Thusness · John Tan

After Anatta · The Logic · Introduction

Seeing Comes First

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Look at a red apple on the table. The red is bright, impossible to miss. Now look for it. Is it in the skin of the apple? In the light? In the eye? Somewhere between them? It is not found in any of them, and not anywhere else. Yet the apple is still red, as vivid as before.

The eight steps that follow teach two logics: the logic of substance and the logic of dependency. Both are set out mainly in the article The Logic of Dependency, and the steps unpack it one piece at a time. Before you start, I want to say one thing plainly. The logic of dependency cannot be understood clearly by reasoning alone. It needs a direct insight into the nature of phenomena: into what a sound, a thought or a cup actually is. That is why the article Vivid and Nowhere: What a Phenomenon Is is so important, and why seeing it was a key insight in my own journey.

Four key insights after anatta

After anatta, four insights turned out to be key. Without seeing them clearly, and authenticating them again and again, the logic of dependency cannot be understood clearly. By authenticating I mean confirming it in direct experience, until it is no longer an idea we agree with. Seeing it once is not enough: if we stop, the old logic quietly comes back.

1. Vivid and unfindable: emptiness

The display is vivid and it is unfindable, at the same time. It is not vivid first and empty later, or empty underneath and vivid on the surface. The apple is fully red while the red is not found. If only the vividness is authenticated, presence turns into a new ground. If only the unfindability is, the world turns thin and void. Both have to be seen together, in the same appearing. The tradition calls this emptiness. It is not a void, and not a ground behind the appearing. It is the appearing's not being found.

2. Appearance originates whenever conditions align: dependent origination

Appearance originates whenever certain factors are present and aligned. Light, a surface, an eye, attention: when they come together, red appears. When one is missing, it does not. Nothing has to come out of a hidden place, and nothing goes back into one. No source stands behind the display, sending it out. Nor are the conditions a solid network behind it: they too are vivid and not found. The tradition calls this dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda).

3. We habitually and intuitively think inherently: ignorance

We think inherently out of habit, almost by intuition, and the way we do it follows the structure of our language. What we take to be reality is things standing on their own, each with its own properties, doing things and having things done to them. That picture is a habit of understanding, not something found in experience. A sentence wants a subject and a verb, so we say "the wind blows" and "lightning flashes", as if there were a wind apart from the blowing and a lightning apart from the flash. "I see the tree" puts a seer on one side, a tree on the other and an act of seeing between them. The grammar becomes the picture of the world.

Experiential reality is never like that. The flashing is the lightning. The blowing is the wind. Nowhere is there a lightning waiting behind the flash, a wind behind the blowing, or a seer behind the seeing. This does not mean a pure, wordless reality lies underneath the words. Experience is not a raw given that language covers up; that would be one more floor. It means only that the picture of things standing behind what happens was never found in experience. It came from the way we speak and think, and it can be seen through.

This habit runs almost by default. Whatever experiences and insights we have, it distorts them almost automatically, reading them back into things, selves and grounds before we notice. So practice is not about collecting more experiences or more insights. Practice is about undoing these habitual tendencies, again and again, wherever they are at work. The tradition calls this ignorance (avidyā). It is not a lack of information. It is the innate grasping at things as existing from their own side.

4. There is no given: the illusion of the given

No world is already there, with its own edges and things, waiting behind what appears. One bowl of liquid is water to us, pus to a hungry ghost, a home to a fish. The habit says that a real bowl of something must sit underneath, a neutral stuff that each kind of being merely filters in its own way. Look for it, and it is not found. What appears and how it is picked out arise together. Beings still agree, and the world still holds together, without any hidden object beneath it. Nor is the mind the floor instead: mind and object arise together, and neither comes first.

This too has to be seen, not only followed. Until it is, the logic of dependency is quietly laid over a world still pictured as given, and the old floor stays in place under the new words. I go through it in The Illusion of the Given.

The first two are one fact, seen from two sides. Nāgārjuna says that what arises dependently is what is called emptiness (MMK 24.18): emptiness is not found anywhere apart from dependent arising, and dependent arising is never anything but empty. The third is what hides that fact. The fourth takes away its last hiding place: a given world beneath it all.

