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Last updated 31 Oct 2026

The Six Higher Knowledges in a Non-Substantialist View

Companion page: The Illusion of the Given.

Part I: The Logic

What Non-Substantialism Rules Out, and What It Leaves Room For

Introduction: Why Start With the Higher Knowledges

Early Buddhist texts describe meditators who know the minds of others, hear sounds far beyond ordinary hearing, see beings pass away and be reborn, recall their own past lives, and wield psychic powers. Alongside these they place a sixth knowledge, the ending of the defilements, which is awakening itself. Later tradition gathers the six under one name: the higher knowledges (Sanskrit abhijñā, Pali abhiññā, also translated “direct knowledges” or “supernormal knowledges”).

Modern readers tend to meet these claims in one of two ways. Some dismiss them at once: they are impossible, because the world is made of matter and matter does not behave like that. Others embrace them as proof of something: a soul that travels, a mind that stands outside the body, a higher reality that the meditator finally sees as it is. This article argues that both reactions make the same mistake. Each assumes that something, matter in one case and mind or soul in the other, exists by itself, with a nature of its own, and is the final measure of what can happen.

The Middle Way of Nāgārjuna rejects that assumption everywhere, and does not exempt any favored item from the search. That is what this article means by a non-substantialist view. The higher knowledges make a good test case for it, because they press on every part of the view at once: on what a mind is, on what it means to know another, on space and distance, on time and memory, on rebirth, on the many worlds of beings, and on what freedom is.

The article has five Parts.

1. Part I, The Logic, sets out the method: what “substance” means, how the search for it is carried out, what the two truths are, and how to tell what an argument rules out from what it merely leaves room for.
2. Part II, The Worldview, applies the method to the knower, to the many worlds of beings, to space and distance, and to continuity across lives. These are the background against which the higher knowledges make sense.
3. Part III, The Six Higher Knowledges, reads each knowledge in turn, first as the texts describe it and then without a hidden ground.
4. Part IV, The Later Traditions, follows the knowledges into Indian Mahāyāna, Tibet, and Chan and Zen, which keep them, keep the early caution, and add three readings of their own.
5. Part V, Holding Them Rightly, separates what the logic shows from what the tradition affirms and what only evidence could decide. It also looks at how the tradition itself handles these abilities, and why it keeps them in their place.

Readers who know The Illusion of the Given, the companion bonus article, will recognize much of Part II. It is restated here in brief so that this article can be read on its own.

1. What “Substance” Means

A. Own-Being

The Sanskrit word that the Middle Way takes apart is svabhāva, usually translated “intrinsic nature” or “own-being.” Something would have svabhāva if it were what it is from its own side: not made, not dependent on anything else, and not changing in its essential nature. Nāgārjuna states the definition plainly in the Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, 15.2): an intrinsic nature would be “not made, and not dependent on another.”

A substance, in the sense used here, is anything taken to have such a nature. It need not be a material stuff. It can be:

• Matter: atoms, particles, fields, or energy taken as the one thing that really exists, of which everything else is a pattern.
• Mind: a consciousness, a witness, or an awareness taken as the one thing that really exists, in which everything else appears.
• A self or soul: a someone who stays the same beneath changing experiences and, on some views, across lives.
• A space or container: a neutral box that would exist with nothing in it, inside which things and worlds are placed.
• A ground: a hidden bedrock, source, or field from which all appearances come and to which they return.

These look very different, but they share one structure. Each is a candidate for the thing that is simply given, the floor that everything else stands on and that does not itself stand on anything.

B. Why Substance Is Tempting

The habit of positing a substance is not a philosopher’s invention. It is how ordinary experience organizes itself. We see a cup, and the word “cup” seems to name a thing that was there before we looked and will be there after we leave. We feel “I,” and the feeling seems to point to someone who has the feeling. Buddhist texts call this habit grasping or fixing: the mind takes what is in fact dependent, changing, and made of parts, and treats it as solid, standing by itself, and complete in itself.

Nothing in this article asks the reader to stop using the word “cup” or the word “I.” The question is only whether either word names something that is there on its own.

2. The Search

A. Looking for the Thing Itself

The Middle Way does not refute substance by announcing that there is none. It looks. If a thing exists by its own nature, then when we search for it carefully, it should be found, standing apart from its parts, its causes, and our ways of naming it.

