The Observer and the Taste of Presence · Chapter 21 · Part IV
The Taste of Pacified Reification
What is it like, from inside, when reification is pacified? The classical formulation is found in the Bahiya sutta, Udāna 1.10. In Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu's translation it reads: "In reference to the seen, there will be only the seen. In reference to the heard, only the heard." Other translations differ in wording, and the book follows the one named here throughout. The sutta is sometimes read as reducing experience to isolated sense events, or as describing a blank. Neither reading fits.
The formulation names a taste. Seeing is just seeing, and hearing is just hearing. No seer stands behind the seeing, and no hearer behind the hearing. The gap between observer and observed was a reifying designation, taken as a fact about experience, and it was never found in the experience itself. Once that reifying stops, nothing undesignated is uncovered beneath it. Experience is simply no longer held at a distance, and it has a vividness that is hard to describe. Colours are vivid, sounds are immediate, and thoughts lose their heavy ownership.
This taste is the mark that the reifying habit has been seen through. It is not a higher stage on a path, and it is not an attainment. It is recognised, and the moment one tries to keep it as an accomplishment, the fixing has returned. The witness is a useful case. If the witness is a separate subject standing behind experience, it becomes one more svabhāva. Seen without fixing, the seeing is simply vivid, and no witness is posited as doing the seeing.
The same unfixed appearing can be met in two ways. Open seeing is what appears when the habit of fixing is not operating. Contrived seeing is the same appearing met with fixing, so that stillness, vividness and a sense of freedom become objects to hold. The difference lies in the seeing, not in emptiness, and not in a seer standing behind it. Recognising the difference does not happen by itself. It takes clear knowing, which is itself part of the practice.
The taste is also not a denial of the world. The seen is still seen, the heard still heard. Nothing has been removed from experience. What has been removed is the addition of a viewer and a ground, and with them the sense that experience is happening to someone from somewhere.