the Bible is the word of God” that presupposes the truth that “God exists”. It is fallacious because you can’t prove that the conclusion, “God exists”, is true by using evidence that assumes it is true. Consider another assumption. The thought arises “What an incredible universe, it must have been made by an incredible maker hence it was created by God.” Such an assumption is yet to be proven; it is not fact but fiction. Many religions are based on the assumption of Gods existence whereas, Madhyamaka’s do not assume God’s existence and do not believe the assumption of an “Absolute” is necessary for wisdom.
Madhyamaka’s denial of theism does not entail atheism. For Madhyamaka’s, if theism is unintelligible, then so is atheism. If the assertion that there is a God is non-sensical then the atheist’s assertion that there is no God is equally non-sensical. When the existence of God is not established, the non-existence of God is also not established because for the non-existence of God to be established the existence of God must first be established, which it is not. To clarify this statement, by positing non-existence of God we indirectly affirm the existence of God because to affirm the non-existence of God you have to assume the quality of the existence of God in the first place. Also, non-existence of God is assumed to be an existent entity.
In ruling out atheism as well as theism, Madhyamaka’s position may seem to be agnostic. In a sense this is true because both Madhyamaka and the agnostic refrain from assertion. However, in the agnostic view we do not know whether or not God exists. It is an attitude of doubt and despair, but for Madhyamaka’s they do know that the question of whether or not God exists is unintelligible. It is an attitude of conviction and certainty. Further, it is characteristic of agnostics to hold that the existence of God is possible; there is no good reason either to believe or disbelieve. But this is a stance of uncertainty. But according to Madhyamaka’s, all statements about the existence of God are unintelligible, so then it is unintelligible to doubt as well as to affirm.
Madhyamaka’s rejection of the concept of a noumenon or God does not imply that they accepted the empirical as real or ultimate. Science sometimes accepts the empirical as ultimate. Empirical reality, like everything else, is also empty, not real, not something we can point to and say “this is ultimate truth.” For Madhyamaka’s “empirical reality” would be another metaphysics and is thus ruled out.
Finally, the question: “Who created the world?” This is not a genuine question. We assume it is a “who” (an entity) that “creates” the world. We assume that the world is “created,” and so we assume that there is also a “Creator.” The idea itself of a Creator or of a Source is highly problematic. What would be the source of such a Source?
The Two Truths
The Two Truths are: the conventional and the ultimate. Conventional truth refers to our everyday perception and understanding of things such as, the sky is blue, fire burns, dark clouds foreshadow rain and an object with four legs and a top is a table. The ultimate truth is the emptiness of those things. The ultimate truth, of say the table, is the emptiness of the table.
Ultimate is the perception of the empty nature of phenomena. Buddha’s know incorrigibly that all the elements of experience are dependent upon one another and upon conceptual designation and are therefore empty of independent nature. This is the perception of emptiness and thus the perception of ultimate truth.
Emptiness is the ultimate nature of the table; emptiness is the ultimate nature of a person; emptiness is the ultimate nature of anxiety, of suffering of death, and of each and every thing that is labelled. This is so because when one searches deeply it fails to find any core nature or essence in the table. Hence, the table is empty, empty of essence or core nature.
Emptiness is an absence, a negation of inherent reality, no a negation of conventional. When inherent existence is negated conventional images do not then disappear but no longer deceive. There is no need to withdraw from objects for they are directly and immediately recognized as empty. Whatever form appears, that is empty; whatever is empty, that appears as form.
The ultimate truth is that phenomena do not arise or cease or come into being. The conventional transactional truth, on the other hand, is that things do come into being and that their arising is conditioned. Perceived this way, conventional truth can be a kind of screen, an obstacle that stands in the way of seeing the ultimate truth, their emptiness.
The transcendence of primal confusion is not the transcendence of the conventional but the transcendence of deception by it. Ultimately, since all phenomena, even ultimate truth, exist only conventionally, conventional truth is therefore all the truth there is. This is an ultimate truth! To deprecate the conventional and favour the ultimate is to fail to see the empty nature of both.
The direct perception of emptiness depends upon conventional phenomena to discover that they are empty. The emptiness of the table (its ultimate truth) depends on the table. No table, no ultimate. Conventional truth is the ladder by which the deceptive structure of its own conceptuality is ultimately undermined. The conventional table provides the platform necessary to subsequently perceive the ultimate emptiness of the table. Ultimate truth is not more than phenomenal emptiness. If ultimate truth was the entire truth then nothing could be said to exist at all as all there would be was an absence, a negation. This would take us to the affliction of nihilism. The object of negation is only the false sense of inherent existence that is projected onto the conventional, not the conventional itself. Ultimate truth is a negation, a negation of inherent existence. It is not something affirming, something positive, because this implies an existent “thing”.
“If we don’t negate inherent existence we have not negated enough. If we negate the conventional we have negated too much.”
There are not two spheres of reality, one ultimate and one conventional, but two faces of the same world. There is only one world, the world of our everyday conventional experience. Everything, including this written thesis, has only nominal truth. As soon as anything is identified it can only be conventional. Conventional reality or dependently arisen reality is the only reality there is. There are no inherent independent entities in existence – including the self. The self is purely conventional, dependently arisen, and designated by label. It is the conventional self that gets up in the morning, who goes to the store, who thinks, who remembers, who asks questions, who interacts, who practices and who attains enlightenment.
It appears there are people, chairs, cats, a Buddha and birth and death, and free will. These are conventional truths. As the myriad things are empty of an abiding self-nature, there are no intrinsic people, chairs, cats, a Buddha, birth and death, or free will. These are ultimate truths. The ultimate truth is that everything is empty, that nothing is ultimately real, not even emptiness. It too is only conventionally real. To be dependently originated, to exist in dependence on conditions in relation to other things, and to have an identity dependent on conceptual designation is what it is to be empty. When we consider things carefully, that is how everything is.
Since all things are empty, ultimate reality is just as empty as conventional reality. In this sense, ultimate reality is hence no different to conventional reality. Both are empty. The ultimate is what the conventional really is; the conventional is the way the ultimate appears. And so the two truths, the world of dependent arising and its emptiness are not different, they are not two different sets of reality posited against each other. One cannot find any distinctions; even the distinction of samsara and nirvana. Samsara is simply nirvana seen without reification, without attachment, without delusion.
Making distinctions makes dual. To take emptiness as ultimately real and everything else as merely conventional would create an unrepairable dualism. Emptiness would be reified as privileged, and conventional reality would be deprecated as a second-class existence or delusion. We would then be stuck with an inaccessible real world; and a delusory world we are condemned to inhabit.
Empty Logic
Emptiness is used to describe the arisen existents “the empty.” Only if these things are seen as “empty” can everything be pertinent, that is, can one formulate coherent and valid thoughts about reality. Emptiness is comprehensive encompassing all other concepts by virtue of showing how any description of reality must ultimately itself be negated and thus be empty. Only if one includes the notion of “emptiness” in one’s worldview can one’s theory be relevant. As a method of negation emptiness does not merely refute false concepts but it refutes them so comprehensively that the ball is in the opponent’s court, so to speak. After emptiness has shown the falsity of wrong views, like essence and self-nature, its job is done and negation itself must be negated.
Emptiness is just the description of the way things are, that is, impermanent and without essences or self-natures. It is only the opposites of emptiness that are concepts. That is, metaphysical theories like self-nature, permanence, the soul, Atman, Brahman, or God, are concepts that require definition and defending by those who hold them. Emptiness requires no defending.
Emptiness is empirically and logically evident in the sense that inherent things can’t be found when looked for. Emptiness is not a “thing” which can be defined and perceived, rather, it is a lack or absence of self-nature or essence in things. An awareness of this absence is referred to as the perception of emptiness.
“Emptiness is indirectly perceived by virtue of inherent things not being perceived.”
“The nature of reality is dependently arisen so it is empty of independent nature. This is attested to by the Buddha, by observation, and by logic. A thing that is not dependently arisen or not empty is not evident.”
All phenomena are empty of inherent nature but exist conventionally and dependently. To say something exists independently or inherently having a permanent essence would mean nothing could interact, change or cease. Everything would be eternal. The very concept of an inherent entity at all is incoherent. And furthermore if inherent existence of an object is not established in this world how can it be established in something “other” than this world, like a ghost, a U.F.O or an alien? There may be appearances of such but such appearances are empty of inherent existence, just like appearances of this world are empty.
The Buddha charges that it is only the fact that things do not have an immutable essence (empty) that makes them able to change, interact and condition new events. It is also only the fact that the defilements and suffering are empty of self-nature that makes them susceptible to eradication. If there were self-nature in things then defilements would be eternal and suffering inescapable. Apart from emptiness the phenomenal world would not be possible. So emptiness is not nihilism but life affirming.
