Thusness · John Tan

After Anatta · The Logic · Bāhiya and Chapter 3

Decoding Anatta and MMK Chapter 3

In seeing, just the seen. Without a seer, no seen. Why the Buddha's words to Bāhiya and Nāgārjuna's verses are one insight, and how that insight ends in spontaneous presence.

The Buddha told a wandering ascetic named Bāhiya: in the seen, there will be just the seen. No one behind the eyes, doing the seeing.

Nāgārjuna, in chapter three of his Fundamental Verses, says: without a seer, there is no seen. And without the seen, there is no seer.

Many people are confused when they hear these two together. The Buddha takes the seer away. Nāgārjuna seems to put it back, and then tie it to the seen. So they see a contradiction. There is none. One is the direct insight. The other is how the logic of dependency expresses that same insight and taste.

I want to make this as plain as I can, because everything after anatta turns on it. It also answers a second question. When I tell people that, to me, dependent arising is spontaneous presence, they ask why. How can the hard logic of Nāgārjuna lead to something as effortless as spontaneous presence? It is the same answer, carried one step further.

Subject, verb, object

Start with how we usually talk. “I see the tree.” There is someone here, the seer. There is something there, the tree. And there is an act that crosses the gap between them, the seeing. Subject, verb, object. Three parts.

That shape feels like a fact about the world. It is a fact about sentences. A sentence holds a subject still, so that the verb can happen to it. The habit runs so deep that we feel it must be so. Every action needs someone doing it. Every seeing needs a seer.

This is the logic of substance. Things are there first, finished and on their own. Then they act, and are acted on.

We say “the wind blows”, as if there were a wind first, and then it did the blowing. But when the blowing stops, no wind is left over, resting somewhere. The blowing is the wind. Keep this in mind. Everything below does the same thing to something else.

Bāhiya: the direct taste

Bāhiya was told to drop that shape, not by arguing, but by looking. In seeing, just the seen. When this is tasted, it is very plain. There is the tree, vivid and bright. Look for a seer standing behind it, and none is found. Not a seer hidden somewhere else. Simply none. The seeing has no centre. This is the insight of anatta, no self. It is not a theory. It is direct.

It is exact to say what falls away. The person does not fall away: you still have a name, catch the bus, keep your promises. Seeing does not stop; it is brighter than before. What falls away is one picture: someone standing behind the action, making it happen. A doer behind the doing.

But insight is not yet understanding. Many who have tasted it keep the old grammar in their thinking. They say “there is no seer”, and still picture a subject that went missing, a gap where it used to be. Or they turn the seer into a big, impersonal awareness, and the subject is back, wearing a larger coat.

What Nāgārjuna is refuting

This is where Nāgārjuna comes in. He does not give a new experience. He shows why the old grammar cannot hold.

In the substantialist framework, an action must always be started by an agent. Nāgārjuna is refuting that. Many think he is affirming it.

Watch how he argues. He takes the logic of substance at its word. You say a seer is there, on its own side. Very well: is that seer seeing, or not?

If it is not seeing, in what sense is it a seer? A seer that does not see is a seer in name only.

If it is seeing, then the seeing is counted twice. Once to make it a seer, and once more for the seeing it does.

So the seer is not found with seeing, and not found without it: “There is no seer, either bound up with seeing or apart from it” (MMK 3.6). Then he turns to the seen. A thing is only “seen” in relation to seeing. Take seeing away, and nothing is left that is seen.

The verse, read again

Now read his verse again: without a seer, there is no seen. He is not saying, “there is a seer, and it leans on the seen.” He is saying the seer cannot stand on its own. Neither can the seen. Each is named only in relation to the other. Take away the relation, and neither is left over.

That is not a seer put back. It is the seer taken apart, inside the very grammar that made it.

Why this leaves just the seen

So how does “no seen without a seer, no seer without the seen” become “in the seen, just the seen”? Nāgārjuna does not remove a seer that was there. He shows that “seer” was only ever a name for one side of the seeing.

Take away the colours, the shapes and the light, and look for what is left over that was the seer. Nothing. Everything “seer” pointed to is found only in the seeing. Just as “wind” adds nothing to the blowing, “seer” adds nothing to the seeing.

Think of “here” and “there”. “Here” makes sense only in relation to “there”, and “there” only in relation to “here”. Look for “here” by itself, apart from any “there”, and it is not a place you can stand. The seer is like that “here”: the point the scene seems to be seen from. Seen through, there is no “here” behind the view. There is just the view.

