Beyond Cause and Effect

What this article is about

Part IV of The Observer and the Taste of Presence (Chapters 17 to 23) is where I take on an old tension. Nāgārjuna takes causality apart. Dzogchen speaks of realisation as "beyond cause and effect" (rgyu 'bras las 'das pa). Read carelessly, the two seem to pull in opposite directions, and the Dzogchen phrase can sound like a claim to stand outside conditions altogether.

The danger I keep coming back to is a quiet substantialism. Awareness (rigpa) or spontaneous presence (lhun grub) gets treated as an uncaused ground: something that produces appearances, or that stands above ordinary conditioning, untouched by it. That is not what I mean, and I do not think it is what the tradition means at its best. "Beyond cause and effect" does not exempt anything from dependent arising, and it does not point to an uncaused source. It marks the place where the question "what produces appearances?" loses what it was pointing at, once we stop reifying things, causal powers and a last substrate.

1. Taking apart how we picture causes (Chapter 17)

Three assumptions, and a fourth

When we think about causes, three assumptions usually ride along unnoticed:

1. Own essence. The cause and the effect each exist from their own side (svabhāva).
2. Causal power. The cause carries a power or a substance and hands it over to the effect.
3. A substrate. Underneath the meeting of conditions there must be some bed that holds them together and keeps them orderly.

Candrakīrti's sevenfold search for the chariot shows the pattern. The chariot is not found in its parts, not apart from them, and not as a separate thing underneath them. The same search, turned on causes, finds no cause with its own essence, no power travelling across, and no bed underneath.

So I hold two things at once, and I do not let go of either:

• No producer or substrate is found. Every candidate, looked for, turns out to be a whole that is designated, not found.
• Appearances arise without fail when their conditions meet. Fuel, air and heat come together, and there is burning.

The flame, and three senses of "cause"

The flame is how I put these together. If the fuel produced the flame as a separate substance, something would have to pass from one to the other, and nothing is found passing. If the flame arose without fuel, it would be uncaused. Neither is the case. What helps is to see that "cause" is used in three different senses:

• A producer: something existing by itself that makes an effect outside itself. This is what Nāgārjuna refutes: things do not arise from themselves, from something other, from both, or without a cause (MMK 1.1).
• A condition that lines up: a factor in the web that lets something appear, like striking a match where there is air. This is conventional truth, and it stands.
• A label for a link: "cause" is simply the name attention gives when it singles out one sequence in a web of conditions that has no edges of its own.

This is why dependent arising, dependent designation and emptiness are one and the same (MMK 24.18).

The last spell

Even after essence, power and substrate have gone, one demand survives: "But why do appearances arise at all?" I call this the last spell. It is not asking how things work; that question has answers. It is asking for a final reason, something that would give us permission to stop looking. Because nothing stands behind appearances producing them, there is no hidden answer to give. The question simply has nothing to point to. When Dzogchen says there is "no why and no because" (ci'i phyir dang gang gi phyir med pa), I read it this way: the reference has run out. It is not a void, and it is not a mystery kept in reserve.

2. Spontaneous presence is flat (Chapter 18)

Spontaneous presence without a substance

In Dzogchen, lhun grub, spontaneous presence, means that appearances show themselves clearly without being manufactured. The risk is sliding into causelessness (ahetuvāda), which would turn spontaneous presence into exactly the own-nature that Madhyamaka refutes.

Two safeguards keep the two traditions together:

1. Emptiness is not a backdrop. It is not something lying behind appearances.
2. Emptiness is empty. It cannot serve as a final bedrock either.

Since there is no phenomenon that has not arisen in dependence, there is no phenomenon that is not empty (MMK 24.19). Spontaneous presence is that same appearing, met once the demand for a producer, a substrate or a final "why" has worn itself out.

A flat web, and a thin "self" in self-appearing

The picture I use is flatness. Conditions are not a basement on which appearances are built, and appearances are not a coating laid over conditions. There is no level above another: the conditions and the appearing are one and the same, and no one owns it.

Because analysis finds no observer standing apart, appearances cannot belong to a subject. So I read "self-appearing" (rang snang) thinly: "self" only says that the appearance is not borrowed from something else and not passed through a go-between. It does not mean that a self owns it or makes it.

3. Where Madhyamaka meets Dzogchen (Chapter 19)

Chapter 19 asks whether Dzogchen's self-knowing awareness (rang rig) survives the Prāsaṅgika criticism of the Yogācāra idea of self-awareness (svasaṃvedana).