Where does anatta fit in this? Anatta is the first door. In seeing, no seer is found: no doer behind the doing. Nāgārjuna takes the same insight through every thing: the walker, the fire, the cause, even the seeing. That is why the Bāhiya teaching and his chapter three say the same thing, though many read them as opposed. I set this out in Decoding Anatta and MMK Chapter 3.

And where do the four insights lead? When the habit of the third stops, and no given is left beneath, the first two are tasted together. With no doer anywhere, and nothing put in its place, nothing is making the appearing. The sound is not a product waiting to be finished. It is already complete, by itself, exactly as its conditions meet. The Dzogchen tradition calls this spontaneous presence (lhun grub), and it is the last of the seven phases: presence is spontaneously perfected. It is not uncaused, and it is not a source behind things. It is dependent arising itself, met without the fixing. That is why I say that dependent arising is spontaneous presence.

Why the logic needs the seeing

The two logics can be learned as ideas. One starts with things and asks what happens to them. The other asks how anything is picked out as a thing at all. Explained like this, the difference takes a minute to follow, and a minute to agree with.

But agreeing changes very little. The logic of substance is not a belief we hold. It is how phenomena seem to be, before any thought: the sound is simply there, the cup is simply there, each on its own side. As long as phenomena are still seen this way, the logic of dependency is quietly read through the old one. Things are still things; now they also depend. The conditions become a new solid floor. Emptiness becomes a void, or a vast space behind it all. The words have changed. The logic has not.

The logic of dependency is not a theory laid over phenomena. It describes how they already are. Until that is seen, it stays a clever argument.

What a phenomenon is

The short answer in Vivid and Nowhere is this: a phenomenon is a vivid appearing that is not found, even while it is appearing vividly.

Vivid. Nothing is taken away. The red is red, a sound is heard, and a car can still knock you down.

Not found. Looked for, it is not in its parts and not apart from them. It is not out there, and it is not in here as an image in the mind. The mind that looks is not found either.

Not even "nowhere". The absence is not a place, a void or a background left over. Nothing is put in the place of what was not found.

Dependent already. Appearing is dependent arising the moment it appears. The red is dependent in the very moment it is red. Dependence is not a label added afterwards to something given.

Clear, with no knower behind it. Every appearance is clear: seen, heard, known. The clarity belongs to the appearing itself. It is not a light shining from a witness behind it, and it is empty too.

This holds for the solid, the dreamlike and the described alike: a ball, a thought, a field in physics. None of them is the floor the others stand on.

Whatever appears, appears vividly. Whatever is looked for is not found. Seen together, that is the logic of dependency, met in experience.

Admitting the problem

Before any of this can work, one thing has to be acknowledged: we think inherently. Not now and then, and not only when we philosophise. It is our default. This has to hit home deeply, and it has to be seen clearly, sincerely and honestly, in our own mind, not as a mistake other people make.

It is easy to agree with and hard to see. Agreeing costs nothing. Seeing it means noticing, in the middle of an ordinary day, that the way we understand, analyse, think and orient ourselves is still built on things standing on their own: a self that decides, a world out there, a problem that is really there, a cause that really produces its effect. The habit is almost intuitive. It does not feel like a view at all. It feels like how things are. I go through this, as honestly as I can, in the talk Do we Think Inherently?

If this is not seen, even deep experiential taste and real insight will hit a wall. The experience can be non-dual and the insight genuine, while the framework that reads them is still inherent. Then the new experience is quietly read in the old way: presence becomes a ground, emptiness becomes a void, conditions become things causing things. The experience has changed. The framework has not.

Experience and insight can go deep while the framework that reads them stays inherent. That is the wall.

Why experience alone is not enough

Many practitioners, especially in Zen, hold that experience and direct taste are what matter most, and that logic and view come second. This is a grave mistake.

From that starting point, practice becomes the removal of concepts: stripping away the symbolic layer that thought lays over experience. Not thinking, bare attention, naked awareness. These practices do something real. With the commentary quiet, appearances are tasted directly, and their luminous clarity can be authenticated: sounds, colours and sensations shining by themselves.