This is how the Buddha goes on in his teaching to Bāhiya (Udāna 1.10). When in the seen there is just the seen, there is no “you” in it, and then you are neither here, nor there, nor anywhere in between. The Buddha says it from the direct taste. Nāgārjuna gives the logic for it: here and there are named together, so neither is found by itself.

And this is why Nāgārjuna's verse must run both ways. “Just the seen” is easy to misread: the seer gone, and an object out there left standing. That is still the logic of substance, with one side missing. But there is no seen without the seer either. So the seen is not left as an object out there. “Just the seen” is the appearing itself, vivid and complete, with nothing standing behind it and nothing standing apart from it. Seer, seeing and seen are three ways of speaking about one appearing.

So many readers get Nāgārjuna backwards. They hear “seer and seen depend on each other”, and picture two solid things, joined by a thread. But “depend” here does not join two things. It shows there were never two things there to join. This is the logic of dependency. Look for the thing apart from what it depends on, and it is not found.

The same move, on everything

Chapter three is not a special case. Nāgārjuna makes the same move again and again, on one thing after another. Each time he takes something that seems to stand behind an action, doing it. Each time he asks: is it the same as the action, or other than it? Each time it is found as neither.

  • The walker and walking (chapter 2): “A goer does not go, and a non-goer does not go” (2.8). The goer is neither the same as the going nor other than it (2.18).
  • The seer and seeing (chapter 3): “There is no seer, either bound up with seeing or apart from it” (3.6).
  • Fire and burning (chapter 10): if fire were the fuel, the one who acts and what is acted on would be one. If it were other than the fuel, it could exist without fuel (10.1).
  • The cause and its effect (chapter 1): “Not from itself, not from another, not from both, and not without a cause: no thing anywhere, of any kind, is ever found to have arisen” (1.1).

The walker does not walk. Not because nobody walks, but because “walker” and “walking” are not two things, one doing the other. Fire is not a thing that arrives and grabs the wood. Wood is only fuel in relation to burning, and burning is only fire in relation to fuel. And chapter one goes furthest of all. It takes the doer out of causes. A cause does not stand there first and then make its effect, the way a factory makes goods.

So the two teachings meet. Anatta finds no doer in seeing, and it finds this by looking. Nāgārjuna finds no doer anywhere: in the walker, the fire, the cause, the seen. He finds this by reasoning. One shows that no seer is found when we look. The other shows why no seer could be found, however we look, and carries the same finding to every thing.

This is the move from the first fold of emptiness to the second. It did not happen by itself for me. Anatta dawned around 1997, but for years afterwards my experience and insight were non-substantialist while my view was not. In experience, the taste was implicitly non-dual. But when the mind tried to understand it, it could not, because its logical thought was always substantial. Insight without the logic drifts back into nouns. The seer returns as a witness, a ground, a vast awareness. Logic without insight stays a clever argument about words. Only together do the view and the taste agree.

Neither the parts nor the whole

We must understand why “found as neither” is emptiness. It is easy to read past it.

Take a car. If “car” pointed to something that stands on its own, we could point to it. There are only so many places it could be. It could be the parts: one of them, or all of them. It could be something apart from the parts, a whole over and above them. Or it could be their arrangement, the shape they are put together in.

Look in each place. No single part is the car, not the wheel, not the engine. All the parts in a box are not a car either. Take every part away, and no car is left over to be the whole. And the shape is only the parts in a certain relation; it is not one more thing hidden among them. Nāgārjuna asks the same of fire and fuel, and Candrakīrti of the chariot: the same as its parts, or other than them? Neither.

These are all the places a car standing on its own could be. Found in none of them, it has no nature of its own. That not-finding is what “empty” means. It does not mean the car is made of emptiness, and emptiness is not something left over once the parts are gone. It only means that, looked for on its own side, there is nothing there to find.

And still the car drives you home. The search looked for one thing only, a car from its own side. It never touched the car that works. So the car is empty and it works, and these are not two facts. Looked for, it is not found; met, it is there, doing what cars do. That is why Nāgārjuna can say that dependent arising is what we call emptiness.

The seer is the same. Is the seer the same as the seeing? Then “seer” adds nothing. Is it something apart from the seeing? Then it is nowhere to be found. Neither, so the seer is empty. The seen gets the same test, and is empty too. What is left is not a remainder. It is the seeing, vivid and complete: in the seen, just the seen.

The wind once more. The wind is not the air, the parts. It is not something apart from the air, a whole. Found as neither, yet the blowing goes on.

