Bonus article · The Logical Necessity of a Substrateless World
Insubstantial Appearances
Two mirror-image mistakes about appearances, and four points that loosen both: things are vivid, workable and empty.
We carry two misconceptions about appearances, and they mirror each other.
The first is the more familiar. We treat what we see, touch, and think about as if each thing had a fixed nature of its own, existing from its own side and waiting to be found. This is the habit of reification, and it is so ordinary that it rarely shows up as a view. It shows up as the plain sense that things are simply there.
The second is less often noticed. Having heard that things lack fixed nature, we imagine that a thing without essence must be a faint, ghostly image, something that wavers and could be brushed aside. We picture emptiness as thinness and appearance as shadow. Yet what we see, touch, and think about is vivid and solid in its working, and the absence of essence does not make it less present.
Both misconceptions assume that solidity and emptiness exclude each other. The first says that whatever is solid must be solid from its own side. The second says that whatever lacks such a side must be unreal. Four points follow from examining this assumption.
1. Mutual Dependence
Attributes, identities, and relationships are defined in mutual dependence. None is established first and then placed in relation to the others. Each is what it is only through its relations, and these arise together without priority.
Consider long and short. Nothing is long or short in itself. A stick is long beside a pebble and short beside a tree. Remove the comparison and "long" has nothing to rest on. Yet we experience length as a property the stick has by itself, and we forget that the comparison supplied it.
The same holds for parent and child. A person is a parent only because there is a child, and a child is a child only because there is a parent. Neither is the primary fact. Yet in ordinary speech "mother" seems a fixed quality of one person, detached from the relationship that makes the word apply.
Modern physics reaches a similar place. Carlo Rovelli's relational interpretation of quantum mechanics holds that a physical property takes a value only relative to another system it interacts with, so the same system can have different properties relative to different observers. Karen Barad, drawing on Niels Bohr, makes a parallel move in what she calls agential realism. For Barad, phenomena are the primary units, and the entities we later name as objects emerge through intra-action, the mutual constitution of entities within a phenomenon. In both, relation comes before the relata. The things that relate are not finished units that then meet.
Yet each account still gives the relating a determinate structure. Rovelli's relational facts are treated as objective, and Barad's phenomena follow lawful patterns of enactment. Relation is thus taken as the ground that is finally described. The Madhyamaka view asks whether that ground can be found at all. If relations are as empty as the things they relate, then nothing lies beneath the pattern to be identified as the real structure. The scientific accounts are best read as reliable designations within their domains, not as the last ground of what appears. The contrast is therefore not between relational and non-relational views, since both sides are relational. It is between a relational ground that is still sought and the emptiness of the ground itself.
Identity works the same way. What you call "my car" is defined by its wheels, its engine, the road it drives on, the owner's purpose, and the language that names it. Gather those relations and you do not find a car lying underneath them. The car is the name applied in dependence on these parts and purposes, and it holds only as long as they hold.
Mutual dependence is not a claim that a hidden structure ties everything together. It describes how things appear when we examine what they are defined by. When the search for a self-standing essence finds only relations, the relations are not found from their own side either. Nothing is left standing underneath, and the car still drives.
2. Empty Appearances
Insubstantial appearances can feel solidly real and can be handled like coins and apples. They appear as things, and they are empty of essence. Nothing stands behind them to make them things in their own right. The error is to expect that empty appearances should feel flimsy. They can be as vivid and solid in their working as anything we know.
Our habitual tendencies carry pre-assumptions that make this hard to see. We have been conditioned, over a long time, to expect that a thing which strikes us must be a thing in its own right. So when a coin is pressed into the palm or an apple is tossed from hand to hand, we do not experience the object as a pattern. We experience a hard, weighty thing whose nature is obvious. Reification supplies that assumption before any reflection begins.
A magician makes a coin appear in an empty hand and moves it from place to place. The coin is vivid. You would swear to its weight and metal. Yet it has no core that persists when the trick ends, and the audience's conviction that a real coin exists is itself part of the performance.
Emptiness does not mean harmlessness, however. A car is empty in exactly this sense. It has no fixed essence that makes it a car from its own side. It is a pattern of metal, fuel, road, driver, and the name we give it. Yet when that pattern swerves into a crowd and strikes a person, the injury is entirely real. The bruises, the broken bone, and the grief of the family are not illusions. The car's emptiness does not reduce the consequences. They follow from the conditions that met, and they are empty in the same way, and just as real.
The same holds for the apple and the coin, in gentler form. A coin tossed carelessly can bruise a child, and an apple thrown across a room can break a window. Their emptiness does not prevent these effects. The effects arise because the patterns that make up the coin or the apple are vivid and interact with other patterns: with bodies, with glass, with expectation.
Dreams show the same thing from another side. In a dream a falling stone is as heavy as any stone while you are in it, and a cup on the table is as solid as cups ever are. None of that solidity survives waking, and you do not conclude that the dream held hidden objects that vanished. The appearances were vivid, and their solidity belonged to the dream: the dreamed stone and the dreaming mind appeared together, and on waking neither is found apart from the other.
Ordinary appearances are no different. A tree seems to stand in its own place, with its own bark and height, remaining itself through the seasons. Its bark is made of cells that are themselves processes, its height is measured from a ground that is also changing, and its identity depends on our naming it and on the living relations around it. The tree appears, bears weight, and offers shade. It is empty of any essence that would make it a self-standing thing, and it is not thereby diminished.
