Examination of the Senses

Open your eyes and the room is there: the window, the chair, the light on the wall. It seems obvious that the eye sees and the room is seen, and that somewhere behind the eye there is someone who does the seeing. The third chapter asks whether seeing can be found as a power the eye has on its own, and whether a seer can be found apart from the seeing.

The chapter is short, nine verses, and it borrows its tools from the chapters before. The three-part analysis of Chapter 2 returns, and so does the question of whether a doer is found apart from the deed. The target this time is the senses, the six 'faculties' through which, for Buddhist schools of Nāgārjuna's time, all experience arrives.

The verses

The translation is new, made from the Sanskrit for this site. The Sanskrit is given above each verse; it follows the GRETIL e-text (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Six faculties and their fields

Verse 3.1 sets out the theory. There are six faculties (indriya): seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and mind, which knows thoughts. Each has its field: sights for the eye, sounds for the ear, and so on. Here 'seeing' (darśana) means the eye as a power to see, not just the act. The Abhidharma treated these faculties as real elements, each with its own nature. The eye's nature was to see.

Nāgārjuna does not deny that we see. He asks what it would mean for seeing to be the eye's own nature, a power it carries around in itself.

Seeing does not see itself

The first argument is famous and compressed (3.2). The eye does not see itself. Then how can it see anything else?

At first this looks like a bad argument. Why should seeing others depend on seeing oneself? A knife cuts bread without cutting itself. The point lies in the word 'own-nature'. If seeing were the eye's own nature, something it had by itself, it would have it in every circumstance, with or without an object, including when turned towards itself. An own-nature cannot switch off. A nature that only shows up when there is something else to see is not the eye's own. It belongs to the meeting of eye, light and object. So the reasoning runs: what seeing has by itself, it would show in relation to itself; it shows nothing there; so it has no seeing by itself to show anything else.

The opponent offers an example (3.3). Fire lights up other things without lighting itself; perhaps seeing is like that. Nāgārjuna answers that the example does not help. Fire's lighting, like seeing, has already been examined by the analysis of Chapter 2: it is not found in what has been lit, in what has not been lit, or in what is being lit. Chapter 7 returns to the lamp in detail.

Does seeing see?

Verses 3.4 and 3.5 use the doubling argument from Chapter 2. 'Seeing sees' sounds harmless. But either the seeing already sees, or it does not. If it already sees, adding 'sees' counts the act twice, like 'the goer goes'. If it does not see, it is not seeing, and what is not seeing does not see. There is no third kind of seeing between the two (3.5).

Is there ever a seeing that is not engaged in seeing (3.4)? No. An idle 'seeing', seeing nothing, is not a weaker seeing; it is no seeing at all. So every seeing is already seeing, and 'seeing sees' adds a second act to it. Seeing cannot be a thing that exists first and then sets about the act, or turns towards an object. It is named together with the act and with what it sees.

No seer apart from seeing

Then the seer (3.5–6). Let the seer be understood the same way. Is there a seer bound up with seeing? Then 'the seer sees' counts the seeing twice. Is there a seer apart from seeing? Then we have a seer who does not see, which is no seer. So the seer is not found, either bound up with seeing or apart from it.

And if there is no seer, where are the seen and the seeing (3.6)? The three stand or fall together. 'Seen' means seen by someone. 'Seeing' means someone's seeing of something. Take away any one and the other two lose their names.

This is the point at which the chapter touches practice most directly. When you look at a tree, there seems to be a looker here, behind the eyes, and a tree out there, with seeing passing between them. Look for the looker. You find the tree, vivid, and the seeing of it, but no viewer standing apart from the view. The three are one occurrence, named three ways.

The chain that depends on seeing

Verse 3.7 quotes the Buddha's own teaching: as a child is born in dependence on mother and father, consciousness arises in dependence on eye and form. Nāgārjuna accepts this. Dependence is exactly his point.

Verse 3.8 draws the consequence. In the Buddhist account of experience, eye-consciousness leads to contact, contact to feeling, feeling to craving, and craving to grasping, the links of dependent arising that keep suffering going (Chapter 26). 'The four beginning with consciousness' are consciousness, contact, feeling and craving. If seeing and seen are not found as things of their own, this chain has no self-standing first link. Grasping, which hangs from the end of it, has nothing self-standing to hang from.

This is good news, not bad. A chain made of self-standing links could never be broken. A chain whose links arise only in dependence can be loosened at any point.

Verse 3.9 extends everything to the other senses. Hearing does not hear itself; hearing is never met without a sound heard; there is no hearer apart from hearing. The same for smell, taste, touch and thought.

What is left standing

You still see the tree and hear the bird. Eye doctors still test your sight, and glasses still help. In Candrakīrti's reading, the analysis refutes seeing that exists by its own nature, not the seeing the world knows.

What goes is a picture: an eye that holds the power of sight inside it, an observer sitting behind it, and a world waiting outside to be looked at. In its place is seeing as a meeting: eye, light, object and attention arising together, with seer, seeing and seen named from that one event. Modern accounts of perception that treat it as something done with the world, rather than a picture made inside the head, point the same way, as the main book discusses in its chapter on perceptual co-arising.

Try it now. Look at something near you. Notice the seeing: colour, shape, distance, all at once. Look for a seer behind it. Then listen to a sound and look for a hearer. The sight and the sound are fully there. The one who supposedly receives them is not found.

In the books

The two books take up this chapter's themes in several places.

• Chapter 7, Dissolving the Hard Problem of Consciousness (The Logical Necessity of a Substrateless World), the sections 'The Co-Arising of Subject and Object' and 'Consciousness Arises in Dependence': seer, seeing and seen designated together (3.2, 3.6–8).
• Chapter 10, Perceptual Co-Arising, the section 'Perceptual Co-Arising: Subject, Sensorium, and World': perception as a co-arising rather than a picture inside the head.
• The Great Desynchronization (The Transition from Anatta to Emptiness), the section 'Why Madhyamaka Seems to Contradict Anatta': why Nāgārjuna's 'no seeing without a seer' (3.6, 3.8) can seem to undo the anatta insight of seeing without a seer, and why it does not: he follows the opponent's assumptions until they collapse.

Talks on YouTube:

• You, Ice, Coldness DONT EXIST Before Interaction.
• Nāgārjuna's MMK: 5 Core Deconstruction Logics.

Words to know

• Faculty (indriya): one of the six sense powers: eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind.
• Field (gocara, viṣaya): what a faculty works on: sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, thoughts.
• Seeing (darśana): here, the eye as the power to see.
• Seer, seen (draṣṭṛ, draṣṭavya): the one who sees and what is seen.
• Consciousness (vijñāna): awareness of an object, arising in dependence on a faculty and its field.
• Grasping (upādāna): clinging, one of the links of dependent arising.