One might ask: “if all things are empty how can one fulfil one’s hopes and desires?” The Buddha replies. When one truly comprehends emptiness one ceases to cling to desires for the things one would desire are shown to be empty and thus not desirable. One would have an incentive to appease suffering, for, being empty, suffering is susceptible to change and hence, can be vanquished.
Emptiness demonstrates relativity and provides a sort of anti-theory on which the rational faculty can focus. It is precisely because things depend for their existence on other things and are therefore empty of independent nature that makes possible the phenomenal world. The whole of Nagarjuna’s philosophy presupposes the perception of everyday things and their phenomenal reality.
Phenomena themselves are not a problem, they are empty, the problem is grasping at them as inherent entities. We are positively attached to things, through attraction, or negatively attached to them, through aversion. We have expectations that result in disappointment, frustration and pain when those attachments are inevitably disrupted or lost. We are unhappy because we desire that the world be something that it is not.
Desire is one of the chief causes of bondage. Desiring pleasure, the mind reifies the apparently pleasurable things in the hope of thereby possessing them and preventing them from ceasing. Fearing death, the individual reifies the apparent existence of life itself. We wrongly believe that the things we desire are permanent or real, we become attached to them, and then we suffer when they reveal their impermanence or transience. Desires are, indirectly, the cause of bondage. Desires are always desires for some “thing” and if the object of the desire is subject to flux, then the desire will, sooner or later, be frustrated. “Desire, know I thy root.”
Suffering basically comes down to misperception: We enjoy something because we find it pleasurable, insofar as it makes us fleetingly happy, and we subsequently cultivate attachment to the pleasure, and also to the object. Owing to our attachment to this pleasure and the object of pleasure we then try to replicate and reproduce this pleasure; pleasure which we have already said is necessarily fleeting and impermanent, it does not last. So we are dissatisfied; the world never gives us what we want. If it did there would be no need for the Buddha’s message. All of our needless miseries arise because we continue to desire things that are in fact completely undesirable. When desires cease, attachment loses its grip, things become lighter, less solid, less threatening, less possessable. This is the antidote to ignorance. What had previously appeared as samsara now appears as nirvana.
Non-origination
Non-origination does not imply absolute non-existence, nihilism or that nothing matters. Conventional existents continue to arise and their arising is not denied, only their status as inherent entities. So non-origination means: “No phenomenon has ever arisen with intrinsic nature.” It does not mean: “No phenomenon has ever appeared conventionally.” The universe, the cosmos and galaxies does arise conventionally and its conventional reality is not denied, but it does not arise intrinsically or inherently as something solid and independent. That appearance is mistaken. Its intrinsic nature is exactly what is not found when searched for. So non-origination means the non-origination of intrinsic nature.
“Neither from itself nor from another, nor from both, nor without a cause does anything whatever anywhere arise intrinsically”. Nagarjuna.
The lack of intrinsic nature is well explained by the metaphors of a mirage of a “lake” in the desert and a coil of rope mistaken as a snake. The lake and the snake never arose intrinsically in the first place. But if we are taken in by the appearance of such we may be prompted to ask: How wide is the lake? How deep is it? Is the snake poisonous, and so on? Many of our questions are like this. Questions such as: “Who made the world?” “How do we contact God?” “What happens after we die?” “Who am I?” are based on unfounded suppositions that things do inherently exist; that a world intrinsically exists; that God intrinsically exists; that death intrinsically exists; and that there is an intrinsic “I” that exists and that can be found.
Phenomena do not come into existence on their own but as a result of the coming together of conditions and when there are no conditions they do not arise. Even at the time when they appear, they appear whilst lacking intrinsic nature. For example, fire comes into existence dependent on conditions like: fuel, oxygen and a spark. So no actual independent or intrinsic entity called fire arises even while it is manifesting and burning our finger because fire depends on other things, it does not have its own nature.
“Whatever arises dependent upon something does not arise essentially or intrinsically”.
“What originates dependently is unoriginated” Nagarjuna
“The perceiving and conceptual faculties of the individual are illuminated, not by the arising and ceasing of things, but by their non-arising and non-ceasing.”
When we see something arise we are prompted to wonder “what was its cause” as if there exists an intrinsic “cause” that causes things to come into existence? But when we look for an intrinsic “cause” it cannot be substantiated. Therefore, an actual intrinsic arising of anything at all cannot be established. Such arising is like the arising of things in a dream. And since intrinsic arising cannot be established, neither can intrinsic ceasing be established because arising is the basis of ceasing. Yet, conventionally things do not disappear. Conventionally there appears mountains, rivers, people, arising and ceasing but ultimately these things lack intrinsic nature or essence. When looked for intrinsic nature is precisely what is not there, what has not ever come into existence, or ceased. What does this say of an intrinsic genesis or a beginning, or of an intrinsic God as the creator, or the Big Bang theory, or what happens to us after we die, or end time apocalyptic theories? On analysis, when all phenomena are seen to lack intrinsic nature, what can be gained and what can be lost? Who will be honoured or despised? Who will really die here? From where can our problems, confusion or suffering appear from? How can anything be taken seriously enough to invite reactions?
The idea is to fail to find intrinsic nature or any core or essence which makes a thing that ‘thing’ because when we “fail” to find that essence we have the potential to realize that there never has been an intrinsic “thing” in the first place, nothing intrinsically being created or destroyed, nothing coming or going, nothing actually ‘there’… yet appearances still manifest conventionally as dependent arising. The object of negation therefore is not the conventional but rather the false idea of inherent existence that is projected onto the conventional.
“Not anything has ever actually come into existence, nor goes out of it. What lacks origination, by itself, lacks existence or emergence; and having lacked emergence, it lacks disappearance, or destruction or non-existence”. Chandrakirti.
Concluding remarks:
Appearances can be deceptive. Things appear in one way (intrinsically) but exist in another (they are absent of intrinsic nature). A mirage appears to be an intrinsic lake when it is actually the absence of a lake. A coil of rope appears to be an intrinsic snake when it is actually the absence of a snake. What seems to be intrinsically “existent” is actually an absence of intrinsic existence. What seems to be an intrinsic “self” is actually an absence of an intrinsic “self”. What seems to be intrinsic Buddhahood is actually an absence of intrinsic Buddhahood. (Lin-chi famously said, “If you meet a Buddha on the road, kill that Buddha.” To conceive a Buddha (as an intrinsic entity) is to be obstructed by that Buddha). It is the realization of this “absence” of intrinsic nature in things that is the key to liberation. This absence (emptiness) is indirectly perceived by virtue of intrinsic things not being perceived. The goal then (ultimate analysis) is not in “finding” but rather in “failing to find”.
There is that sphere wherein is neither earth nor water, nor fire nor air, neither the sphere of infinite space nor of infinite consciousness nor of nothingness, nor of ideation nor non ideation, where there is neither this world nor a world beyond nor both together, nor moon, nor sun. I say, “it” neither exists or does not exist; neither is or is not; neither we see it or don’t see it; neither we know it or don’t know it, It has neither duration nor decay; there is neither beginning nor establishment; there is no result and no cause; there is neither coming from it or going to it. This verily is the end of suffering.
Dogen’s Painted Rice cakes
The great Zen Master Dogen articulates. Everything is groundless empty and interdependent. Emptiness goes all the way down: the emptiness of self and objects, the emptiness of consciousness, the emptiness of Brahman, the emptiness of awareness, the emptiness of Buddha-nature, the emptiness of God, and even the emptiness of emptiness itself. It is therefore impossible to specify an inherent underlying reality upon which anything finally depends. We may think there must be a rock bottom reality or an intrinsic ultimate truth somewhere but when we look for it, Dogen reminds us, we will never find it. Ultimate reality, like conventional reality, is also dependently arisen (it depends on the label ultimate reality and someone labelling) and therefore is empty of intrinsic nature. Dogen is not painting a bleak picture he is removing the scales of a lifetime of ignorance.
What all this means is that there is only dependently arisen reality or conventional reality (things arising dependent on other things). Conventional truth is all we arrive at when viewing the world through our linguistically formed conceptual framework. But we should be wary of denigrating conventional reality. There is no way of investigating the world apart from our linguistic and conceptual practices if only because these practices generate the notion of the ‘world’ and of the ‘objects’ in it in the first place. Our way of investigating the world is inextricably bound up with the linguistic and conceptual framework we happen to employ. Language is part of that framework. It is not an obstacle on the path.
Dogen advises do not seek reality beyond the conventional. Enlightenment is not outside the conventional. Conventional truth is not a second-rate reality, it is the only reality there is. There is no need to search for something superior to the conventional; such as something transcendent or ultimate. Dogen, whose talk entitled “Gabyo” or “Picture of a Rice Cake”, explains this. He likens our experience to encountering a painted rice cake, the only experience we could possibly have, not a real rice cake.