The classical example is the chariot. In the Questions of King Milinda (Milindapañha), the monk Nāgasena asks the king which part is the chariot: the pole, the axle, the wheels, the frame? None of them. All of them taken together, as a heap of parts? Not that either. Something apart from the parts? Nothing is found there. And yet the king came by chariot. “Chariot” is a name used in dependence on the parts, and it works perfectly. In the same way, Nāgasena says, his own name is used in dependence on body and mind, and no person is found in addition to them.

The Indian master Candrakīrti, in chapter 6 of Entering the Middle Way (Madhyamakāvatāra), sharpens this into a sevenfold search. The chariot is not the same as its parts, not different from them, does not possess them, is not in them, does not have them in it, is not their mere collection, and is not their shape. In none of these seven ways is it found. Yet it is not nothing: it is designated, and as designated it carries people from place to place.

B. Nothing Is Exempt

The search is only as strong as its willingness to apply itself to everything. The common way to escape it is to exempt one favored item. A materialist searches the self, finds nothing, and concludes that only matter is real, without searching matter in the same way. An idealist searches matter, finds nothing standing by itself, and concludes that only mind is real, without searching mind. A spiritual seeker searches the ordinary self, finds nothing, and concludes that a pure awareness behind it is the true self.

Each of these stops the search one step early. The Middle Way does not. A substance, a relation, a moment, a mind, a self, a space, a field, an awareness: each meets the same search, and none is found standing on its own. This is why the view is called non-substantialist, not anti-materialist or anti-mentalist. It is not against matter in favor of mind, or against mind in favor of matter. It finds neither as a floor.

3. Two Truths, One Appearance

A. Conventional and Ultimate

If nothing is found under analysis, what are cups, people, and chariots? The Middle Way answers with the two truths.

• Conventional truth (saṃvṛti-satya) is the way things appear and work: the cup holds tea, the chariot carries the king, the person keeps a promise. Within this truth there are real distinctions between right and wrong, healthy and impaired, accurate and mistaken.
• Ultimate truth (paramārtha-satya) is what is found when one searches for how things exist in themselves: nothing standing by itself. This is emptiness (śūnyatā), the absence of intrinsic nature.

The two truths are not two levels or two worlds, one ordinary and one hidden. They are two aspects of one appearance. The cup that holds tea is the cup that is empty of a nature of its own. Its emptiness does not sit behind it, and its working does not sit on top of its emptiness.

B. Empty Does Not Mean Flimsy

Emptiness is often misheard as unreality, as if empty things were faint, dreamlike, or optional. That is not the claim. Empty appearances are vivid and work reliably. Fire still burns, a lie still harms, and a kind act still helps. What is denied is only that any of them works by a power it owns from its own side. A thing with its nature fixed from its own side could not respond, combine, or change: a world of true substances would be frozen. That is the point of Nāgārjuna’s reply to critics who said that emptiness would make the path and its results impossible (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 24.14): “For whom emptiness works, everything works.” It is fixed natures, not emptiness, that would stop everything. Emptiness itself does nothing and explains nothing; it is simply what dependent arising amounts to when it is examined.

4. Two Kinds of Denial

A. Denying Without Replacing

Indian and Tibetan logic distinguish two kinds of negation.

• An implicative negation denies one thing and implies another. “He is not a monk” suggests he is a layperson.
• A non-implicative negation (Sanskrit prasajya-pratiṣedha) simply denies, and implies nothing in its place. “There is no self-standing self” does not mean “so there is a different, better self.”

The Middle Way, as Tsongkhapa reads it, takes emptiness as a negation of the second kind. It removes intrinsic nature and puts nothing in its place. This is the single most important rule for reading everything that follows. Whenever the analysis removes a substance, the temptation is to install a new one in the space that has been cleared: “There is no material bedrock, so mind must be the bedrock”; “There is no traveling soul, so a subtle consciousness must travel instead”; “There is no ordinary view from nowhere, so the meditator’s higher vision must be the view from nowhere.” Each of these is an implicative reading. Each brings the substance back under a new name.

B. Emptiness Is Not a New Ground

The same rule applies to emptiness itself. Emptiness is not a substance, a field, a space, or a radiant reality from which things come. It is not a bedrock that the meditator finally reaches. In the words of Nāgārjuna (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 13.8), the victorious ones taught emptiness as the relinquishing of all views, and those for whom emptiness becomes a view are said to be incurable. Emptiness, too, is empty.