Emptiness is not a blank, and it is not a dimming of appearance. It is the way appearance is. Appearances are vivid, they can be handled and used, they can injure and heal, and they are empty. These do not conflict. Their emptiness is not a lack in their working. It is what their dependent working amounts to, in all its solidity and consequence.
3. Functioning Without Inherent Existence
We don't need truly existing things to function at all. We need only the designation of a vivid pattern arising within a set of conditions. Those conditions are themselves designated in dependence, not a web standing behind the impressions, so the impressions arise together with them and are not delivered from a substrate beneath.
Our habits lead us to assume that something must be the real basis for things to work. When a light switches on, we picture a hidden current, a fixed wire, a true source of power behind the bulb. When someone we love speaks kindly, we imagine a fixed "self" behind the words that really means them. The pre-assumption is that function must rest on a substance. Yet the light works, and the kindness is felt, without any such ground being found.
A bridge carries traffic without any single part of it being "the bridge." The steel, the deck, the supports, the traffic, and the name we give the whole all function together. Nothing has to be the true bridge for the bridge to hold weight. A pattern arises within conditions, we call it a bridge, and it works, fully and reliably. A truck can cross it, and the bridge can collapse under a truck that is too heavy. Both outcomes are real, and neither requires the bridge to be a thing in its own right.
A conversation works the same way. Two people speak, and meaning passes between them. No meaning sits in a sentence waiting to be transmitted intact. The words, the listeners, the context, and the expectations form a pattern, and understanding is designated within it. When the conditions change, the meaning changes too. A cruel word said in a certain tone can wound for years, and a sentence misread can start a quarrel that ends a friendship. The consequences are concrete, yet the meaning that wounds was never a substance carried in the sentence.
What we call "the world" is this kind of patterning. Mountains, rivers, and people appear, function, and are relied upon, without requiring any inherent essence. A river can flood a village, and a mountain can shelter one. They do not need to be substances in order to be real as appearances, and they act on us as surely as anything could.
It may seem that the conditions must be the real foundation, since they "produce" the pattern. But the conditions are patterns too. They are designated in the same way, depend on other conditions, and arise together with what they condition. Nāgārjuna's examination of conditions in the first chapter of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā presses exactly this point: when the conditions are searched for as a fixed ground, none is found, yet the pattern they support still functions. Once the conditions are seen to be designated, there is no bottom layer producing impressions from outside. There are only vivid patterns appearing on their conditions, with all their effects, and the conditions are no more found than the patterns.
4. Karma and Habitual Conditioning
Karma and habitual conditionings make up the impressions. What appears to each mind is shaped by the tendencies it has accumulated, and those tendencies are themselves designated in mutual dependence, not a web behind appearances. Habit does not sit behind appearances as a hidden cause. It is the patterning through which they show up as solid and separate.
Our habitual tendencies carry pre-assumptions that we rarely examine. We expect water to be wet and drinkable, a face to be someone, a pain to be a thing located in a body part. These expectations feel like plain observation. They are in fact accumulated patterning, and they decide what kind of thing shows up for us.
Take water. People see water as something to drink, fish see it as a home, and in the traditional image of the hungry ghosts, beings driven by craving see it as pus and blood. No water-in-itself lies underneath the three as the real one. The impression differs because each kind of perceiver brings a different pattern of habit and need. The water that appears is shaped together with the one who perceives it, and no single version is the water as it truly is. Yet each version acts. The thirsty drink, the fish swim, and the ghost suffers from a substance that is only the appearance it has been conditioned to see.
Consider a coiled rope seen in dim light. You see a snake and start. Your heart pounds, your muscles tense, and you might step back and fall. The fear and the snake-shape are the impression, built from past fears and from the habit of expecting danger in that shape. When you look again and see the rope, the snake leaves no remainder. It was the patterning, not a hidden object briefly mistaken for a rope. But the fear was real in its effects, and the fall, had it happened, would have been real too.
Recognizing a friend's face works the same way. Across a crowded room you see someone and think, "There's Anna." The face you recognize is assembled from years of habitual recognition. It seems solid and singular, yet it changes with mood, lighting, and expectation. Shift the expectation and the same face can look like a stranger, and a warm greeting can turn into an awkward silence. The habit that assembled the face also shapes the relationship it carries.
A sore knee is a clear case. It is felt as one definite thing located in the knee. But the habit of grasping at discomfort as "my pain, in my knee" gives it the feel of a solid object. Attend closely and the same sensations can be experienced as heat, vibration, or movement, with no fixed "knee-pain" appearing at all. The solidity lay in the habit of grasping, and that grasping shapes how much the pain controls the day, how we walk, and whether we sleep.
Habit is not a private failing. It is the common patterning through which appearances take shape, not a ground beneath them, and it arises in dependence like everything else. Seeing this does not mean abandoning appearances. It means seeing how they are built, so that their solidity loosens and they can be used without being clung to. And because habit shapes what we do, changing habit changes what the world does to us.
Closing
Taken together, these four points describe a single movement of understanding. The first shows that things are defined by their relations, and that even the relations, as modern physics describes them, are still sought as a ground. The second shows that the apparent solidity of appearances is empty of essence, and that emptiness does not make them flimsy or harmless. The third shows that functioning requires only designated patterns within conditions, and that the conditions belong to the same pattern. The fourth shows that the impressions arising within those patterns are shaped by karma and habit, which arise in dependence too.
Two errors are being addressed. The first is the belief that something stands behind appearances and holds them in place. The second is the belief that appearances without such a ground must be unreal, faint, and disposable. Once both loosen, appearances are neither solid objects nor illusory shadows. They are vivid, workable, and empty, with real consequences, and they can be met without the grasping that made them seem like things.