Everything is painted, meaning everything is dependently arisen subject to conditions, change, perceptions and karmic conditioning. Nothing is unpainted. There is not a single activity that is not painted. Life and death, their comings and goings, are all painted pictures; all the things in the world, the empty sky, supreme enlightenment and ultimate reality itself, there is nothing whatsoever that is not a painted picture, a painted rice cake. The ultimate is no less painted than the conventional forms that we experience. The conventional is not inferior to the ultimate. Dogen is rejecting the idea that truth must hang on some ultimate reality, on some “unpainted” rice cake.
This radical teaching is a much-needed corrective to an experience or insight of “oneness” or “direct experience” as a privileging of some absolute (unpainted) state. Dogen’s underlying message is that conventional truth (painted rice cakes) and ultimate truth (unpainted rice cakes) are completely interdependent. Ultimate truth is just as empty as conventional truth so there is no duality between them. All of his teachings manifest this level of appreciation of “the non-duality” of everything. Whether we are talking about the absolute and relative, heaven and earth, good and evil, man and woman, nirvana or samsara; the same applies. The painted picture is reality, reality is the painted picture. Nothing is hidden, all is painted. We would all benefit from attending to our painting (the conventional) and not be distracted by a craving for the unpainted (the ultimate). In this way, all rice cakes actualized right now are nothing but a painted rice cake. If you look for some other kind of rice cake (an unpainted one) you will never find it, you will never grasp it.
As the entire world and all phenomena are a painting (dependently arisen) human existence appears from a painting and Buddha ancestors are actualized from a painting. Since this is so, there is no remedy for satisfying hunger other than a painted rice cake. (There are only painted rice cakes; none are unpainted). There is no satisfaction other than painted satisfaction. In fact, satisfying hunger, not satisfying hunger, cannot be attained or spoken of without painted hunger. For now, study all of these as a painted rice cake. To enact this ability is to actualize the painting of enlightenment.
No Beginning or End
The process of dependently arising phenomena is beginningless. There is no first cause (beginning) because every factor is dependent on some other factor. If it had a beginning then there would be one thing which came first which thing would then be the originating cause of the entire subsequent chain. It is not that a beginning is hidden in immemorial time, or hidden by a transcendent power, rather, a beginning (something that does not depend on anything else) is simply inconceivable. And without a beginning, neither can there be said to be an end. This is why nothing truly begins or ends, why nothing is born and nothing dies. When asked about the beginning, The Great Sage said that “nothing is known of it”.
Whatever our situation in the world it has its own conditions and those conditions had to have their own conditions, and so on, because nothing in the cycle of existence occurs without causes and conditions to bring it into being. We can therefore never find an “original cause” that would constitute the beginning of cyclic existence because if there were one it would have arisen without conditions itself, which is impossible. Nowhere is there a single original cause (the big bang, God, Brahman, etc) that has the power to produce everything. Thus, there was no actual point when the world began and how could something that never began ever end? And how could there be any period of time in the middle? Since it has neither beginning middle, nor end, the world does not truly exist. It is like what takes place in a dream.
The Buddha spurned discussions of beginning and end because ultimate beginnings and ends are not evident and hence inconceivable. In fact, time itself cannot be established. Time is not a unitary concept but is divided into three components – past, present and future. Past, present and future time, again, are devoid of independent or inherent reality inasmuch as they exist only in dependence on each other. An inherent “present moment” is also impossible since it is defined in dependence on a past and future. Hence time is devoid of objective reality. Furthermore, time cannot be considered to be a self-existing thing that is somehow not dependent on other existing objects. The timespan or age of a tree, for instance, depends on the tree. So time itself cannot be independent. It is defined by its relation to such objects. Disassociated from phenomena, time is impossible. Since phenomena do not exist ultimately or inherently therefore time too does not exist inherently. And time is not a self-existing substratum or arena in which equally independent things endure or independent events occur. Since time lacks self-nature or reality there is no intrinsic time when one was born, endures, and when one dies.
As to an ultimate beginning or end, the Buddha stated that it is not evident and hence inconceivable. Such a view presupposes one can talk coherently about the beginning or end of the world, or beginning or end of personal existence, or to be able to speak of a future time where nothing exists, or of the end of time, or of a definite moment when the self ceases to exist whereas before it had existed.
Since all things arise dependently (they depend for their existence on other things) they cannot have their own intrinsic nature so they don’t truly arise. Therefore, nothing truly or intrinsically arises or is born in the first place. And what is not born cannot cease or die. Since birth and death do not exist intrinsically therefore one can in no way speak of origins or ends, of effect and cause, or of the entire life process itself. What does this say of the existence of former (antecedent states) such as past lives, and so on; and to the existence of later subsequent states, such as future lives, reincarnation, heaven, hell, and so on? Furthermore, who is it that is born and dies, who is it that goes to heaven or that reincarnates?
Finally, if birth and death are real intrinsic entities and if birth preceded the entity death, then there would be a birth without old age and death and all arisen things would be immortal. And if birth and death were separate entities then no born things will die and the things that die will never have been born.
Because birth and death do not exist on their own one can in no way speak of origins or ends, the prior and posterior.
Existence and Nonexistence
For a thing to exist inherently is for it to exist independently without help from anything else. To affirm inherent existence (eternalism or essentialism) is to affirm that things are really, truly, objectively there. To really be there, it would never have been able to come into existence or pass out of existence. It would then be unable to change or respond to conditions. It would be fixed and frozen and unrelated to other things. On the other hand, for a thing to be inherently non-existent (which assumes something existent can become non-existent) is for it to not exist in any sense at all; not even conventionally or dependently. To deny existence altogether is to fall to the extreme of nihilism. All concepts are based on these two, existence or not existence.
Things neither absolutely exist nor absolutely do not exist. If things existed absolutely they would have their own nature and would not be dependent upon causal conditions, which is absurd. And if things were absolutely non-existent, there would be no change or motion in the universe, yet myriad things are perceived to arise, change and move. Buddhism avoids both extremes.
A popular theory is that something non-existent can turn into something existent. For example, you might think that prior to a sprout shooting it was non-existent but due to causes, such as a seed, water, and soil, it turns into something existent, a sprout. It is not so. Since existent and non-existent are mutually contradictory, they could never combine on the basis of a single entity. There are no phenomena that were formerly non-existent and later changed into something existent; or that were existent and later changed into something non-existent. Thus, there is neither coming into existence nor going out of existence (cessation). Therefore, this entire world does not arise or cease and neither do the people in it arise and cease. So who is it that is born and dies?
Conventionally effects appear based on causes. For example, when the conditions of fuel, oxygen and a spark come together then fire comes to exist. When oxygen is removed, fire does not exist. The mind relates these two stages to one another and then there is the conceptual statement: “Initially, before the conditions of fuel, oxygen and a spark come together, fire did not exist, but now, after the conditions have come together, fire has arisen and exists.” Conventionally we can say that when conditions are favourable (fuel and oxygen) fire exists and when conditions are unfavourable (no oxygen) fire does not exist. But there are no non-existent phenomena whatsoever that transform into existent ones, nor existent phenomena that transform into non-existent. Existent and non-existent phenomena are conceptual fabrications.
We can apply this understanding to the existence of former (antecedence) states, such as past lives, and so on; and to the existence of later (subsequence) states, such as future lives, reincarnation, heaven, and so on. Let us explain. When favourable conditions come together, a phenomenon appears; when those conditions cease, so does the phenomenon cease. There is no speculation of an antecedent state (past life) nor a subsequent state (reincarnation) nor the transformation of something existent into something non-existent or something non-existent into existent, or of any going or coming, arising or ceasing, increasing or decreasing. When it is known that arising enduring and disintegrating are devoid of inherent existence it will be understood that “existing” and “non-existing” are also devoid of inherent existence. The arising of effects is simply the undeceiving appearance of dependent origination and when analyzed as to whether it is existent or non-existent, it is not established in any way whatsoever.
For example, seeing the mirage of an oasis in the desert you would be elated that there is water which is not far away. Upon getting closer you would realize that the oasis is just a mirage and it would dissipate. It is not that the “lake” once existed before and then ceases to exist; there never was an oasis. Upon realizing that, the notions of existence and non-existence cannot actually apply to anything. The oasis was a figment of confusion, a hallucination. It now cannot possibly exist or not exist.
When we recognize that the oasis is a mirage, the misconception of an oasis is immediately liberated and it is known there never was an actual oasis in the very beginning. This is not a negation of something that once existed before and then ceases to exist by negation. Rather, the oasis never existed in the first place. All things are like that. They appear dependent on conditions and abide as long as those conditions remain.