This matters for the higher knowledges in a direct way. If a contemplative’s seeing were said to reach “emptiness itself,” as if emptiness were a place or a thing to be looked at, the ground would have returned. What the tradition calls the highest knowledge is not a look at a hidden thing. Part III, §6, returns to this.

5. Dependent Arising and Designation

A. Arising in Dependence

What is left when intrinsic nature is removed is dependent arising (pratītya-samutpāda): things arise in dependence on causes and conditions, on their parts, and on the ways they are conceived and named. Nāgārjuna makes the two inseparable (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 24.18): whatever arises dependently is what is called emptiness; that is a dependent designation; and that itself is the middle way.

Three kinds of dependence are worth keeping apart:

1. Causal dependence: a sprout depends on a seed, water, and warmth.
2. Dependence on parts: a chariot depends on its wheels and axle; a mind depends on its moments.
3. Dependence on designation: “long” depends on “short,” “near” on “far,” “knower” on “known,” and each thing depends on the ways a community of beings picks it out and names it.

B. Designation Is the Whole Status

It is tempting to think that designation is a label attached to something already there underneath. On the Middle Way it is not. A thing and its designation arise together. There is no unlabeled thing waiting beneath the label, and no labeler who stands outside the process doing the labeling. This is the precise sense in which the view is non-substantialist: nothing is given in advance, neither the thing, nor the knower, nor the space between them.

C. Regularity Without a Producer

Dependent arising is regular. Rice comes from rice seed, not from barley seed; kind acts tend toward happiness and cruel acts toward suffering. But the regularity does not need a hidden power that makes it hold, and the question “Why is there regularity at all?” does not have to be answered by a deeper substance. The Illusion of the Given (Part I, §8) discusses this at length. For this article, it is enough to note that the higher knowledges, if they occur, would be regular in the same way: they would arise from causes (ethical conduct, concentration, training) and would not need a special substance to make them possible.

6. Three Questions for Any Claim

The method of this article can now be stated. For each of the higher knowledges, and for each claim the tradition makes about them, three questions are asked in turn.

1. Does the claim, as usually understood, need a substance? For example, does recollecting past lives need a soul that was present in those lives and carried the memories forward? Does knowing another’s mind need a private inner box that the knower somehow opens?
2. If it does, can the claim be understood without one? That is, can the same knowledge be described as dependently arisen, designated, and empty, like everything else?
3. Does the logic prove that the claim is true? In every case, the answer is no.

The third question is where readers on both sides most often go wrong, so it deserves a careful statement. The Middle Way can show that an objection to a claim depends on a substance. When it does, the objection falls. But showing that an objection falls is not the same as showing that the claim is true. Removing a bad argument against something is not the same as supplying a good argument for it.

So each Part of this article keeps three things separate:

• What the logic shows: that a given objection rests on a substance, or that a given reading of a claim does.
• What the tradition affirms: what the Buddhist texts teach, which a Buddhist reader holds as the tradition does, conventionally.
• What only evidence can decide: whether a given report in a given case is accurate.

Part V, §2, sets these out side by side for each of the six knowledges.

Part II: The Worldview

Knower, Channels, Many Worlds, and Continuity

Introduction: The Background the Knowledges Need

Each of the higher knowledges is a kind of knowing. Each reaches something: another mind, a distant sound, a past life, a being in another realm. To read them without a substance, we first need a picture of knowing, of worlds, of distance, and of continuity that does not itself rest on one. This Part supplies that picture in five steps.

1. The knower is not a substance.
2. Worlds are made by channels of contact.
3. There is no view from nowhere.
4. Distance does not need a container.
5. Continuity does not need a carrier.

Each step corresponds to one or more of the knowledges, and Part III draws on them in turn.

1. The Knower Is Not a Substance

A. Mind Is Searched Like Everything Else

Part I, §2B, said that nothing is exempt from the search. This applies above all to the mind, because the mind is the most tempting candidate for the last substance. When everything outside has been shown to depend on perception, it seems natural to conclude that perception, at least, is simply given.

The Middle Way does not accept this. Candrakīrti, in his critique of the Mind-Only view (Entering the Middle Way, chapter 6), argues that if the object is not found existing by itself, the mind that knows it is not found existing by itself either. They arise together, and they stand or fall together. To deny objects while keeping mind would make mind the last substance. Idealism, on this view, is simply materialism turned inside out.