Candrakīrti's objection, in chapter 6 of Entering the Middle Way, is the old one: a sword blade cannot cut itself, and a fingertip cannot touch itself, so a cognition cannot know itself without splitting into a knower and a known. The other side, through Dharmakīrti and Prajñākaragupta, answers with the lamp, which lights itself and its surroundings at once. On that reading, luminosity is not a second act turned back on the first. It is the clarity of knowing itself, and it is as empty as everything else.

Here I lean on John Whitney Pettit's study and translation of Mipham's Beacon of Certainty. Mipham shows how the Prāsaṅgika negations clear away every extreme of existence and non-existence, and so leave room for recognising that clarity and emptiness are not two. I also draw on David Higgins's work on the distinction between ordinary mind (sems) and pristine awareness (ye shes), and on Longchenpa's own care with the word "ground" (gzhi): it is called a ground only from a relative point of view, and in the nature of things it is empty of being a ground.

Both traditions also know the same trap in practice. Dzogchen teachers distinguish pushing thoughts down from letting them release themselves (rang grol); pushing them down makes a cultivated stillness, and with it a quiet observer comes back. Candrakīrti accepts calm abiding (śamatha) as a conventional help, but calm held in place by effort becomes one more thing to cling to unless insight into emptiness sees through it.

4. Immediacy (Chapters 20 and 21)

The gap was never holding anything up

Ordinary experience assumes a rift: a witness inside, things outside. Practice does not build a bridge across that rift. It sees that the gap was never holding anything up.

• Immediacy is not an extra charge of energy or a special intensity.
• It is only the stopping of the conceptual go-between that keeps experience at arm's length.
• Because the gap was constructed, its ending is a stopping (nirodha), not something achieved.

In the seen, only the seen

Chapter 21 grounds this in the Bāhiya Sutta (Udāna 1.10), in Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu's translation: "In reference to the seen, there will be only the seen. In reference to the heard, only the heard."

I distinguish two ways of seeing:

• Contrived seeing: the same sights and sounds, but with a subtle grasping at freedom, stillness or the witness as things to have.
• Open seeing: the same field, with no vantage point added.

5. Painted cakes, and a negation that leaves nothing behind (Chapters 22 and 23)

Dōgen's painted rice cakes, and Xiangyan

In Chapter 22 I turn to Dōgen's fascicle Painting of a Rice Cake (Gabyō):

• The old Zen saying is that a painted rice cake does not satisfy hunger: concepts cannot feed you.
• Dōgen turns it over. The hunger is painted, the rice cake is painted, and the whole world is painted. No unpainted world is hidden underneath designation.
• Xiangyan Zhixian burned his notes because he had been putting scholarly abstractions in place of direct seeing. When a pebble struck bamboo, his awakening did not escape designation into some bare layer beneath it. It saw through the demand for an unpainted essence behind the sound.

A negation that installs nothing (Chapter 23)

Chapter 23 sets out the logic of recognition (ngo sprod) in Dzogchen. There are two kinds of negation:

• An implicative negation (paryudāsa, yin dgag) denies one thing and puts something else in its place: it negates ordinary thought, say, and installs a Cosmic Mind.
• A non-implicative negation (prasajya-pratiṣedha, med dgag) simply removes what is denied, own-nature, an independent cause, a substrate, and puts nothing in its place.

Recognition has to stay in the second kind. If it slides into the first, "the Ground" or "Awareness" becomes a new absolute, and the reification is back.

The graded analysis of the Gelug (rim gyis pa) and the direct recognition of Dzogchen (gcig car ba) teach differently, but they share one logic: freedom cannot be produced by causes and conditions. If practice produced liberation, liberation would be compounded (saṃskṛta), and it would decay. Practice only loosens the habit of reifying that keeps the unconditioned (asaṃskṛta) from being recognised.

6. What is traditional and what is mine

I want to be clear about which parts come from the tradition and which are my own frameworks:

Conclusion

Part IV is a defence of Dzogchen practice that does not lean on a foundation. "Beyond cause and effect" is not an exemption from dependent arising. It is the quieting of the habit that reifies. Read that way, the old tension between Madhyamaka logic and Dzogchen experience falls away. What remains is neither a final ground to hold on to nor a nihilistic void, but clear knowing, open and owned by no one, as practice.

Read Part IV itself in the book: Chapter 17, The Three Assumptions and the Fourth.