Cause and Effect
Conventionally we say that a seed (the cause) produces a tree (the effect); or that parents are the cause of a child; or that the cause germs results in the effect sickness; or the cause of hot weather results in dehydration. Nagarjuna does not refute conventional cause and effect only inherent cause and effect. That is, that an inherent independent real seed causes or produces an inherent independent real tree. He points out that it is impossible to explain the relationship between a cause and an effect and to relate inherent entities. Inherent entities, for one thing, cannot change, whereas cause and effect is all about change.
For a real intrinsic effect to come into existence from a real intrinsic cause then it must be either: self-caused; caused by another; caused by both of these; or uncaused. The first two are the most common. Nararjuna refutes each of these positions as being absurd and contradictory and argues that inherent causal production is really impossible. The method is called the “Catuskoti” or “Tetralemma.”
“Neither from itself, nor from another, nor from both, nor without a cause, does anything, whatever, anywhere arise.” Nagarjuna.
Self-causation:
Once something is self-caused it should be already there so arising is pointless. Saying something arose from itself destroys the language of cause and effect. And something self-caused means nothing new has occurred, there is no change, which defeats the very idea of cause and effect. Also, if a thing causes itself it is the subject and the object at the same time; which is impossible. And further still, if something (a tree) could arise from itself it would not need an environment, a seed, sunlight, soil, water, and so on.
Other causation:
How can anything be produced from something that it is inherently different and separate from? That would be magic. The relationship is lost, then anything could be produced from anything, cause and effect lose all meaning. A cow might arise from a horse. Further, we might ask, what caused the cause?
The third option is a contradiction, and the fourth means something is produced by no cause, which is absurd.
Since causal relations cannot be established, it makes no sense to say that things are “causally related” and that there is a “necessary connection” between cause and effect. One can only conclude that the very ideas of cause and effect, and of arising and perishing, cannot correspond to reality. Nagarjuna did not deny conventional cause and effect (like a seed causes a sprout), what he did deny was that this causal principle can be proved and that it is ultimately or inherently true. He concluded that there is not even the slightest so-called production that can be observed.
People are convinced that a tree (the effect) is caused or produced from a seed (the cause), hence convincing them that an inherent causal relationship exists between them. But we cannot even isolate something that is representative of an inherent seed or something that is representative of an inherent tree so how can we establish a truly existent relationship between two non-existent entities? Cause and effect is only assumed to exist but is yet to be proven.
Cause and effect is enunciated as a moral law meaning there are good deeds and rewards for them, and there are bad deeds and punishments. But Nagarjuna argues that the “necessary connection” between a good deed and a reward; and between a bad deed and punishment has all the contradictions of “other causation”, so is rejected.
In order to explain the apparent production of things in the world, Nagarjuna appeals to the various underlying conditions to explain the effect without ascribing the conditions any active causal involvement in the process. For example: a seed, fertile soil, steady sunlight, and a strong water supply are the “conditions” necessary for the growth of a tree, but none of these conditions are inherent causes in the sense that they exert some enigmatic power to provoke the tree’s growth. The condition, say soil, does not have power on its own to provoke the tree’s growth; nor does the condition “seed” have power within itself to cause the growth of the tree. If you place a seed in your hand for a millennium it will not turn into a tree. The coming together of countless conditions: a seed, water, soil, sunlight, etc, is what counts, without attributing inherent causal powers to these conditions. Because the tree is dependent on conditions might explain why we don’t find an inherent independent tree.
Nagarjuna’s conception of cause and effect is that all participants in the causal nexus are empty of intrinsic, independent nature because they depend on other things. Because they are empty they can interact with each other to generate the effect, which, being dependent and impermanent cannot but be empty as well. That things are ever-changing also indicates that they are devoid of any fixed identity. Ultimately, we cannot say what things are because they do not exist in and of themselves.
The idea of an inherent fixed cause producing an inherent fixed effect is contradictory to the fact that all things are subject to change. Therefore it is unintelligible to use fixed, inherent entities to explain the true nature of things which is that they are subject to change and flux.
The appearing phenomena are dependently arisen meaning: since they are not arisen on their own they cannot be said to exist on their own. Since they don’t exist on their own they are not truly arisen. They are somewhat like what takes place in a dream.
Interdependence
The Buddha taught the doctrine of “dependent arising” which sees the world as fundamentally interconnected. Things arise depending on other things. Dependent arising is what we use to establish emptiness. Everything exists by depending upon something else therefore everything is empty of its own self-nature or its own essence.
All the phenomena of the world appear due to the coming together of underlying conditions and at the same time as they appear one cannot find the slightest trace of their actual intrinsic or inherent existence. They are appearances that are empty of any substantial essence, just like the reflection of the moon in the lake, but just like the reflection, their emptiness of intrinsic nature does not prevent them from appearing vividly when the proper conditions come together. The fact that an object that is empty of inherent existence is able to appear and be perceived illustrates how empty phenomena are able to manifest. Their emptiness does not stop them from having an effect. Their appearance is undeniable, but when they are examined they prove to be empty and without substance or essence.
Dependent arising means that the perceived object and the perceiving subject are mutually interdependent. The reality of one is dependent upon the other; if one lacks intrinsic nature, the other must also lack intrinsic nature. When a rope is perceived as a snake, the perceived object, the snake, lacks intrinsic nature. Therefore, the perceiving subject must also lack intrinsic nature. Likewise, since the self arises dependently, and therefore lacks intrinsic nature, so do the thoughts, experiences and perceptions of the self lack intrinsic nature. So what one perceives within or without is illusory.
This is similar to the perceptions or images we perceive in a dream. For example, dreaming of an elephant while asleep is brought on by various causes and conditions and seems real for the person while dreaming. Searching for the elephant and other visions that arose in a dream when awake would be absurd, a meaningless endeavour, since there never was an elephant to begin with. Similarly, searching for the inherent existence of the appearing phenomena is futile since there never were any inherent entities in the first place. Everything that arises is a mere appearance with no own essence at all. In a final analysis, no ultimate statement can really be made about phenomena since everything is empty of self-nature.
The mutual interdependence of phenomena shifted the emphasis from beingness to becoming. That is, whereas the Hindu philosophies asserted a ground of “true being” the Buddha recognized no substantial essence or beingness of the universe. He saw all in terms of process, flux and change. Change is the only thing that can be seen as having any degree of certainty or reality. The only constant is change.
Not a single thing in the world exists in its own right; nothing has an independent reality of its own. Everything is dependent upon the sum total of its conditions. Everything is constituted by everything else. A thing by itself is nothing at all. This is what is meant by the emptiness of all things.
The Tathagata
A disciple named Vaccha, persisted in his questions regarding the nature of the Tathagata (a Buddha) after death. The Buddha offered the analogy of “fire”. If a fire burning in front of you was to die out, tell me in what direction has that fire gone: east, or west, or north, or south?’ Vaccha replied: “The question would not fit the case.”
The Buddha replied. Just like when fire is extinguished it does not go anywhere, east, west, north, or south, similarly the Tathagata does not go some “where” after death, like a heavenly realm or a state of sanctified bliss. The Tathagata does not disappear only to reappear elsewhere, but is simply no longer. It is not that the Tathagata ceases to exist, for he never assumed he existed in the first place. That is, nothing goes out of existence; it never existed in the first place. So in answer to the question then, is that nothing happened to the Tathagata.
Since all things are empty of intrinsic nature (including the Tathagata) then the nature of the Tathagata is just as empty as the nature of an ordinary person and in this sense there is no real difference between them. Hence, what happens to the Tathagata after death and what happens to an ordinary person after death is the same. This does not mean that an ordinary being and the Tathagata are identical in conventional experience. Conventionally they are very different. An ordinary being grasps at things in confusion, while for the Tathagata, grasping and confusion has ceased. But ultimately, since the natures of both are empty of inherent existence so in this sense they are not separate or different. The difference is only in perspective or attitude for all else remains as it was. It is not the world that needs to change the change is only in our subjective understanding of it and a new way of reacting to it.
Since the Tathagata has become enlightened by virtue of having released the tendency to grasp, he no longer believes that there is a “self” comprising him in the present and so he knows there will be no “self” comprising him after death either. It is only the misguided drive to attribute reality to the objects of grasping, the grasping itself, and the one who grasps that embroils the ignorant person in the tangle of existence and non-existence theorizing. The Tathagata never assumed he existed or not.
There is a great tendency for sentient beings to distinguish bondage and freedom, samsara and nirvana. The Buddha explains clearly that the nature of the Tathagata is identical to that of any other person, and it has neither the “quality” of bondage nor the “quality” of freedom. There is no self to be found in either the bound or the freed person; both are composed of nothing but the selfless aggregates, and there is no real self which can be thus qualified. The existence of a self in the Tathagata is denied for the same reasons that it is denied in any person.