B. Knower and Known Are Designated Together

Consciousness, on this view, is not a standing light, a container, or a witness behind experience. It is always of something, through something: seeing is of a color through an eye, hearing is of a sound through an ear, thinking is of a thought through the mind. “Knower” and “known” are designated together, as “long” and “short” are. Neither comes first.

The early texts already insist on this. In the Longer Discourse on the Ending of Craving (Mahātaṇhāsaṅkhaya Sutta, MN 38), the monk Sāti claims that, as he understands the Buddha’s teaching, “it is this very same consciousness that roams and transmigrates, not another.” The Buddha rebukes him sharply and repeats what he had said “in many ways”: that “consciousness is dependently originated,” and that “without a cause, consciousness does not come to be.” Consciousness is named after the conditions it arises from, as fire is named after its fuel: a fire burning logs is a log fire, and a fire burning grass is a grass fire.

C. What This Means for the Knowledges

If the knower were a substance, the higher knowledges would be easy to misread. Knowing another’s mind would be one private box opening another. Remembering past lives would be the same box remembering its earlier contents. The divine eye would be the box looking out through a wider window.

Once the knower is not a box, none of these pictures is available, and none is needed. A knowing that reaches further is still a knowing of something, through something. It arises from conditions, as all knowing does.

2. Worlds Are Made by Channels

A. What a World Is

In this article, as in The Illusion of the Given, a world is the whole field of appearances that opens when a particular kind of being meets its surroundings through particular senses, habits, and channels of contact. Buddhist texts call this a loka; the biologist Jakob von Uexküll called it an Umwelt.

Uexküll’s tick responds to three signals: the smell of butyric acid in mammal sweat, the warmth of a body, and the touch of hair. Those three signals are, almost entirely, its world. The bat lives in a world shaped by returning sound; the honeybee in a world organized by ultraviolet patterns on flowers; the human in a world of colors, mid-sized objects, words, clocks, and maps.

These worlds are not separated by walls or by distance. They differ because each kind of being is coupled to its surroundings through different channels. What a being can sense, what it can do, and what it habitually reaches for together decide what shows up for it as real.

B. Three Sides, Designated Together

Every world has three sides: the being with its senses and habits; the environment as it is met; and the channels of contact that join the two. None of them comes first. The being is not a finished observer who later meets an environment; the environment is not a finished stage awaiting observers; the channels are not pipes laid down in advance. All three are designated together.

C. Many Worlds, No Master World

Classical Buddhist cosmology describes six realms of rebirth: gods, demigods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts, and hell beings. Their differences are explained above all by karma, the accumulated habits of intention and action that shape how a being meets everything around it. The famous example is a single bowl of liquid that is water for a human, burning pus for a hungry ghost, an atmosphere for a fish, and nectar for a god.

On the non-substantialist view, none of these is the hidden original of the others. There is no neutral liquid beneath them that each kind of being merely filters. Nor is the human world the master copy, with the others as distortions of it. The human world is coherent and reliable within its own channels. It has every practical priority for us. What it lacks is ultimate priority.

This is what multi-dimensional means here. It does not mean the extra dimensions of physics. It means that reality is not one world seen through many filters, but many worlds, each a whole side of what is, none of them the foundation of the rest.

D. Worlds Come in Degrees

Worlds are not sealed compartments. They overlap to the extent that channels are shared. A human and a dog share sight, hearing, and touch to a large degree; a human and a tick share very little. The question “Are these the same world?” has no single yes-or-no answer. It is a matter of how much is shared, along which channels.

This has a direct consequence for the higher knowledges. If worlds differ by their channels, then a being whose channels change would find its world changing too. Part III reads the knowledges in exactly this way: as changes in the channels of contact, brought about by training.

3. There Is No View From Nowhere

A. Every View Is From Somewhere

One thing does not cross between worlds: a view from nowhere. No being can step outside every world and compare them all from a neutral overview, because any comparison is itself made from somewhere, through some channel. A human can learn a great deal about the bat’s world through instruments and experiments, but always as a human, building a human picture of the bat.

This is not a failure to be fixed. It is what it means for knowing to be dependently arisen. A view from nowhere would be a knowing that depended on no position, no channel, and no knower. It would be a knowing with an intrinsic nature: exactly what the search of Part I fails to find.