But at most, that is all they do. Removing concepts does not show what appearances are. Phenomena can be tasted vividly and still be taken, quietly, as real on their own side. The mind can be tasted too, as pure, clear awareness, and then taken as the one thing that is really there. But the mind is a phenomenon like any other. Its clarity is as empty as the red of the apple. Without the view, the nature of phenomena, mind included, is never known.

The reason is the third insight. Whatever experiences and insights we have will be distorted, because by default we analyse and think inherently. Even the idea behind these practices is shaped by it. Conceptual layering is pictured as labels and symbols placed over a given, objective reality, so practice becomes peeling the labels off to reach the reality underneath. That picture is itself the logic of substance: a world already there, with its own edges, waiting to be named. But a thing and its designation arise together. Designation is not a label on top of a thing, and there is no undesignated layer underneath waiting to be uncovered (The Illusion of the Given looks at this in depth). Stripping the labels does not reveal how things are. It leaves the habit in place, now without comment, and the clear, wordless experience is read in the old way. That is how luminous clarity becomes a Witness, a ground, a Source. It was my own story in the I AM years.

Bare attention can taste the clarity of appearances. Only the view shows what they are.

What the great masters said

This is not my own idea. The great masters, whatever their tradition, all put the view at the centre of the path. Here are six of them, in order of time.

Atiśa (eleventh century). Calm abiding and meditative experience, without wisdom, do not end the obstructions:

When the practitioner has gained calm abiding,
Higher perception will also be gained,
But without practice of the perfection of wisdom,
The obstructions will not come to an end.

Atiśa, A Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment, verse 41, translated by Ruth Sonam

A few verses later he says what that wisdom is: "understanding emptiness of inherent existence". And elsewhere, simply: "The best knowledge is the realization of selflessness" (The Twenty-One Supreme Aspects of the Path, translated by Stefan Mang and Lowell Cook).

Rongzom (eleventh century). The habit behind appearances comes from a view, the view of real entities. This is the third insight in his words:

Because directly perceived appearance has arisen due to the power of latent tendencies, it does not quickly disappear. Because habituation to such appearance is produced by adventitious erroneous notions, it can quickly disappear. This habituation, moreover, arises from belief in characteristics. That in turn arises from the view of real entities.

Rongzom Chökyi Zangpo, The Black Snake Discourse, translated by David Higgins

Dōgen (thirteenth century). A Zen master, and often cryptic and poetic. Yet he scolded the Zen people of his day who thought the old stories were beyond logical thought, and that this was the point:

Now in Great Song China there are careless fellows who form groups; they cannot be set straight by the few true masters. They say that the statement, “The eastern mountains travel on water,” or Nanquan’s story of a sickle, is illogical; what they mean is that any words having to do with logical thought are not buddha ancestors’ Zen stories, and that only illogical stories are buddha ancestors’ expressions. … How sad that they do not know about the phrases of logical thought, or penetrating logical thought in the phrases and stories! … Their idea about illogical words is only a distorted view.

Dōgen, “Mountains and Waters Sūtra” (Sansuikyō), translated by Arnold Kotler and Kazuaki Tanahashi, in Moon in a Dewdrop

He also rejected the luminous true self that clear, wordless experience is so easily taken for: “the wrong view that mind is permanent and forms perish” is not the Buddha’s teaching (“On the Endeavor of the Way”, Bendōwa, translated by Lew Richmond and Kazuaki Tanahashi). And he warned against being satisfied with an experience: “When dharma does not fill your whole body and mind, you think it is already sufficient” (“Actualizing the Fundamental Point”, Genjōkōan, translated by Robert Aitken and Kazuaki Tanahashi). His “Painting of a Rice-cake” makes the point about words: they are not a veil over a hidden real thing (see The Painted Rice Cake in Book 2).

Longchenpa (fourteenth century). The great Dzogchen master puts the view first, and examining before settling:

When conceptual thoughts arise, the direct view is crucial;
Having examined the mind, to settle it is crucial;
Even as there is nothing to meditate on, to meditate is crucial.

Longchen Rabjam, Thirty Pieces of Heart Advice, stanza 28, translated by Daniela Hartmann

Tsongkhapa (fourteenth to fifteenth century). Even renunciation and compassion cannot cut saṃsāra at its root without the wisdom that sees how things are:

If you lack the wisdom that realizes the nature of things,
Although you might grow accustomed to renunciation and bodhicitta,
You will be incapable of cutting through conditioned existence at its root.
Exert yourself, therefore, in the methods for realizing interdependence.