There is a saying in Buddhism, “A Buddha is an awakened sentient being. Sentient beings are unawakened Buddha’s.”
Emptiness is Empty
Madhyamaka’s reminds us that emptiness also is dependently arisen and therefore is empty. Suppose that we take a conventional entity, such as a table. The table depends on its parts, it depends on conditions (like a tree, a furniture maker, and so on) and it depends on being labelled a table. So we conclude that it is empty of its own nature or independent nature. But this emptiness is also dependent; it is dependent upon the table. Without a conventional table, we cannot establish its emptiness. So emptiness is dependent and is therefore also empty. It is not an intrinsic ultimate.
To be empty is to be dependently arisen and emptiness is no exception. Emptiness is dependent upon conventional phenomena to perceive its emptiness. So emptiness is empty.
To reify the concept of emptiness as some ultimate privileged reality is a blatant error for emptiness is an idea whose function is to prevent reification of concepts. “Those who are possessed of the view of emptiness are said to be incorrigible.” Nagarjuna. Emptiness is not a thing, it is the perception of an absence, the absence of intrinsic existence in things. To say that things are empty is to say that they dependently exist and are essenceless. Buddhist emptiness is not a universal essence or a source (like in Hinduism). It is the recognition that an essence or core nature in phenomena is unfindable. So again, emptiness is an absence, not a thing. Emptiness teachings resist turning this absence back into an intrinsic entity, which would contradict the insight that everything is empty. When the belief in intrinsic existence is refuted, the emptiness, the groundlessness of all phenomena, is realized. It is like “I thought it was there, but I can’t find it.” It is the perception of an absence.
The theory of emptiness is intricately bound up with human interests and concerns. If there were no human minds who mistakenly read the existence of intrinsic existence into phenomena, which lack it, there would be no point in having a theory to correct this. It is only due to our erroneous view of things as being intrinsic entities that the theory of emptiness is required as a corrective.
“Things appear in one way (intrinsically) but exist in another (empty of intrinsic reality).”
Because all things are dependently arisen one cannot ultimately identify anything for nothing can be individually located. Again, this is why everything, including emptiness, can only be seen to conventionally exist. Ultimate reality (emptiness) is hence only conventional reality.
Things don’t arise from emptiness or subside back into emptiness. Instead, emptiness is the mode of existence that things have. It means that things cannot be found when looked for closely. Things aren’t empty because of something big called “emptiness.” Rather, to be, in the first place, is already to be empty.
Emptiness does not assert a positivist view of reality, but is a refutation of the view that anything could possibly exist inherently or. Thus it cannot be refuted because it is not proposing anything. Nagarjuna writes: “If I were to advance any proposition whatsoever, from that I would incur error On the contrary, I advance no proposition, therefore I incur no error.” The conception of intrinsic existence is the subtle form of obstruction to liberation and is therefore the object of negation.
To realize emptiness is to recognize that there can be no essence or core nature in anything. It is to appreciate the negative assertion that as soon as anything is identified it can only be dependently arisen, a mere appearance, as nothing can truly be located or pointed to or singled out as some “thing”, including ultimate truth. What we label “ultimate truth” is merely that; a label. There is no inherent ultimate truth that stands behind the label. So in this sense there is no ultimate truth.
Emptiness refutes ultimate truth as yet another argument for essentialism or “thingness” under the guise of being beyond the conventional. Emptiness should be understood purely as a convention. The term “emptiness” does not stand for a transcendent metaphysical reality whose meaning we can grasp by apprehending the reality behind the name. Reality is not beyond the limit of everyday conventional existence. Instead, everything that exists or arises does so at the conventional level. Conventional existence, on this view, is the only kind that anything could have.
Summary
Mere speculation has occupied the minds of philosophers for thousands of years. Faced with the mystery of the cosmos, the spirit naturally tries to interpret what it encounters, and where knowledge is lacking, it will fill the void with speculation or myth. One cannot but marvel at the sheer inventiveness of the human imagination. In view of the fact that reason and logic seem to work well enough in the conventional day-to-day that logic is extended beyond the conventional and empirical sphere (such as the beginning of time, the big bang, what happens after we die, the existence of God, etc). This results not in knowledge but in contradiction. For example, one philosopher will propound a thesis to show that the cosmos had a beginning in time; another, with equally persuasive reasons, will prove the contrary. No one has ever succeeded in inventing a rational philosophy that is wholly incontrovertible. A procedure that appears to give us truth in fact produces only theory and opinion. And since there is no objective evidence available to support theories such as: a beginning, the big bang, eternity, or God, etc, it is clear that conflict between contrasting opinions is not only inevitable but endless.
It is precisely because the Buddha does not immerse himself in theories about phenomena he is able to discern their true nature (that they lack self-nature) and it is this very discernment that confers liberation. To know things as they truly are is to free oneself from their tyranny. On the other hand, to elaborate theories about phenomena is not only to become engrossed in endless cogitation and verbiage; it is to veil the nature of phenomena even more and to fall even further beneath their spell. The Buddha declared – to hold that the world is eternal or to hold that it is not, or to hold that things truly exist or that they don’t truly exist – is the jungle of theorizing, the wilderness of theorizing, the tangle of theorizing, the bondage and the shackles of theorizing, attended by ill, distress, perturbation, and fever. This is the danger I perceive in these views, which makes me discard them all.
“Brilliant and intellectual people always abide in the cave of conceptualisation. As they conceptualize, so do they speak.”
This passage indicates a truth that the ordinary conceptual mind is unaware of and this truth becomes accessible precisely when theories are laid aside. It points to a reality that avoids conceptual theorizing, yet, the vast majority of living beings are wholly unaware of it. It is called nirvana (the understanding that things lack intrinsic nature). But it is of paramount importance not to regard nirvana as some “thing.” The Buddha declared: “Open to them are the doors to deathlessness. Let those who have ears throw off their old beliefs.” This refers not only to the belief in the self but to all theories and constructions of the mind, the inventions of philosophy which operate according to affirmation and negation and the extreme viewpoints of existence and nonexistence. All beliefs and theories falsely attribute intrinsic existence to things. No one, the Buddha affirms, can hold to the belief that things intrinsically exist or that they intrinsically don’t exist and hope to be free. It is necessary to analyse such false trails and, having discovered their inner contradiction, to abandon them. Only then can one progress beyond samsara.
Concerning the correct view the Buddha said that ordinary beings are used to thinking dualistically in terms of “it is” and “it is not.” For example, concerning the self, it is commonly perceived by people as “it is”, that is, that it intrinsically does exist; whereas, if the person dies, the self is commonly perceived by people as, “it is not”, that is, that it intrinsically does not-exist. They take themselves, things and situations to be intrinsically real (existent), or to be intrinsically not real (non-existent). They cling to things, act accordingly, and wander through the transient joys and sorrows of samsara, high and low. But for those who correctly perceive the truth of how phenomena arise, abide, and pass away, the Buddha said, there is no “is” and no “is not.” “That things exist, is one extreme. That they do not exist, is another. But I, the Tathagata accept neither ‘is’ nor ‘is not’; neither existence or non-existence; neither impermanence or permanence; neither truth or falsehood; neither attachment or freedom from attachment; and I declare the truth from the Middle Position. Without adopting a viewpoint of his own every possible position is exposed as false so the busy restless mind is reduced to silence. One should be empty of all truths and lean on nothing.
But in an ultimate sense, truth avoids all extremes: existence or non-existence; impermanence or permanence; self or no-self; interdependence or independence; truth or falsehood; attachment or freedom from attachment; suffering or freedom from suffering, hence the “Middle Way”. One should be empty of all truths and lean on nothing.
The mission of Madhyamika is to undermine the misrepresentations of philosophy and religion, the fruit of the discursive mind’s deep-rooted tendency to elaborate theories in an attempt to explain phenomena, both inner and outer. But all of them fall short on the one all-important issue: the ultimate status of phenomena. All of them, in one way or another, affirm intrinsic existence to people objects and things. Some Buddhist schools attribute objects or matter as intrinsic mind “stuff” or intrinsic constructions of mind. This simply shifts intrinsic existence from matter to mind, but it is still intrinsic existence. Madhyamika’s emphatically refute intrinsic existence wherever or however it occurs. Madhyamika is not a philosophy so much as a critique of philosophy. Its task is to examine the attempts of thought that in one way or another asserts “that things are intrinsically real” and to demonstrate its failure. In being a system of pure criticism, Madhyamika has no positive content of its own. Its evolution, therefore, cannot be assessed in terms of doctrinal elaboration. The history of Madhyamika is, consequently, no more than the account of the system’s relationship with other philosophies. The Madhyamika simply shows the stresses, strains and contradictions of intrinsic existence to which philosophy was subject down the ages.