B. Wider Is Not the Same as From Nowhere

It is important to see what this does not rule out. It does not rule out knowing more, knowing further, or knowing along channels that ordinary humans lack. Science already extends human channels enormously: spectrometers, microscopes, and particle detectors couple us to things our unaided senses miss. Science widens the human world, but it does not lift us out of every world.

The same distinction applies to any knowing, however wide. A view can grow wider without limit and still be a view from somewhere. What the argument rules out is not reach, but the idea of a knowing that has no position at all.

This single distinction does most of the work in Part III. Every higher knowledge described in the texts is a widening. None of them, read carefully, is described as a view from nowhere. And the one knowledge the tradition values above all, the ending of the defilements, is not a wider view at all.

4. Distance Without a Container

A. The Container Myth

We naturally imagine space as an empty, ready-made box that would exist with nothing in it, with objects placed inside it at fixed distances from one another. The Illusion of the Given calls this the Container Myth.

Nāgārjuna examines space in chapter 5 of the Fundamental Verses. Space is defined by its characteristic, the absence of obstruction. But space cannot exist before its characteristic, as if it were an empty something waiting to be characterized, and the characteristic cannot exist without something it characterizes. Space and what is located in it are designated together. Space is not a container that exists first and holds things later.

B. Near and Far Are Designated Within a World

If space is not a neutral box, then distance is not a fixed quantity laid down in advance between two points. “Near” and “far” are designated within a world, through its channels. To the tick, “near” is a rising gradient of butyric acid. To a human with a telephone, a friend on another continent is near in one respect and far in another. To a human with a telescope, a galaxy is visible though it is unimaginably distant by another measure.

None of this says that distance is unreal or that anything can reach anything. Within the human world, distances are reliable and travel takes time. The claim is only that distance, like everything else, is a relation designated in dependence on beings and their channels, not a property of a container that exists by itself.

C. Other Worlds Are Not Elsewhere

The same applies to other realms. The tempting answer to “Where are the other worlds?” is “Right here, in the same space as ours.” That answer sounds open-minded, but it brings back the container: a single neutral space in which both worlds are placed.

The non-substantialist answer uses a non-implicative negation (Part I, §4). The other worlds are not elsewhere: not in a distant place, not behind a hidden wall. But that does not imply that they are “in the same place,” because there is no neutral place for them to share. The honest position is to deny the distance and leave it there.

This is the background for the divine ear, which hears sounds “near or far,” and for the divine eye, which sees beings in many realms. Part III, §§2 and 5, return to it.

5. Continuity Without a Carrier

A. Karma Without a Ledger

Karma is the Buddhist teaching that intentional action bears fruit. Kind acts tend toward happiness and cruel acts toward suffering, in this life and beyond it. A substantialist reading imagines karma as a kind of stored stuff: a deposit placed in a hidden account and paid out later, or a seed carried in a hidden storehouse.

Nāgārjuna examines karma in chapter 17 of the Fundamental Verses. If karma had an intrinsic nature, it could never have been made, never change, and never end: it would have to ripen again and again. A karma that exists by itself could not do the work karma is supposed to do. Only an empty karma can deliver its fruit. Agent, action, and result are all empty, and this is exactly why they work. The link between action and result is real and reliable, as the link between rice seed and rice is. It is designated across the moments, not carried by something that travels through them.

B. Rebirth Without a Traveler

The same reasoning applies to rebirth. The Buddhist tradition affirms that one life conditions the next. What it denies, from the earliest texts on, is a traveler: a self that walks unchanged from life to life, and also its shadow, the self that would be wiped out at death.

Sāti’s mistake in MN 38 (§1B above) was precisely to make consciousness the traveler. The Buddha’s correction was not to deny rebirth, but to deny that anything passes over. In the Questions of King Milinda, Nāgasena explains with the image of a lamp burning through the night: the flame in the last watch is neither the same flame as in the first watch nor a different one, yet the one depends on the other. When one lamp is lit from another, nothing passes over, yet the second flame is not unconnected with the first.

Nāgārjuna presses the point (Fundamental Verses, 21.18–21). If the last moment of one life had already ceased, nothing would connect it to the next; if it had not ceased, two lives would run at once; and if one began at the very instant the other ended, they would still be two. No link is found at the joint. The continuity is not denied as a convention. It is not found as a thing that flows.