Named is not labelled

I have said that seer and seen are named together, and that the car is named in dependence on its parts. This is not a label stuck on something already there, like “sugar” written on a jar. Naming here is picking something out as “this”, in the appearing itself, before any words. There is nothing bare underneath it, and it is the whole status the thing has. I go through this in What the Logic Is Looking At, “Designation needs no words”.

The seeing, too

There is one more step here, and it is easy to miss. Once the seer is gone, the mind wants to keep something. “Fine, no seer. Just seeing, then. Pure verb.” But a verb can be made into a thing as easily as a noun. If “seeing” becomes a stream, a process, a field that everything happens in, the substance is back. It has only moved from the subject to the verb.

So the seeing, too, is looked for. Apart from the colour, the light, the eye and the tree, where is it? Not found. Seer, seeing and seen are named together, on conditions. None is found on its own. In Nāgārjuna's words, dependent arising is what we call emptiness. That is a designation in dependence, and that itself is the middle way (MMK 24.18).

Not mind either

There is one more place the mind likes to hide something. It comes most of all to practitioners who have a direct taste and insight that appearances are one's own clarity. The sound is not out there, heard by someone in here; the sound itself is clear, itself the knowing. The tree is luminous. Nothing appears apart from that clarity. The taste is genuine. But read with the old logic, it turns into a conclusion: everything is made of one stuff, and that stuff is mind.

The physical world can seem to point the same way. Take weight. It feels like the most private thing there is, sitting in the body like a stone in a pocket. But weight is a pull between the body and the earth. On the Moon it is a sixth; in orbit it is gone, and not a gram of you is lost. Ernst Mach argued that even the body's resistance to being pushed comes from its relation to all the matter in the universe. So where is the line between my body and the world, in the heaviness itself? It is not found. Matter loses its weight and turns light, magical and plastic (Step 2, “Your own weight”). It is easy to take one more step and say: so it was all mind.

But in Buddhism everything is a phenomenon, mind and matter alike, and the knowing is on that list too. Consciousness is one of the five aggregates, and the Buddha says it is named after its condition, as a fire is named after what it burns. Nothing knows from outside the list (What the Logic Is Looking At, “What the logic looks at: a dharma”).

So mind cannot be the ground of the rest. It is on the list, not under it, and it meets the same test. Weight is not found in the body by itself; it depends on the earth. Knowing is not found by itself either; there is no hearing apart from the sound, the ear and the attention. Both are vivid, both work, and neither is found from its own side. The solid is not more real than the dreamlike, and the mental is not more real than the physical. Making matter the floor and making mind the floor are the same mistake.

Then what of the taste that appearances are one's own clarity? “Own” here does not mean owned. The clarity is the appearance's own: unborrowed, not lent to it by a knower behind it, and not a mind-stuff that appearances are made of. “Mind-like” is not “made of mind” (What the Logic Is Looking At, “The clarity, mistaken as self and Self”).

A simple check. If everything is my mind, or the one Mind, then appearances belong to someone after all, and the owner is back in the largest coat of all. Appearing is clear and complete, and it belongs to no one.

Nothing is put in its place

This is the point everything depends on, and it is the point most often missed.

There are two ways to say no. One way says no and then puts something else in its place. “There is no small self, so there must be a big Self.” “There is no seer, so there must be pure awareness.” “There is no thing, so there must be a field or a ground that things float in.” Each time, the doer leaves by the front door and comes back by the back door.

Nāgārjuna's no is the other kind. It removes and adds nothing. The tradition calls it a non-implicative negation: it denies without implying anything else. No seer, and nothing in the seer's place. No producing cause, and nothing producing instead. Even dependence is not kept as a new thing. The conditions are not a web or a machine standing behind what appears. They, too, are not found from their own side.

The book says this in its first lines. The Buddha taught dependent arising “without ceasing, without arising … without coming and without going”. No list of things that make, and no last maker behind them all.

How it ends in spontaneous presence

Now go back to the wind. If no wind stands behind the blowing, pushing it, the blowing is not being done. It is not made. It is simply the blowing, complete as it is.

Now widen that to everything, as Nāgārjuna does. If nothing makes the sound of a car going by, the sound is not a product. It is not waiting for anything to finish it. It shows up whole and vivid, exactly as its conditions meet. If nothing makes the thought, the thought appears and goes by itself. No one has to hold it or push it away. It is the same with blue and red in What the Logic Is Looking At: red did not make blue appear, and blue did not make red appear. Nothing produced it.