In the intellectual environment in which Buddhism evolved, the concept of something being stable, lasting and permanent was very important. Although the world of human experiences, according to the senses, is constantly changing and in constant flux, traditional religions and particularly Indian philosophers, assert that underlying all this change surely there must be something stable, something permanent, some foundation that it all rests upon.
The Hindu Upanishads, for example, suggests that within all the changes of the individual there is a deep part of one’s psyche, called the ātman or the Self, that in some way either underlies or transcends all of the changes that go on moment to moment. They say, if we could only discover this subtle Self in our experience and dwell in it moment to moment, we would manage to overcome the transience of the world and become established upon something eternal and everlasting.
There is a felt sense out there that there is something permanent from which this world emerged, the one true reality, self-created, eternal, unchanging and not depending on anything but itself. This is the ultimate reality and is called Brahman. And Atman is the true self of the individual which is unchanging and lies beneath life’s changes. The goal is to know the truly real and become one with it.
This is the background against which Buddhism was working. The Buddha basically came to the conclusion that something permanent, something eternal, something inherent that underlies our experience is an entirely constructed concept. The claim of stability, permanence or inherent existence articulated in these traditions is really just an idea, just a theory; it is not to be found in actual experience and so is dismissed as pure assumption. So one of the principal insights of the whole Buddhist tradition is that the entire world of our experience, whether the outer material world or our inner personal world, is fundamentally in a state of constant change and flux so there can be no fixed, permanent, independent, unchanging Brahman in existence.
When the Buddha began to teach his first task was to wean his hearers away from the gross, naïve understanding of worldly beings: their unquestioning belief in the personal self and the reality of physical objects and mental experiences. He therefore spoke about the five aggregates, the six senses, and their objects and associated consciousnesses, showing, for example, how the human person can be analyzed into form, feelings, perceptions, conditioning factors, and consciousness without the existence of an additional factor called “self”. Despite the ingrained tendency of all sentient beings to assume the existence of a self and to cling to it, analysis shows that no matter how hard one searches, no self can be found. In the same way, by observing the impermanence of physical things and mental events one can come to an understanding that phenomena, however solid and unchanging they may appear, are in a state of constant momentary flux, or are impermanent. On the basis of this insight, one can begin to dissolve the attachment one has to mere transitory things and loosen the fetters that bind one in the round of suffering.
The work begins with a discussion about how things come into being and evolve. Nagarjuna shows that phenomenal appearances, to the contrary, are not independent self-contained entities but arise dependent on other things. It is because nothing exists independently as its own substance nature or process that everything is impermanent. A tree, for example, depends for its existence on its parts, such as branches, leaves and so on; depends on conditions, such as a seed, water, soil, sun, and so on; and depends on someone labelling it a tree (conceptual imputation). Since the tree is dependent on many other factors it is said to be empty, empty of its own independent nature. Whereas, to say that something has real existence in itself is to say that it is an autonomous, circumscribed entity, separate and not dependent on other things. This is how we habitually view things in the ordinary transactions of everyday life. We feel that we are self-contained individuals and relate to other self-contained individuals. We encounter objects, some pleasant, some unpleasant, which we try to acquire or avoid accordingly. Complicated situations arise which themselves seem inherent and real. We are happy and we suffer. Life consists of blocks; it is a collection of individual, discrete realities. But this is an illusion. In its anxiety for reassurance and security, the mind reifies situations and things which it clings to and manipulates in its hopeless quest for lasting satisfaction. In order to expose this procedure as the false trail that it is, the Buddha (Nagarjuna) relentlessly demonstrates the inconsistencies of belief in intrinsically existing things. He shows that the normal “worldview” is in fact riddled with contradiction. Even to say that things are real or that they intrinsically exist implies an unchanging permanent entity. But this is not our experience.
The Buddha is not trying to deny our experience in the phenomenal world. The objects of his critique are not the empirical facts of existence that inescapably appear to us but the assumptions that we make about these facts. We think that real things give rise to real things; that real things come into being and pass away. But this notion of real, individual, self-contained entities is a misperception. It is a figment of our imagination; in fact there are no real self-contained things in this sense. Self-contained entities can never change and can never enter into relation with other entities. The notions of intrinsic entities coming into being, or intrinsic entities passing away makes no sense. Thus Nagarjuna’s first stanza announces: “No things are produced anywhere at any time, either from themselves, from something else, from both, or from neither.” The true status of the phenomena that we experience is not, therefore, that they are real intrinsic unchanging entities coming into existence, but in their relatedness, their interdependence with all other phenomena. This interdependence undermines the notion of individual, intrinsic reality in things; it is the very antithesis of “thingness.”
Phenomena, being the interplay of interdependent factors, are unreal. Their interdependence is their emptiness of intrinsic existence. And common things like time, movement, gain and loss, cause and effect (like a seed causes a tree), which we thought to be real inherent independent processes, Nagarjuna demonstrates to be also interdependent and are not real independent entities. Nagarjuna’s “karikas” is an astonishing and disconcerting performance, and the reader is forced to acknowledge that what had previously been taken as the straightforward certainties of existence is nothing but a tissue of naïve and ultimately untenable assumptions. The entire worldview, commonly accepted to be real by ordinary people, is shown to be completely incoherent. If we follow Nagarjuna’s arguments the common world view makes no sense. If we think that the things of the world (ourselves included) are as they appear – self-existent and solid – we are not in touch with reality. Phenomena appear to be real, but they are insubstantial, dreamlike.
We may be tempted to dismiss Nagarjuna’s ideas as no more than a curious paradox with little relevance to the facts of experience. Life, after all, goes on regardless of the theories of philosophers. Nagarjuna could be right, we may say, but since we are all experiencing such dreamlike experiences, why question them? What, finally, is wrong with the way we perceive things? The answer is that there is nothing “wrong” with it; the issue is not a moral one. We are not condemned for being in samsara. To believe that phenomena are solid, real entities is not a “sin”; it is only a mistake, but a mistake with unfortunate consequences. The Buddha referred to a more pressing, less deniable problem, namely, that existence (the samsaric dream) is, as a matter of fact, utterly painful. Beings suffer; they are not satisfied. We cannot deny that our lives are plagued by the ills of birth, sickness, old age, and death, the inescapable accompaniments of existence. It is true that suffering may be suspended by moments of happiness. But these turn out to be fragile and are marked by a transience that renders them, in the larger view, meaningless.
Caught in the dream, unaware that they are dreaming, ordinary worldly beings endlessly try to manipulate phenomena in the interests of security and fulfillment. They do this by trying to create the conditions of material and emotional satisfaction and, if they are religious, by striving to create the causes of happiness in the hereafter, whether in terms of “going to heaven” or of securing a favourable “rebirth” in their future existences. So the happiness, thus produced, may be perceived as good, but it is still samsara. It is still part of the dream; it is not the final answer, not liberation. For samsara to disappear, its cause must be identified and arrested. The Buddha is saying that a lasting solution cannot possibly lie in the reorganization of the dream, in a mere rearrangement of the furniture. A better plan is to recognize our state of deception – the fact that we are dreaming – and to wake up. And to wake from the dream, it is necessary to understand the true nature of phenomena, that is, that they are empty or lack intrinsic nature essence or solidity. They are not empty of conventional reality.
The very word emptiness is highly disturbing. It carries with it the connotation that everything is denied, nothing is real; nothing makes sense and what is the point in pursuing a spiritual path? The Buddha shows that emptiness is the very factor that makes spiritual growth and progress on the path possible. In fact, it is precisely because of emptiness that things can be amenable to change, transformation and evolution. Change is precisely why people live, die, suffer and can be enlightened and liberated. And change and activity is only possible if entities and the way in which we conceptualize them are void or empty of any fixed, immutable essence. Apart from the insight of emptiness the mind that perceives both mental and physical objects is constrained by the noose of attachment toward its object.