C. Affirmed, Not Proven

It matters to be precise about what emptiness does here. Emptiness removes one objection to rebirth: the objection that rebirth would need a carrier, a soul or a subtle substance to make the journey. Since nothing ever has such a carrier, not even within a single life, rebirth is not harder to make sense of than ordinary continuity from one day to the next.

But removing that objection does not show that rebirth happens. Whether it happens is affirmed by the tradition and held conventionally by those who follow it; whether a given report of a past life is accurate is a matter of evidence. This is the pattern of Part I, §6, and it is the same pattern Part III will apply to every one of the higher knowledges.

6. From the Worldview to the Knowledges

The five steps of this Part map onto the six knowledges as follows.

The sixth knowledge, the ending of the defilements, stands apart. It is not one more channel, and Part III, §6, explains why.

Part III: The Six Higher Knowledges

Each Read Without a Hidden Ground

Introduction: What the Early Texts Describe

A. The Setting

The fullest early account is in the Discourse on the Fruits of the Ascetic Life (Sāmaññaphala Sutta, DN 2). King Ajātasattu of Magadha asks the Buddha what visible fruit the life of a renunciate brings, here and now. The Buddha answers with a graded series. First come the simple fruits: a bondservant or a farmer who goes forth is honored even by the king. Then come ethical conduct, restraint of the senses, contentment, and the four absorptions (jhāna) of deep meditation.

Then the sutta describes a mind “immersed in samādhi” (deep concentration) in a fixed formula, repeated before each knowledge: “purified, bright, flawless, rid of corruptions, pliable, workable, steady, and imperturbable.” (Quotations from the early discourses in this article follow Bhikkhu Sujato’s translations.) Such a mind, the sutta says, can be “projected and extended” toward a series of knowledges. DN 2 lists eight: insight into the body and consciousness, the creation of a mind-made body, and then the six that later tradition gathers as the higher knowledges.

The Buddha’s own awakening, in the Discourse on Fear and Dread (Bhayabherava Sutta, MN 4), follows the same pattern in brief. With his mind immersed in samādhi in the same words, he recollects his past lives in the first watch of the night, sees beings pass away and be reborn in the middle watch, and realizes the ending of the defilements in the last watch. Only with the third, he says, was his mind freed.

B. The Six

C. Five Worldly, One Liberating

The tradition draws a sharp line between the first five and the sixth. The first five are worldly (lokiya): abilities that come with deep concentration. The early texts themselves credit some of them to people outside the Buddha’s teaching. In the Brahmajāla Sutta (DN 1), the Buddha describes ascetics who, through effort and concentration, recollect many past lives, and on that basis declare that “the self and the cosmos are eternal … steady as a mountain peak, standing firm like a pillar.” The knowledge of past lives does not, by itself, make anyone wise. It can even become the support for a wrong view.

The sixth is supramundane (lokuttara). It is not one more ability. It is the end of what binds. This difference will matter at the end of this Part.

D. How This Part Reads Each One

For each knowledge, this Part asks the three questions of Part I, §6.

1. The substantialist reading: what substance the knowledge seems to need, if read in the usual way.
2. The non-substantialist reading: how the same knowledge can be understood as dependently arisen, designated, and empty.
3. What remains open: what the reading does not show.

The answer to the third question is the same every time, so it is given once here and not repeated at length: the reading shows that the knowledge does not need a substance, and it does not show that the knowledge occurs. Part V takes this up in full.

1. Psychic Powers

A. What the Texts Say

The first knowledge covers a family of powers: becoming many and becoming one again; appearing and vanishing; going unobstructed through walls and mountains “as if through space”; diving in and out of the earth “as if it were water”; walking on water “as if it were earth”; flying cross-legged through the sky like a bird; touching the sun and moon with the hand; and controlling the body as far as the realm of divinity (Brahmā). The image the sutta gives is of a skilled potter with well-prepared clay, who can make any kind of pot they like. DN 2 places just before it the creation of a “mind-made body,” drawn out from this body “as a reed is drawn from its sheath.”

B. The Substantialist Reading

On the usual reading, these powers would be violations. There is a wall, solid by nature; there is a body, solid by nature; and the meditator somehow forces one through the other, overriding the way things really are. This picture makes solidity an intrinsic property of matter. On it, psychic power must either be impossible (because matter cannot be overridden) or miraculous (because something has broken the bedrock rules).

