The Observer and the Taste of Presence · Chapter 16 · Part III
Non-Dividing Seeing
Analysis answers the dividing habit. It works when there is a habit to reify, and it reaches its end when there is nothing left to examine. The question of this chapter is what remains then.
Cognition seems to work in two ways. The first divides, as the last chapter showed. The second does not divide. It registers what presents without the names, categories and part-whole structure that thought adds. The Buddhist traditions give these modes different names. The first is conceptual construction, vikalpa. The second is non-conceptual awareness, avikalpa. Dharmakīrti defined direct perception as free of conceptual construction, registering the particular without the name that would make it a thing.
It would be tempting to treat the two as stages, first analysis and then recognition. That reading is mistaken. The dividing mode is the habit that analysis answers. The non-dividing mode is what remains when the habit is no longer operating. Non-dividing seeing is therefore not a second method that completes the analysis, and it is not a stillness reached by effort. It is appearing as it is when no fixing occurs: presented whole, without a before and an after, with designation as the forming itself.
The duck-rabbit makes the point. The drawing can be seen as a duck or as a rabbit. Nothing on the page changes when the aspect switches. The lines are the same, the light is the same, the eye is the same. Yet what is seen changes completely. The duck is not first seen as neutral lines and then labelled a duck. It is seen as a duck, at once, with the designation already in the seeing. When it becomes a rabbit, the change is as vivid as a change of colour.
The same structure is at work every time we read. Look at the word on this line and try to see it only as marks. A literate reader cannot. The meaning is not decoded after the shapes have been seen. Seeing the shapes is reading them. A trained musician hears a cadence resolve, not a sequence of pitches she must then interpret. Give the same reader a page in an unfamiliar script, and the meaning falls away. What remains is not a bare layer beneath reading. It is seen as writing of some kind, not as cracks in the paper. One seeing-as is replaced by another. Remove the designation and a different designation is found, never an undesignated floor.
The non-dividing seeing of the same appearing is not a second reality. It is the same vivid appearing, without the division into parts and the standing-behind. "In reference to the seen, there will be only the seen. In reference to the heard, only the heard" (Udāna 1.10, trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu). Analysis shows that the parts searched for in an object are not there, and that the dividing mind is a formation. Non-conceptual seeing shows the same appearing without the division. Neither needs to be forced, and neither is the final truth of what is seen.
This is the point where the two modes meet. They do not point to different results. One approaches the appearing by dismantling the habit of dividing it. The other sees the appearing as it is once the habit is no longer operating. Neither is established by emptiness, because emptiness is not a further thing that could establish anything. It is what dependent arising amounts to when it is seen.
Toward Part IV
The eight extremes turned over, the criteria of convention, and the two modes of seeing have shown what the analysis of appearance can do. It dismantles the habit of reification. It leaves a seeing that does not divide. What is still unresolved is the fourth assumption: the question of why appearances spring forth at all. Part IV takes up that question, and the traditions that answer it, and asks what the taste of pacified reification is like from inside.