The notion that things exist intrinsically is a deep rooted misunderstanding that has blinded us to seeing the real state of things (their emptiness). Intrinsic or independent things (things that don’t depend on other things) not only do they not exist, they cannot even conceivable exist. Intrinsic existence is an impossible mode of existence, like the hairs on a tortoise. Yet ordinary people fall into the trap and misperceive things to be intrinsically real entities. Only awakened beings realize intrinsic nature is illusory. As such, ordinary beings fail to see the true nature of things; their emptiness. Their minds have been suffused with a poisonous clinging to the real existence of entities. They attach to or cling to people, objects and concepts, thus creating expectations that result in disappointment, frustration and pain when these attachments are inevitably disrupted or cease. Moreover, attachment fuels a ceaseless cycle of craving as they chase after the satisfaction and pleasure linked to these attachments. This is like the futile attempt to pursue a mirage in the desert hoping the “water” will quench their thirst. They have become addicted to such an attitude, and their habit is exceedingly strong, with the result that it is hard to abandon. Therefore, in perceiving concrete objects, beings are quite unable to discern their true nature, their lack of substantiality. They are overpowered by false discursive thought which mistakenly takes such objects to be truly existent things. It is for this reason that all living beings fail to perceive the true nature of phenomena – that they lack intrinsic existence. In exactly the same way, it is by continuously observing a thing that looks the same from moment to moment that the mind is dulled and fails to notice the thing’s momentary or transitory nature. Such people are hampered by their mistaken thoughts and they apprehend things amiss. Now as to the one who has eliminated ignorance and sees emptiness directly, that one does not entertain intrinsic existence and hence, does not cling to things as truly existent. Only by jettisoning the deeply ingrained tendency to search for some essential true existence to things and to our life can we find liberation.
Contemplation:
When the urge arises in your mind to feelings of desire or angry hate, do not act! Be silent, do not speak!
If you do not treat people with partiality, as friends or enemies, you will be in harmony with everyone.
Conquering enemies only means you will make more later on.
Engaging in a plethora of activities means you will always have more to do.
Understand that negative circumstances are in fact your allies.
If you respond in anger when harmed, does your wrath remove the harm inflicted? Resentment surely serves no purpose in this life.
Reacting to what others think means you will react more and more.
Give up self-perpetuating plans and projects; there will never be a time when you will cease to be occupied.
The upset you feel over the faults of others is your own projection.
Holding your friends close means you should hold your enemies closer.
If you are unable to find enlightenment where you are, where else will you find it?
Prefer to be defeated in the presence of the wise than to excel in the company of fools.
Do you think you will be aware of your own enlightenment?
Guided Meditation – Overcoming Anger
For example, consider the anger, frustration, reactions and outrage we experience at say: government corruption, secrecy, incompetence, hypocrisy, waste, lies, and so on.
That mix of anger, injustice, and obsession can feel overwhelming – especially when it’s tied to something as big and impersonal as government. Let’s slow this down and work through it in a way that’s true to Madhyamaka Prāsaṅgika insight, but also grounded enough to actually help us right now.
Settle (2minutes)
Sit comfortably. Let your body be natural—not rigid. Bring attention to the breath: Inhale… aware, Exhale… aware No need to control it now—just feel it. Gently label: “breathing in”, “breathing out” Return to normal.
Bring in the anger (carefully)
Now, slightly recall the situation: government corruption, hypocrisy, injustice, whatever triggered you.
Don’t overwhelm yourself—just enough to feel the anger in the body.
Where is it? chest? jaw? stomach? Let it be there.
Now reflect silently: “This is anger.” Not my anger. Just: “anger is experienced.”
Investigate the anger (Prāsaṅgika inquiry)
Ask slowly: Where is this anger?
Is it in the body? If yes, exactly where? Can you isolate it?
Is it in the thoughts? Which thought?
Is it separate from both? Look directly:
You won’t find a single, solid “anger.” Only: sensations, thoughts, labels
Investigate the “self” who is angry
Now turn inward: Who is angry? Look carefully.
Is the “self” who is angry the body? Which part? Is it the thoughts? But thoughts change constantly.
Each time you point to something, ask:
“Is this truly me, or just something observed?”
Let the answer come from experience, not logic.
Eventually you hit something important:
The “self” feels real—but cannot be found.
Just a designation (label) on body-mind experience.
Investigate the “enemy”
In this case: politicians, institutions, people you feel are corrupt or incompetent. Don’t pick the most extreme example—start with something manageable.
Notice: irritation, anger, tightnes. Let it be present.
Now look at the target: “corrupt government”
Ask: Is the target of anger one person? Many people? Policies? Institution? My interpretation?
Where exactly is the thing I hate?
Break it down. You’ll see anger depends on many conditions: news exposure, interpretations, past experiences, values about fairness, political views.
Nothing here exists independently. A label applied to many changing parts. The “Enemy” is constructed by mind based on selective information. Feels solid, but isn’t findable as a single essence.
Now shift perspective to a corrupt person.
Ask: What conditions create a person like this?
Reflect: upbringing, incentives, fear of losing power, ego, social pressure, ignorance, political persuasions, systems they are embedded in. This is not an excuse—just causal reality. No one appears independent of underlying causes and conditions.
This “person” cannot be found as a fixed essence or entity. Their “corruption” is not independent or permanent. Your image of them is partly constructed by mind.
And: The “you” who hates them is also dependently arisen and is therefore subject to change as the conditions change. Let this land:
Now reflect:
“Just like me, others want security.”
“Just like me, others are shaped by causes and conditions.”
“Just like me, others act confused at times.”
Just recognizing: “This is a conditioned being, not a fixed villain” —that’s already softer.
Revenge
Revenge depends on three solid things:
A real, fixed “me”, a real, fixed “enemy”, a real, justified “payback”
Now examine: If the self is not findable… if the enemy is constructed… if events arise from countless causes… then revenge loses its foundation. So what is this conflict, really?
It starts to feel: less necessary, less coherent, less satisfying, even in imagination.
Noticing
When the loop starts again (news, outrage, revenge thoughts):
Pause and label: “anger” or “outrage”. Ask: “Where is it?” See its unfindable nature.
Notice: The anger may still be there—but lighter, less solid, less “urgent”
Reflect: Because things are not solid (empty) they can change. This means nothing is fixed or absolute.
But when concern about, say injustice, is obsessive the anger is using you, not helping you act clearly. But also this practice is not about becoming passive. You still act. You can still: care about injustice, stay informed (in moderation), speak, vote, act. But without: hatred solidifying the “enemy”, a rigid “self” carrying the burden.
It’s about: seeing clearly without distortion, concern without burning out, acting (if you choose) without hatred driving you.
Summarizing:
Let everything arise: sounds, sensations, thoughts but without: a central “owner.”
It’s like: experience taking place but with no one behind it. Or like food digesting and blood circulating that takes place naturally without the need of an “agent” that does the digesting and circulating.
Reintroduce the trigger
Now, very lightly bring back: the idea of corruption, injustice, frustration.
Watch carefully: Does anger and outrage form differently now?
Look for: Is there a solid “me” being attacked? Is there a solid “enemy”?
Or just: thoughts arising, sensations shifting
Watch how the mind tries to rebuild:
“This is wrong!”, “They are bad!”, “I must react!”
When you’re triggered by news headlines:
Instead of getting pulled in: Pause, feel the “I” that is outraged, look for it, fail to find it. Rest in that, even for 5 seconds. It cuts the root of reaction.
This practice can feel: disorienting, even unsettling. That’s normal.
You’re loosening something very deep: the assumption of a solid self. So balance it with normal activities.
“In-the-Moment” Practice
This is not about withdrawing from the world, but not getting consumed by it either. Use this anytime you feel the surge.
Pause, just stop for a moment when triggered.
Label silently: “anger” or “outrage.” In other words, they are just labels not real entities. (This may help explain why they are not found). This already creates a little space.
“What exactly am I angry at?”
Notice: images, thoughts, narratives, not a solid entity—just mental constructions.
Without solid ground, what is there to defend? What is there to attack?
Right now, your suffering isn’t coming from “government corruption” itself.
It’s coming from the mind repeatedly constructing a solid world + solid enemy + solid self and reacting to that construction.
Once you see that happening: the grip weakens, the urgency softens, clarity increases.
Guided Meditation – The Myth of Self
Although the existence of a “self” or “I” is taken for granted, Buddhist thought claims that not only is such an “I” not findable but belief in it is the root cause of all suffering. Here’s a guided way to approach it:
Settle
Sit comfortably. Eyes open or closed. Let your attention rest on: the breath or the general feeling of the body (1 or 2 minutes). Don’t try to control anything, just let experience be there. Notice the sense of “I” (1 minute). Gently bring attention to this feeling: “I am here” Don’t analyse yet—just notice: Where does that feel located? Head? Chest? Somewhere vague? Let it be intuitive.
Looking more closely
Ask quietly: What exactly is this “I”? Then check, one layer at a time:
Is the “I” the body?
Scan your body slowly. Is the “I” your hand? Your face? Your brain?
If it were, losing a part would mean losing the “self” completely. But that’s not how it feels. Let the question hang:
Is the “I” the mind?
Now look at thoughts. A thought appears… then disappears. Another comes… different content
Ask: Is the “I” one of these thoughts? If yes, which one? The last? The current? The next?
Notice: thoughts are changing constantly. But “I” feels continuous. So, the “I” can’t be any single thought?
Is the “I” separate from body and mind?