A second substantialist reading concerns the mind-made body. It is easy to picture it as the soul stepping out of the body: the “real” person, made of subtler stuff, leaving its shell. The images of the reed and the sheath, the sword and the scabbard, the snake and its slough seem to invite it.

C. The Non-Substantialist Reading

The Illusion of the Given (Part I, §6) treats solidity as a relation, not a possession. A wall is solid for a body that shares the relevant coupling with it. Dark matter, as far as observations show, passes through the Earth without collision, because it does not couple electromagnetically, yet the Earth’s gravity still bends its path. A neutrino passes through vast thicknesses of lead with almost no chance of striking an atom. In the traditional accounts, spirits with subtle bodies pass through mountains. Solidity is not an intrinsic property of rock; it is a resistance that arises when two systems that share the relevant kind of coupling meet.

Read in these terms, passing through a wall “as if through space” would not be the overriding of an intrinsic solidity, because there is no intrinsic solidity to override. It would be a change in which channels are coupled. The wall would remain a wall for everyone else, and for the meditator at other times. Nothing about walls would have been refuted. What would have changed is the meeting.

The sutta’s own image points the same way. The potter’s clay is “well-prepared,” and the mind that turns toward psychic power is “pliable, workable.” The power is described as workability, as a skill with a material that responds, not as force applied against a nature that resists.

The other powers can be read in the same way. Becoming many and becoming one would not be one substance dividing and recombining, because a person was never one substance to begin with: “one” and “many” are designated in dependence on each other, and a person is already designated in dependence on many parts and moments. Flying would not be the suspension of a law that exists by itself, because the regularities of the human world are designated within that world and hold reliably there, not as decrees issued from outside every world.

The mind-made body, too, need not be a soul. The sutta says the meditator creates it (“from this body they create another body”) from a concentrated mind. Read without a substance, it is a body designated in dependence on that concentration, as this body is designated in dependence on its elements and its history. The reed and the sheath are an image of distinctness, not a doctrine that the reed is the true self. Nowhere does the sutta say that the mind-made body is what the person really is.

D. A Caution

This reading is not an explanation of psychic power, and it supplies no mechanism. Talk of “channels” and “coupling” is a way of showing that the claim does not require an intrinsic solidity to be broken. It does not show how such a change in coupling could be brought about, and physics does not confirm that it can. The examples of dark matter and neutrinos illustrate a pattern; they are not evidence that a human body can do what a neutrino does.

2. The Divine Ear

A. What the Texts Say

“With clairaudience that is purified and superhuman, they hear both kinds of sounds, human and heavenly, whether near or far.” The image the sutta gives is of a person traveling along a road who hears the sound of drums, horns, and kettledrums, and knows each for what it is.

B. The Substantialist Reading

On the usual reading, the divine ear would be an extremely long ear: a hearing that reaches across a fixed container of space to sound-sources located far away in it, perhaps by some subtle wave traveling through the box. And “heavenly” sounds would be sounds made in a different region of the same box, far above.

C. The Non-Substantialist Reading

Part II, §4, showed that distance is designated within a world, not laid down in a container. “Near” and “far” are relations that depend on beings and their channels. A telephone already makes a voice on another continent near in one respect and far in another, without the box of space having changed at all.

The divine ear, read without a container, would be a change in the channel of hearing, so that sounds which are far by one measure become near by another. It would not need a single neutral space across which a signal must travel. And “heavenly” sounds would not have to come from a higher floor of the same building. They would be sounds of another world, in the sense of Part II, §2: met through a channel that ordinary human hearing does not share. Other worlds, on this view, are not elsewhere, and are not “in the same place” either (Part II, §4C).

Two features of the sutta’s own description fit this reading. First, the divine ear hears sounds, “human and heavenly”: it is still hearing, with its own object, and not a knowing of everything at once. Second, the image is of someone on a road who recognizes what they hear: the hearer is located, and what is heard is known as a drum or a horn. Even a superhuman hearing, as described, is a hearing from somewhere.

3. Knowing the Minds of Others

A. What the Texts Say

“They understand the minds of other beings and individuals, having encompassed them with their own mind.” The sutta then lists what is understood: a mind with greed as “mind with greed” and a mind without greed as “mind without greed”; and so on for hate and delusion, for a constricted or scattered mind, an expansive or unexpansive mind, a mind immersed in concentration or not, and a freed or unfreed mind. The image is of a young person checking their reflection in a clean, bright mirror or a clear bowl of water, and knowing whether or not there is a spot on their face.

