The Substantialist Misconception

The Default Assumption of 'Entities First, Relations Second'

The default metaphysical habit of common sense—substantialism—begins with the assumption of isolated entities. In this framework, a phenomenon is presumed to possess its own identity, its own intrinsic nature, and its own inherent causal powers prior to any interaction. Relations are appended only as a secondary stage: an object exists first in isolation, and subsequently interacts with other objects. Under this view, the universe is imagined as a collection of self-existing 'nouns' linked together by secondary relational verbs.

The Innate Sense of Reality

Substantialism is not first a theory. Before anyone has read Aristotle or the Abhidharma, it is already at work as a way of perceiving. Pick up your phone. It is cool against the palm, heavier than its size suggests, its screen bright with whatever you were last reading. Nothing could seem more plainly real. It does not seem to be waiting on anything—not on the light, not on your hand, not on the word 'phone'. It seems simply to be there, finished, from its own side.

Or touch a cube of ice. The cold is in the ice; that seems beyond question. The hand only discovers what the ice already has. We do not infer this. We feel it, immediately, as part of the experience itself.

Buddhist traditions distinguish two kinds of grasping at inherent existence. Acquired grasping (kun brtags) is learned: it is grasping shaped by philosophical theories, such as the theories of substance examined later in this chapter. Innate grasping (lhan skyes) is not learned at all. It is the felt sense that things are there from their own side—present in animals and infants, and in philosophers too once they put their books down. Refuting the theories leaves the innate sense untouched. This book argues against theories, but its real subject is the habit. Chapter 5 returns to the ice to show what the habit conceals.

Do We Really Think Inherently?

It is often said that no one actually believes in inherent existence. Ask people whether the table in front of them exists independently of everything else, and they will say of course not: it was made in a factory, from wood that grew in a forest, and one day it will break or rot. Some careful students of Buddhist philosophy draw a similar conclusion. Own-nature (svabhāva), they suggest, is a technical notion of the Abhidharma schools, and Madhyamaka refutes a position that few people have ever held. If that were so, this book would be attacking a straw man.

The objection looks for the habit in the wrong place. Inherent existence is not a belief that people would assent to when asked. It is a shape that thought and perception take before any question is asked. To find it, one does not ask what people believe; one watches what they assume—the pictures that organize ordinary thinking without being noticed as pictures. Tsongkhapa made this the first step of the whole analysis: unless the object of negation (dgag bya) is identified as it actually operates in one's own mind, the refutation will miss its target, however sound the reasoning (Great Treatise, vol. 3). Three such pictures are almost universal.

Space as a container

We think of space as a vast, empty room in which things are placed. Take away every star and galaxy and space, we imagine, would still be there—dark, empty, waiting to be filled. Space so pictured depends on nothing. It is the one thing that would survive the removal of everything else: a container that exists from its own side, prior to whatever it holds.

Yet space is never met in that way. What is experienced is the distance between this and that, room to move, the reach of an arm, the gap a car needs to park. Nāgārjuna gives it a chapter of its own (MMK 5), and physics stopped treating it as a fixed stage a century ago; the Interlude takes up both. The empty room is not something anyone has found. It is something we assume.

Time as a stream

We think of time as a river flowing from the past, through the present, into the future, carrying events along with it. The past lies behind us, still somehow there; the future lies ahead, already waiting; the present is a moving point riding the current. Time so pictured flows on its own, whether anything happens or not. If every clock stopped and every heart, we imagine, time would still pass.

No one has ever met time apart from change. We know the hour by the sun or the clock, the year by the seasons, a life by its ageing. Nāgārjuna finds each of the three times established only in dependence on the others (MMK 19). The river that flows on its own, beneath events and independent of them, is not found. It is the substantialist habit applied to change.

Rebirth as a traveller

The third picture is the most intimate. Asked about rebirth, many people, Buddhists among them, imagine something that leaves the body at death and travels on—a soul, a subtle consciousness, a self that continues life after life as a traveller moves from house to house. Even those who deny an eternal soul often picture a stream of consciousness flowing on like water through a series of pipes: a thing in all but name.