Maybe the “I” is something separate, like a witness.
Look directly: can you find the “I” outside sensations and thoughts, some observer that is independent? Search carefully—but don’t imagine.
Usually, you’ll find: only more thoughts, only more sensations.
Finally, mentally strip away all the parts of the body-mind and see if you can find an “I” left over.
Rest in what you “don’t find” (important)
At this point, something subtle happens: you’ve looked for a self or “I” in the body, in thoughts, or separate from both, but nothing solid shows.
Just rest in that: ungraspable, unfindable quality.
Experience is still there, sensations and thoughts still occur, but the “owner” is… not located.
Something personal:
Think: “I am sitting here”
Then investigate: Who is sitting? Where is that “I” right now?
Or if a feeling arises: “I feel bored”, “I feel calm.”
Look: is there a separate “I” apart from the feeling? Or just the feeling itself?
Experience is still there but what is not found is: “I have experience” or “this is happening to me”. The I” or me is imputed, not found. This loosens the structure.
Don’t try to conclude: “There is no self” or “I” realized something.”
Just notice: things appear and function normally but the solid “me or “I” is hard to pin down. That’s enough.
Don’t force an answer. Don’t blank your mind. Don’t try to feel “no-self.” This is about “seeing a mistake” not creating a state.
What you might notice afterward:
A slight lessoning of “ownership.” Thoughts feel less personal, emotions still arise, but less “mine”, or nothing special (ordinary), that’s also fine.
Dismantling self
This is where Prāsaṅgika really becomes alive. The point isn’t just meditation sessions, but slowly changing how experience is interpreted moment to moment.
You’re not trying to walk around thinking: “there is no I, instead, what begins to weaken is: “this is happening to me.” Conventional experience is still there, seeing is occurring and sensations are felt, this is not negated. But the ownership of it, the “I”, is lessening. That’s it. Subtle but powerful.
“Micro-inquiries”
Example: Walking.
While walking, notice: The sensation of feet moving. Then ask:
Can I find an entity or agent, called the “walker” who is separate from the experience of walking? Don’t answer conceptually—just look.
You’ll find: the “walker” isn’t clearly findable. That is sufficient.
Example: Thinking
When thoughts arise: “I need to do this… I messed up… etc.” Pause:
Is there an independent “thinker” who is separate from the thought? Or just the thought appearing?
Emotions
This is where insight deepens fast.
Example: Stress, anxiety.
When it hits: Instead of: “I am stressed” feel the sensations (tight chest, fast thoughts)
Then ask: Can I find the “I” or “self” that experiences the stress?
Look carefully: Is the “I” the sensations, the feelings, or something else?
What you’ll often see: although stress is experienced, the owner is vague or missing. This creates space—not by suppressing stress, but by deconstructing ownership.
Catch the “solid me” reflex
Throughout the day, notice moments like:
“They disrespected me”, “I am outraged”, “I need to prove myself”, “This is my failure”. These feel very real.
Now apply a quick Prāsaṅgika-style check :
Where exactly is this “me” who is outraged? Don’t overthink—just glance. You’ll see the outrage is vivid but the “me” who is outraged is not something solid and findable.
During the day pick triggers: waiting in queues, a newspaper headline, your football team lost, a rude remark. See if you can find the me who is upset or offended.
Whenever a strong reaction happens: pause for a few seconds, investigate ownership.
Where is this “I” located? Is it in the body? Which part? Is it in the mind? Which thought?
If you look, you won’t find a stable “I” or owner of such reactions.
At night, look back: When did the “I” feel most solid? Was it findable?
Common pitfalls
This is not: “nothing is real”, “I don’t exist”.
Don’t try to convince yourself: “There is no self”. Instead: Look → fail to find → rest there.
This path is less like an explosion, more like a loosening.
Concluding remarks:
“No-self” doesn’t mean you don’t exist at all. It means:
There is no independent, solid, unchanging core called “me” or “self.”
What you call “self” is just a label applied to body-mind aggregates; like “car” is just a label for parts assembled in a certain way. “Self” or “I” is imputed, not found.
Over time, you may notice: less defensiveness, thoughts feel lighter, less “owned”, emotions arise but don’t define a solid “me.” A kind of openness in experience, not because you changed reality – but because you stopped misreading it.
Guided Meditation – Overcoming Fear of Death
This meditation follows the spirit of Nāgārjuna (Madhyamika) and Candrakīrti (Prāsaṅgika).
The aim is to examine carefully what exactly is feared, and whether the thing being protected truly exists in the way it appears. Go slowly.
Settle
Find a quiet place where you can sit comfortably. Let your body be natural. Let the fear be present.
Introduce the fear:
Bring to mind the simple fact: “I will die.” Do not elaborate. Do not dramatize. Just let the sentence rest.
Notice what appears in the body: tightening, heaviness, pressure , sadness , resistance , numbness.
Don’t push away any reaction. Let the fear or unease arise, if it does.
Now gently notice: Where is the fear felt? (chest, stomach, throat?). Just observe.
Identify what is afraid
Now ask quietly: “What exactly is afraid?” Don’t answer conceptually. Look.
Is it: The body? A thought? A sense of “I” or “me” behind everything?
Let the sense of “I” come into focus.
Search for the “I”
Let us examine and see if we can identify the “I” that is fearful.
Look in the body:
Scan your body slowly. Ask: “Is the ‘I’ this body?” Is the‘I’ the parts of the body (head, torso, brain, etc).
But the body changes constantly: cells change constantly, sensations appear and vanish.
Can something constantly changing be the stable “I or “me”? Notice: the “I” doesn’t clearly land on any part of the body.
Look in the mind:
Now observe thoughts. But thoughts change constantly.
So the sense of a permanent I cannot be the mind or thought.
Look for something separate:
Maybe the “I” is something in the background like awareness or a witness. Awareness feels more stable than thought, it feels like a true centre. But when we look nothing solid can be found. Just a sense – but not an entity.
Return to the fear of death
Now bring back the thought: “I will die.”
And ask: “Where is the I that will die?”
When looked for, it can’t be found.
Let the contradiction reveal itself.
Now see the hidden assumption: “A real, solid I will be annihilated.”
But in your direct observation: That solid “I” was never found.
So ask gently: “How can something unfound be destroyed?”
Don’t force an answer—just let the question open.
Investigate Death Itself
Now ask: “What exactly is death?” Is death a thing that can be isolated?
You may find: there are sensations, images, concepts, anticipation, imagination. But where is “death” itself?
The mind often imagines death as a solid event waiting ahead, but that event is hazy and can’t be pinned down
Summarizing
Look closely at experience right now:
A sensation arises (fear of death). A thought labels it: “mine”
Ask: Where is the owner (mine) separate from the fear?
You’ll find: fear is experienced. Ownership (mine) is added afterward.
Mine or “I” is just a conceptual designation. It’s not an inherent entity hiding somewhere deeper.
Here are some steps to take when fear hits.
Pause and notice: “Fear of death is here.” Not “I am fearful” – just: sensations, thoughts, urgency.
“I” is just a conceptual designation added later.
Break it down: Physical sensations (tight chest, etc.). Mental images (future, death). Thoughts (“I will disappear”)
Now ask:
“Who exactly is in danger?” Look sharply. Not philosophically – directly.
You’ll notice: The fear of death points to a “me” or “I”, but that “me” is not findable
Now comes the key turning:
The fear depends on something that cannot be located. Let that contradiction sit.
Instead of: “I am fearful of death”
It becomes: “Fear of death is arising… but no owner is found”. This is a radically different structure.
At a certain point, something flips:
You stop trying to secure the “I” that is fearful because you see there isn’t one to secure
Then: Death is no longer “the end of me”. It’s just another process of transformation and change.
Where fear actually comes from:
Fear of death arises from reification: That is, treating the “I” as more real, solid, and independent than it actually is.
This creates: A sense of something to defend. A sense of something that can be lost.
When that solidity is analysed and not found: the basis of fear weakens.
You can try this gently:
When fear of death arises, ask: “What exactly is threatened?” Look carefully: Is it the body? A thought? A feeling? Something else?
Keep going until: You can’t find a solid “owner” of the fear. At that point, something shifts: Fear may still arise—but it has no solid center.
Over time fear of death may still arise—but feels less absolute.
The “target” of fear becomes unclear.
The one who seems to be in danger cannot be found in the way it appears.
A kind of openness replaces tightness.
Not because you convinced yourself but because the assumption collapsed under examination.
Now reflect:
Every being fears loss. Every being experiences uncertainty. Every being faces death.
Bring to mind countless beings: those who are lonely, those who are ill, those grieving right now.
“Just like me, all beings wish to be free from fear.”
“Buddhist Nonduality, Melbourne, Middle Way, Nagarjuna 