Examination of the Prior Entity

You see a bird, you hear it sing, you feel the morning air. It seems obvious that someone is doing all this: one person, the same one, who sees and hears and feels. That someone seems to come first. The seeing and hearing belong to them, the way rooms belong to a house. Take away a particular sight or sound and the person is still there, waiting for the next one.

This chapter examines that someone. The opponent calls it 'the prior entity': a self that exists before, and apart from, the activities it owns. It is the natural sequel to Chapter 3, where seeing was found not to stand on its own, and to Chapter 8, where agent and action were found to be established only together. If the seer were already there before any seeing, the result of Chapter 8 would be wrong. So Nāgārjuna looks for the seer before the seeing.

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).

The case for a prior self

The chapter opens with the opponent's view (9.1–2), and it is a reasonable one. Seeing, hearing and the other senses, and feeling and the other mental events, must belong to someone. A seeing that belongs to no one makes no sense. And whatever they belong to must already be there, or there would be nothing for them to belong to. So there is an owner, in place before them: a self that has experiences, the way a house has rooms.

Several schools of Nāgārjuna's time held something like this. Some Buddhist schools, the Pudgalavādins, spoke of a 'person' that is neither the same as the aggregates nor different from them. Non-Buddhist schools spoke of an ātman, a self that is the witness of experience. Most of us hold it without a name. It is the sense that 'I' am here first, and experiences come to me.

Made known by what?

Nāgārjuna's first question is simple (9.3). If this self is in place before seeing, hearing and feeling, by what is it designated? What shows that it is there, so that we can point to it and name it?

It cannot be shown by seeing, hearing or feeling. Those come after it, by the opponent's own account, and the self is supposed to be there without them. But we have no other way of pointing to a seer than by seeing, to a hearer than by hearing. A self before all experience is a self that nothing reveals. There is nothing to designate it by.

The next step turns the argument around (9.4). Suppose the self really can be in place without seeing and the rest. Then it is independent of them. But independence goes both ways. If the self does not need seeing, seeing does not need the self, and seeing could happen with no one to whom it belongs. That is exactly what the opponent said was impossible in 9.2. The view undoes itself.

Someone and something

Verse 9.5 states the positive point in a few words. Someone is made known by something: a seer by a seeing, a listener by a sound heard. Something is made known by someone: a seeing is someone's seeing. Neither is found without the other.

This is not the claim that there is a seer after all. It is the claim that 'seer' and 'seeing' are designated together, like agent and action, and neither can be found first. Those who have seen through the self in practice sometimes find Nāgārjuna's wording puzzling here: if there is no seer, why insist that seeing needs one? The answer is that he is arguing on the opponent's ground. If you insist that seeing exists on its own, you must also find the seer it belongs to; and the seer is not found. So seeing, taken as existing on its own, is not found either.

One at a time?

The opponent retreats (9.6). Perhaps the self is not before all the senses together, as a separate thing behind them. Perhaps at one moment it shows itself through seeing, at another through hearing, at another through feeling. It moves from window to window, like a person in a house looking out of one window and then another.

Nāgārjuna's reply is short (9.7). If the self is not found before all of them together, it cannot be found before each one separately. What is not in the whole set is not in any member of it. A self that is there before this seeing, but not before experience as a whole, is not a coherent idea.

One self or many?

Then a dilemma about the person in the house (9.8–9). Is the seer the same as the hearer and the one who feels, or different?

If they are one and the same (9.8), then this one self exists before each sense: it is there as the hearer even while it is seeing, ready and waiting. That puts it back before each particular experience, standing on its own, which 9.7 has just ruled out; and 9.3–4 showed that such a self has nothing to reveal it.

If they are different (9.9), the seer is one self, the hearer another, the feeler another. Then whenever there is a seer there is also, separately, a hearer, even when nothing is heard; and one person would contain many selves. That is not what anyone meant by 'I'.

Not in the elements either

Perhaps the self is in the material basis of experience: the elements, earth, water, fire and air, from which the body and its senses are made (9.10). But the same search applies. The elements are not found as an owner of seeing standing before seeing. And the elements themselves are examined and found empty in their own chapter (Chapter 5), so they cannot serve as a solid floor.

Then the result runs back the other way (9.11). If the owner of seeing and the rest is not found, then seeing and the rest, taken as things that belong to an owner, are not found either. This does not mean nothing is seen. It means that seeing is not found as a self-standing event with an owner attached, any more than the owner is found apart from it.

Before, at the same time, after

The last verse widens the search to every time (9.12). The self is not found before seeing and the rest, as the opponent claimed. It is not found at the same time, alongside them, as a second thing. It is not found after them, as something they leave behind. And for what is not found at any time, the ideas 'it exists' and 'it does not exist' simply fall away.

The wording is careful. Nāgārjuna does not conclude 'so the self does not exist'. That would be another view about the self, a claim that there is something and it is absent. He says the conceptions (kalpanā) of existing and not existing stop. This is the non-implicative negation again: the false picture is removed and nothing is put in its place.

What is left standing

You still see the bird and hear it sing, and you can say 'I saw it' and be right. Your friend can ask what you heard, and you can tell them. The word 'I' keeps its everyday use: it picks out this person, designated in dependence on this body, these experiences and this history. Tsongkhapa calls this the mere I. It acts, remembers and keeps promises.

What goes is the owner behind the windows: a self already there before any experience, waiting for sights and sounds to arrive. Look for it and you find seeing, hearing and feeling, and the 'I' designated together with them; you do not find a witness standing apart. Many people meet this first in practice, as the discovery that there is seeing without a seer behind it. The chapter adds the second half: the seeing, too, is not found on its own.

In the books

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

• The Great Desynchronization (The Transition from Anatta to Emptiness), the section 'Why Madhyamaka Seems to Contradict Anatta': why Nāgārjuna's statements that there is no seeing without a seer (MMK 3.6, 8.12 and chapter 9) do not reintroduce a self, but follow the opponent's view until it collapses.
• The Starting Point: The Journey Through Presence, the section 'Before We Begin: The Cumulative Peak of Anatta': 'no seer, no seeing, and nothing seen', and how that realization later had to permeate language and meaning.
• The Logic of the Single Stroke & The Eye as a Living Chariot, the section 'The Eye as a Living Chariot': searching for the seer behind vision and not finding one.
• Chapter 7, Dissolving the Hard Problem of Consciousness (The Logical Necessity of a Substrateless World), the section 'Consciousness Arises in Dependence': seer, seeing and seen designated together, none found under analysis (MMK 3.6–8).
• Chapter 11, Alignment with 4E Cognition, the section 'Doing Without a Doer': the doer and the doing designated together (MMK 8.12).

Words to know

• Prior entity (prāg vyavasthito bhāvaḥ, 'the entity in place before'): a self held to exist before, and apart from, the experiences it owns.
• Self (ātman): in this chapter, an owner and witness of experience, existing from its own side.
• Seeing, hearing and the rest (darśana, śravaṇa): the activities of the senses.
• Feeling and the rest (vedanā): pleasant, unpleasant and neutral feeling, and the other mental events.
• Made known (ajyate, prajñapyate): pointed out, designated; the self is designated only by what it is said to own.
• Conceptions (kalpanā): the ideas 'it exists' and 'it does not exist', which fall away when nothing is found to have either status.