The Buddha's own teaching was framed against exactly this picture. When the monk Sāti held that it is this same consciousness that runs and wanders through the round of births, the Buddha rebuked him: consciousness arises in dependence on conditions, and apart from conditions there is no arising of consciousness (Majjhima Nikāya 38). Chapter 8 takes up Nāgasena's lamp, which makes the same point—nothing passes over—and shows that death and continuity alike are designated, not found. The tradition affirms rebirth, but not as a journey. What is denied is the passenger—the self-standing something that would make one life and the next two stops on a single road.

Smaller pictures

The same habit shows in a hundred smaller pictures. A cause pushes its effect, as one billiard ball strikes another. A self owns its thoughts, as a person owns a house. A word points to a thing already there, waiting for its name. A mind sits behind the eyes, looking out. Each picture is natural, each organizes thought without being seen, and each assumes something standing on its own: a stage, a river, a traveller, a pusher, an owner, a spectator.

So the answer to the question is yes. We do think inherently—not in our stated beliefs, but in the pictures by which we think at all. Clever people are not exempt; the pictures are simply better hidden in clever theories. This is why the Madhyamaka analysis is not an academic exercise aimed at a forgotten school. Recognizing the pictures as pictures is the first step. Seeing that what they picture is not found is the work of the chapters that follow.

Reversing the Foundational Order

Dependent arising—identification only in dependence—undoes the substantialist order of priority. A phenomenon is not first established in and of itself and only afterwards related to surrounding conditions. Instead, its identity, function, boundary, continuity and very intelligibility are identified only in dependence—and the dependence, too, is designated, not a prior ground.

Because an entity cannot be identified apart from its relations, causes and context, relation cannot be treated as a secondary product of pre-existing things. Nor, as Chapter 4 will show, can relation be treated as prior to them: relation and relata are designated together, within the conceptual framework that distinguishes them.

Phenomena as Dependently Designated

Once the substantialist order is reversed, what we conventionally call a 'thing' undergoes a fundamental redefinition. A phenomenon is not an independent substance that subsequently enters into relations. It is designated in dependence on conditions, identifiable for a time and within a framework. Where this book speaks of 'configurations', 'patterns' or 'regularities', these are ways of describing that identifiability, not a new stuff that phenomena are made of.

Just as a flame or a whirlpool is not a solid object moving through space but something recognized and named amid changing conditions, conventional objects—from tables to conscious experiences—are designated together with the contexts and contrasts through which they are picked out, none of which is there first. The stability and predictability of an object do not stem from a solid intrinsic core. Nor does dependent arising take that core's place as a deeper source of stability: the regularities we observe are themselves found only in dependence.

A Short History of Substance

The substantialist premise is not a straw man; it has shaped Western and Buddhist philosophy alike. Aristotle defined primary substance (ousia) as that which is neither said of a subject nor in a subject—the individual man or horse, which bears properties but is not itself the property of anything (Categories 5). Descartes sharpened the criterion into independence itself: by substance, he wrote, 'we can understand nothing other than a thing which exists in such a way as to depend on no other thing for its existence' (Principles of Philosophy I.51, trans. Cottingham, Stoothoff and Murdoch)—and he conceded at once that, strictly, only God meets it.

Buddhist philosophy has its own version. The Abhidharma schools, having dissolved the person into momentary constituents (dharmas), credited each constituent with its own nature (svabhāva): an irreducible defining characteristic that makes it what it is—solidity for earth, cognizing for consciousness. The self was emptied, but its components were left full. It is this position, more than any Western one, that Nāgārjuna addresses. An own-nature, he argues, cannot arise from causes and conditions, for what arises from conditions is made, and an own-nature is by definition unmade and not dependent on anything else (MMK 15.1–2).

Objection: Doesn't Science Need Objects?

A natural objection is that science, and ordinary life, cannot do without objects. Chemistry counts molecules, biology classifies organisms, engineering calculates the load on a beam. If there are no self-standing things, what are these disciplines about?

What they require, however, is reidentification, not intrinsic nature. A chemist needs molecules to be picked out reliably, to behave regularly under specified conditions, and to be counted the same way by different observers. All of this is secured by dependable regularities and shared conventions of designation, both of them designated rather than found. Nothing in the practice requires that a molecule be what it is apart from all relation; indeed, its identity in chemistry is fixed precisely by its relations—its bonds, its reactions, its spectra.

The objection therefore mistakes conventional reliability for ontological independence. The objects of the sciences are kept in full; what is given up is only the further claim that their reliability must rest on an essence. Chapter 15 returns to this in detail.