That is what spontaneous presence (lhun grub) means. Appearing is already complete, because nothing is hidden behind it, doing it. It is the last of the seven phases: presence is spontaneously perfected. Not a new state reached at the end, but how it always was, once the doer is gone everywhere. As I put it: anatta is a seal, not a stage.

This is also why it is effortless. It is not difficult to see, especially in meditation. There is an energetic openness and release, as if everything is just so, without an actor. That lets us understand that holding, pushing and managing are the agent itself: one happening split into two, a doer and its doing, through a confusion that language and its structure lead us into. When no doer is found anywhere, there is no one left to push. The ease that anatta first gives in seeing now runs through everything.

Two cautions keep this right.

  • Spontaneous does not mean uncaused. The car still has to go by for its sound to appear. Conditions still come together, and the world still follows them. What is gone is the maker, not the order. Spontaneous presence is dependent arising with no producer.
  • Spontaneous presence is not a source. It is not a ground that gives off appearances. That would bring the doer back once more, in its most beautiful coat. Nothing stands behind appearing, not even “spontaneity”.

So when I say that dependent arising is spontaneous presence, this is what I mean. They are not two things. They are one appearing, described in two ways. Dependent arising is how it is described when we analyse: conditions, and nothing found from its own side. Spontaneous presence is the same appearing when the habit of fixing stops: complete, effortless, with nothing behind it. Neither description is higher.

Clarity is never missing

One thing must be said plainly here, or all of this can be misheard. You cannot talk about phenomena without clarity. A sound is clear as sound. A colour is vivid as colour. A thought is known as it appears. A phenomenon is whatever can be known, so to speak of one at all is already to speak of something clear. Dependent arising is never a machine working in the dark, waiting for a knower to light it up. The clarity is always there.

So the question is never whether there is clarity. It is only whether the clarity is abstracted out and reified. Clarity shows up in every sight, every sound, every thought. The mind notices this sameness and lifts it out: awareness, presence, the one thing that is there in all of them. Then it takes that abstraction to stand on its own. It becomes the background that everything appears in, the witness that knows it all, the Mind that gives off appearances. The substrate is back, now made of clarity. It is the same move that makes the chariot a thing over its parts, done to the knowing.

Left as it is, the clarity is not lifted out. It stays the appearing's own: this sound's clearness, this colour's vividness, found only as them and on their conditions. It is not a second thing the sound has. So it can be neither a background nor one great clarity behind the many appearings.

The same lifting out, done to other things, is the same mistake. Abstract the conditions and make them a thing, and you get a web or a machine behind the world. Abstract the appearing, and you get an object out there. Abstract emptiness, and you get a ground, a field, a space everything sits in. Dependent arising undoes all of these. It does not take the clarity away; it only stops it from being made into a thing.

When nothing is abstracted, nothing stands behind the appearing: no maker, no knower, no background. Without a substrate, appearing is clear and complete as its conditions meet, with nothing behind it making it clear or finishing it. That is spontaneous presence.

Nothing is taken away

None of this takes anything away. The tree is still green. You still read road signs and catch a ball. Because nothing is there from its own side, things can change, meet and work. A thing with a fixed essence could never change, or take part in cause and effect. If a seer were truly fixed, it could never learn to see differently.

So why must it be said as subject, verb and object? It need not be. That shape is useful for talking. It is not the shape of what appears. “I see the tree” can stay, as a convenient way of speaking. Nothing has to be found behind the words.

In one line

Anatta finds no doer in seeing. Nāgārjuna finds no doer anywhere, and puts nothing in its place. With no doer anywhere, and the clarity not lifted out and made into a thing, everything appears clear and complete, by itself, as its conditions meet. That is spontaneous presence.

Try it

Sit for a moment and look, or listen. A colour, a shape, a car, a fan, a voice.

  1. Notice it, vivid, just as it is. Then look for the one who is seeing or hearing. Do not argue. Just look.
  2. Now look for the seeing apart from what is seen, and the seen apart from the seeing. Look for something that makes it happen.
  3. Nothing is found. Do not put anything in its place. Let it be as it is, already complete.

What is left is not a blank. It is the scene, bright and whole, coming and going by itself, with no one standing behind it, and nothing standing under it.

In seeing, just the seen. Now you know why.

The chain, 3 of 7. Next: Vivid and Nowhere: What a Phenomenon Is, the search for a floor in time, matter and space, and why the conditions are empty too.

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Each section of this page is argued in full elsewhere. To go deeper on any step: