Neither Carried Nor Cut

Continuity with nothing carried over and nothing cut off, seen first where it can be felt: in the six streams of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching and thinking.

When people first hear that no self is carried from moment to moment, or from life to life, a fear comes up at once: "Then everything is cut off. At death I simply end." That fear sounds like the opposite of clinging to a self. It is not. It clings to the same self, and only changes the story of what happens to it.

Something can be cut off only if it was there from its own side first. "It ends" still needs an "it". So the fear of being cut off and the hope of being carried over share one root: a thing with a being of its own, which either goes on for ever or is destroyed.

Nāgārjuna answers both with a single reason:

Whatever comes to be in dependence on something is not that very thing, and it is not other than it either. So it is neither cut off nor permanent. (MMK 18.10)

Most explanations of this verse reach for outside images: a seed and its plant, one flame lighting another. They help, but they are watched from outside. This article starts somewhere closer, where the point can be felt directly: in your own seeing, hearing and thinking, right now.

Six streams

Look at what is happening as you read this.

There is seeing: these letters, the screen or page, the light. There is hearing: whatever sounds are around, a fan, a car, a voice in another room. There is smelling and tasting, faint perhaps, but there when you notice them. There is touching: the weight of your body on the chair, the temperature of the air, your hand. And there is thinking: the words being understood, a passing thought about something else.

The Buddha's teaching counts these as six kinds of consciousness, and says each one arises with its own conditions:

Dependent on the eye and forms, eye-consciousness arises; the meeting of the three is contact.

Seeing arises with eye and colour. Hearing arises with ear and sound. Touching arises with body and something touched. Thinking arises with mind and what is thought. Each stream has its own conditions, and each is fully itself. Seeing does not hear. Hearing does not see. No smell has ever been heard.

A coordinated unity

And yet these six do not feel like six strangers.

You see the cup, reach for it, feel its warmth, smell the tea, taste it, hear the small sound as you set it down, and think "that's better". Seeing guides the hand. Touch confirms what seeing showed. The thought takes up what the tongue found. All of it hangs together so smoothly that it feels like one life, lived by one someone.

This coordination is so seamless that it gives the strong impression of a self: one who sees and hears and tastes and thinks. In refined practice it gives an even subtler impression: a pure consciousness, a Self, a clear awareness that is "there" behind all six, the same in each.

What the substantialist mind does next

Here, almost without fail, the substantialist mind makes one move. It takes the six streams, each arising with its conditions, and abstracts from them a single consciousness: one awareness that sees through the eyes, hears through the ears, and runs from one sense to the next. It is pictured as the thread that joins them, the one that is still there when seeing gives way to hearing.

The Buddha met this view in a monk named Sāti, who held that "it is this very same consciousness that roams and transmigrates, not another" (MN 38). Sāti did not posit a soul. He posited consciousness itself as the carrier. The Buddha's correction was that consciousness is dependently originated: without its conditions, there is no consciousness. It is named by what it depends on, as a fire is named by its fuel: a fire burning logs is a log fire, a fire burning grass is a grass fire. Seeing is eye-consciousness. Hearing is ear-consciousness. There is no consciousness-as-such that moves from fuel to fuel.

This is not an obscure mistake. It is the most natural one there is, and it is worth seeing where it comes from. It does not come from looking: look, and no carrier is found. It comes from habit: the long-standing tendencies of the inherent framework, which expect every "and then" to have a something underneath that goes on. The six streams cooperate so well that, to this habit, it seems impossible that nothing holds them together. So the mind supplies something, a self or a pure awareness, without noticing that it has supplied it. The carrier is not found in experience. It is a confusion added to experience by the habit of looking for one.

Look again: neither same nor different

Now look at the moment seeing gives way to hearing. You are reading, and a sound comes. Attention turns to the sound.

Is the hearing the same as the seeing? No. It has different conditions: ear and sound, not eye and colour. It is a different stream. Nothing of the seeing went into the hearing. Nothing travelled across. So it is not the same: nothing was carried.

Is the hearing cut off from the seeing, unrelated to it? Also no. The hearing turned up in the middle of the reading. The thought "what was that?" takes up the sound, and then you go back to these lines and find your place. The streams are interwoven: each one conditions what the others do next. So it is not different either: nothing was cut.

Neither same nor different. Neither carried nor cut. And it is not a theory. You can watch it happen, several times a minute, every waking hour.

In real time, there is no carrier at all

Before going further, look at what is actually happening, now, without lining anything up.

In real time there has never been a carrier. Not a hidden one, not a subtle one. Each instant is complete: the seeing is wholly seeing, the sound is wholly sound, the thought is wholly thought. Nothing is missing from it that a carrier would have to supply. Nothing in it is waiting to be handed on. The instant does not ask to be joined to anything.

Complete does not mean sealed off. Each instant arises with its conditions, and those conditions are entangled with others. It means only that nothing is lacking, so there is nothing to bridge.

The question "what carries me from this to the next?" does not arise in the instant. It arises only when the mind steps back, lines the instants up one after another in time, and then looks at the spaces it has drawn between them.

This is the continuity

Here is the key point, and it is easy to miss.

When we do line the instants up into a sequence, as we must to speak of yesterday and tomorrow, of growing up and growing old, this is how the sequence is rightly described: neither same nor different, neither carried nor cut. It is the way of speaking that fits the framework of time, once instants have been set in a row.

And within that framework, "neither same nor different, neither carried nor cut" is not a description of a gap that continuity somehow has to cross. It is the continuity. There is no further continuity behind it, holding the streams together. The interweaving of the six streams, each arising with its conditions, none the same as another, none cut off from another, is the whole of what we have always called "going on".

The substantialist mind cannot picture this. Shown seeing and then hearing, it pictures two banks of a river with a gap between them, and asks: what crosses the gap? What carries me from the seeing to the hearing? It looks for a carrier to bridge the transition. Finding none, it concludes: then I am cut off every moment, and I will be cut off for good at death.

But the two banks were never standing on their own. Seeing is not a self-standing thing that ends at a border, with hearing a second self-standing thing that begins on the far side. Each arises with its conditions, and the conditions of each are entangled with the others. No gap stands between them, so no bridge is needed, and no one has to cross. Asking "what carries me across?" is like asking what carries blue across to red in a painting where they meet.

One stroke and the sequence: Nāgārjuna, Dzogchen and Dōgen

Put the two sections above together. Without the time framework, there is no sequence to describe: what is here is one complete stroke, timeless, total, immediate and complete. Line it up in time, and the same appearing is rightly described as neither same nor different, neither carried nor cut. These are not two worlds, a timeless one above and a passing one below. They are one appearing, seen without the framework and seen with it.

This is not a new idea. Three traditions say it, each in its own way, and each guards it against a different misreading.

Nāgārjuna. Time is not found apart from what changes: "If time exists in dependence on things, how could there be time without things? And not a single thing is found, so how will there be time?" (MMK 19.6). The time sequence is a framework laid on what appears, not something found in it. And the verses that say "neither the same nor different, so neither cut off nor permanent" (18.10), or that cause and effect are neither one nor different (Chapter 20), are said of a sequence: cause, then effect. They belong to the time framework. Chapter 7 goes further: arising, staying and ceasing are not found even within one moment, so the "instant" is not a little unit standing on its own either. The guard: "timeless" here means only that time is not found. It is not a timeless reality behind appearances, which would be a new ground. And the sequence stays valid in everyday terms: actions bear fruit, yesterday came before today.

Dzogchen. Its very name, the Great Completeness (rdzogs pa chen po), says that nothing is lacking and nothing needs to be added. What appears is spontaneously present (lhun grub). The tradition speaks of a "fourth time" beyond past, present and future, and of instant presence. The guard: the ground and rigpa are easily heard as a pure awareness behind the six streams: exactly the abstraction this article is about. Read with Mipham, the ground is empty, the union of appearance and emptiness. The complete stroke is the six streams themselves, not a timeless something behind them.

Dōgen. In Uji ("being-time") time is being, and being is time; each moment is the whole of time, fully itself. In Genjōkōan, firewood abides in its own dharma-position, with a before and an after, yet cut off from before and after; ash does not turn back into firewood. That is "each instant is complete", with no carrier. And Dōgen also keeps the passage of time (kyōryaku): time goes on, today into tomorrow. He holds both together: each moment total, and the passage going on. The guard: "cut off from before and after" can sound like the cut this article argues against. It means that no carrier links the moments, not that a self-standing thing is destroyed between them. The dharma-positions, too, are designated, not found.

In one line: in real time, one complete stroke; lined up in time, neither same nor different, neither carried nor cut; never two worlds, and the timeless never a ground.

The same knot, again

What the Logic Is Looking At shows how, in holding an apple, the separate appearings of colour, weight, smell and taste are tied by the habit of the mind into one solid apple "out there". The knot is not in the appearings; it is added.

The self is tied the same way. Six streams, each with its conditions, are tied into one solid someone "in here", a seer behind the seeing and a hearer behind the hearing. And when that coarse self is seen through, a subtler knot often remains: a pure, featureless awareness, abstracted from the six and set behind them as their ground.

The answer is not to throw clarity away. Seeing is clear, hearing is clear, thinking is clear: clarity is never absent. The error is in abstracting it, pulling it out of the streams and making it into one thing that stands behind them. Untie the knot, and nothing is lost. The six streams go on, as vivid as before, now owned by no one.

Moment to moment, night to morning

Once this is seen in the senses, it is seen everywhere, because the shape is the same.

Moment to moment. Each instant is complete as it is. Line the instants of an afternoon up in a row, and this is how the row is described: this moment's seeing is not the last moment's seeing, since it has fresh conditions; it is not cut off from the last moment's either, since it picks up where that one left off. Nothing carried, nothing cut. That is the continuity of a single afternoon.

A night's sleep. In deep sleep, the six streams quieten and no one watches the hours. It is easy to slip from there to "so for those hours nothing went on". That is the cut, sneaking back in. All night the heart beat and breathing went on. Yesterday's learning settled. Habits and plans waited in their conditions. In the morning you know your name and remember the friend you meant to call. None of it was carried through the night by a passenger, and none of it was cut off. Naming does not make continuity, and the absence of naming does not break it. When no one is watching, no continuum is felt; the dependence does not stop.

Outer images. The old teachers pointed to the same shape outside: a seed and its plant (rice gives rice, but the seed is not kept inside the plant); one lamp lit from another; a seal pressed into wax; a face in a mirror (Visuddhimagga XVII). These help, once the shape has been seen within. Without that, they stay pictures.

Death

At death the same two halves matter most.

Nothing is carried. No soul, no subtle self, no pure consciousness packs up and moves to a new body. That was Sāti's picture, and the Buddha rejected it.

Nothing is cut. Actions bear their fruit. The habits of a life give rise to what comes next, the way this moment's hearing gives rise to the thought that follows it. The tradition affirms rebirth and karma in exactly this conventional way, and so do these pages. They are not explained away, and they are not concluded from emptiness. Emptiness only shows that the carrier and the cut were never found.

So the honest answer to "Will I continue after death?" is neither "yes, the same I goes on" nor "no, I simply end". It is the answer you can already see between seeing and hearing: what follows depends on what is now; it is not the same, and it is not other. One Flame Lights Another takes this further.

"No carrier" does not mean "nothing goes on"

This is so often misheard because of the word "no".

When the teaching says "there is no carrier", it denies one thing: a self-standing carrier. It does not slip in a second claim, "and therefore nothing continues". This is a non-implicative negation: it denies without putting anything in the denied thing's place, not even an absence.

The mind that still believes in a self-standing self does not hear it that way. It hears "no carrier" and fills in the rest from its own habit: "so the one who was there, me, stops". The words did not say that. The habit did.

So it helps to say both halves every time, in one breath:

Try it

Sit for a minute and let the six streams be as they are. First, just this instant: whatever is seen, heard or felt now. Notice that nothing is missing from it, and nothing in it is waiting to be carried anywhere.

Then let it go on. Notice seeing, then a sound, then a touch, then a thought.

At each change, ask two questions. Did anything travel from the last one into this one? Look for it. Is this one cut off from the last, unrelated to it? Look at that too.

Then notice the third question that wants to come: "Then what joins them? Who goes from one to the next?" Do not answer it. Just notice that it is looking for a bridge, that it only appears once the instants are lined up in a row, and that it comes from habit, not from anything you can find. The streams are going on perfectly well without a bridge. That going on, with nothing carried and nothing cut, is the continuity.

In brief

Read more

• Decoding Anatta and MMK Chapter 3: in the seen, just the seen; no seer behind seeing.
• What the Logic Is Looking At: holding an apple, and the world of only blue.
• Mind and Consciousness: eye, form and eye-consciousness.
• Annihilation Is an Inherent View: why "it is cut off" holds on to the same thing as "it is carried".
• One Flame Lights Another: Sāti's mistake (MN 38), and rebirth with nothing carried and nothing cut off.
• Nāgārjuna's Chapter 18 (18.10), Chapter 19 (time), Chapter 7 (arising, staying, ceasing) and Chapter 27 (neither "I will exist" nor "I will not exist").
• Does It Arise or Cease?: the koan, and Dōgen's firewood and ash.

Words to know

• Six consciousnesses: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching and thinking, each arising with its own sense and object.
• Carried (eternalism): the view that a thing with its own nature goes on unchanged, like a soul, or one consciousness, passing from body to body or sense to sense.
• Cut (annihilation): the view that a thing with its own nature is destroyed and becomes nothing.
• Dependence: something comes to be by relying on other things, so it is neither the same as them nor other than them.
• Non-implicative negation: a denial that puts nothing in place of what it denies, not even an absence.
• Inherent framework: the habitual way of reading experience as made of things with their own nature. Its tendencies are what look for a carrier; the carrier is never found in experience itself.