Tsongkhapa, Three Principal Aspects of the Path, verse 9, translated by Adam Pearcey

And he says when the view is complete: when dependent arising and emptiness "arise at once, not each in turn but both together", then "certainty is born, and all modes of misapprehension fall apart" (verse 12). That is the first two insights, seen as one.

Mipham (nineteenth century). Analysis comes first, and it runs through all phenomena, not only the self:

Once you have gone through the training in analysis
And developed confidence in the crucial point
Of how the individual is devoid of self,
Then consider how, just as the so-called “I” is
An unexamined conceptual imputation,
All phenomena included within
The five skandhas and the unconditioned are the same:
Labeled conceptually as this or that.

Mipham, Profound Instruction on the View of the Middle Way, translated by Adam Pearcey

None of them says that experience does not matter. Mipham ends the same text by warning that hearing there is water does not quench thirst; only drinking does. Atiśa says that wisdom without method, and method without wisdom, are both bondage. What they all say is that experience without the view cannot do the work. The view is not a substitute for tasting. It is what lets the tasting be seen for what it is.

In my own journey

For years after the realisation of I AM, presence was vivid and unmistakable. The vividness was never what was missing. What was missing was seeing what that vividness is. I read it through the logic of substance: first a Witness, then a non-dual Presence, but still something real on its own side, behind everything.

I met the wall again after anatta. Experience and insight had become non-substantialist, but my view had not. I describe this desynchronisation of view, insight and experience in The Transition from Anatta to Emptiness. By 2009 I had become very serious about the view. Experiences and insights alone cannot fully open up body and mind; right view is needed. Inherent habits run far deeper than surface insights can penetrate and unbind.

What changed things was seeing directly what a phenomenon is: vivid and nowhere, with no knower behind the knowing and no ground behind the appearing. Only then did the logic of dependency become clear, not as a theory I agreed with, but as how things are. That is why I put Vivid and Nowhere first. The steps give the reasoning. The article points to what the reasoning is about.

How to use these pages

Two articles carry this introduction. Vivid and Nowhere is about the seeing. The Logic of Dependency is the logic itself: the logics are mainly contained there, and the eight steps take it apart one piece at a time. Read both, first or alongside the steps. All the pages below take the logic further:

  • Vivid and Nowhere: What a Phenomenon Is: the insight the logic rests on. Read it first.
  • What the Logic Is Looking At: the next page. Self, object, cause and person are one vivid appearing, singled out, dependent, and by appearing already empty. Read it before Step 1.
  • Decoding Anatta and MMK Chapter 3: why anatta and Nāgārjuna are one insight, and how it ends in spontaneous presence.
  • Does It Arise or Cease?: a koan worked through with both logics.
  • What Is a Phenomenon?: the same insight as an exploration, with the four questions applied to it.
  • The Logic of Dependency: the logics themselves, set out in full: the two starting points, whether we actually think substantially, change without a changer, the eight extremes, identity, continuity without a carrier, and the main objections. The eight steps unpack it.
  • The Illusion of the Given: the fourth insight, that there is no given. How many beings can agree about a world with no hidden object behind it, and what "many worlds" means. It goes with Step 4, The Two Truths.
  • Neither Carried Nor Cut: how something continues with nothing carried over and nothing cut off, seen in the six streams of consciousness.

Each step ends with a few things to try. When you do them, don't stop at following the argument. Turn to what is appearing now, a sound, a colour, a thought, and look. That looking is where the logic becomes clear.

The chain, 1 of 7. Next: What the Logic Is Looking At, what a phenomenon is: singled out, dependent, and by appearing already empty.

Talks

Try it

  • Listen to one sound until it ends. Notice how vivid it was. Then ask where it was. Don't answer with a thought; just look.
  • Look at a colour in front of you. Is there a seer behind the seeing, apart from the colour being seen? Notice what is found, and what is not.
  • Say to yourself, "the wind is blowing". Then feel the wind on your skin. Is there a wind apart from the blowing?