Elsewhere the texts describe a related ability. In the Kevaddha Sutta (DN 11) and the Saṅgārava Sutta (AN 3.60), the “demonstration of revealing” (ādesanā) includes revealing another person’s thoughts: by a sign, by hearing it from others, by hearing “the sound of thought spreading as someone thinks and considers,” or by comprehending another’s mind.

B. The Substantialist Reading

On the usual reading, each mind is a private interior, a sealed room that only its owner can enter. Ordinary knowledge of others would then be inference from the outside, and telepathy would be the miracle of breaking into the room: one private substance gaining direct access to another, or even merging with it.

This reading rests on a deep assumption: that my own mind is simply given to me, certain and immediate, while yours is hidden. Dharmakīrti, in his Proof of Other Mental Streams (Santānāntarasiddhi), argued that we infer other minds from the purposeful actions of other bodies. Ratnakīrti, from the Mind-Only side, later argued that other minds can never finally be proven. Both share the assumption that one’s own mind is the unquestioned starting point.

C. The Non-Substantialist Reading

The Illusion of the Given (Part I, §3A) rejects that asymmetry. Under analysis, my own stream of consciousness is no more findable as an independent thing than yours is. Both are designated in dependence on changing physical and mental events, and both function in daily life. Other minds are not a conclusion deduced from a private starting point; they are designated together with oneself, as “long” is designated alongside “short.” There is no sealed room on either side.

Once the rooms are gone, knowing another’s mind does not need to be a break-in. Ordinary empathy is already a channel of contact between minds: we read a face, hear a tone of voice, and know that a friend is angry or afraid, and we are often right. Knowing others’ minds, as the texts describe it, would be a further and finer channel of the same kind, opened by concentration rather than by long acquaintance.

Three features of the sutta’s description fit this reading closely.

1. It is done “with their own mind.” The knower does not become the other, merge into a shared awareness, or step outside both minds to compare them. One mind knows another, from where it is. This is a knowing from somewhere, by someone, through a channel.
2. What is known is how the mind is conditioned. The list is of qualities: greed or its absence, hate or its absence, delusion or its absence, concentration, freedom. These are exactly the features of a mind that the Buddhist path is concerned with, and each of them is a dependently arisen state, not a fixed essence. The sutta does not describe a knowing of what another person “really is” beneath their states.
3. The image is a mirror. A mirror shows a face accurately, and the face is not in the mirror. Knowing, on this image, is accurate without being possession.

D. Two Minds Remain Two

Non-substantialism does not dissolve the difference between minds into one great awareness. That would install a new substance, a universal mind, in place of the many private ones. Two streams remain two by convention, as two lamps remain two even when one is lit from the other. Knowing another’s mind, on this reading, is contact between two designated streams, each empty, neither absorbed into the other.

4. Recollecting Past Lives

A. What the Texts Say

“They recollect many kinds of past lives, that is, one, two, three, four, five, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand rebirths; many eons of the world contracting, many eons of the world expanding.” And they remember the details: “There, I was named this, my clan was that, I looked like this, and that was my food. This was how I felt pleasure and pain, and that was how my life came to an end.” The image is of someone who travels from their own village to another and then a third, and returns, remembering where they went and what they did.

B. The Substantialist Reading

This knowledge seems to demand a substance more than any other. If I remember having been someone else, it seems there must be an “I” that was present then and is present now, carrying the memories across the gap: a soul, or at least a subtle consciousness that makes the journey.

The early texts know this reading well, because it is the root of a wrong view. In the Brahmajāla Sutta (DN 1), ascetics who recollect past lives conclude that “the self and the cosmos are eternal.” In the Longer Discourse on the Ending of Craving (MN 38), Sāti holds that “it is this very same consciousness that roams and transmigrates, not another.” The tradition rejects both, while keeping the recollection of past lives. So the tradition itself holds that this knowledge does not imply a traveler.

C. The Non-Substantialist Reading

Part II, §5, showed that continuity does not need a carrier, even within a single life. When I remember yesterday, nothing has carried yesterday’s experience across the night. There is no box in which memories are stored between rememberings, as there is no place where a melody known by heart waits between performances. Memory is a regular relation of dependence between present and past moments, designated across them, not something transported through them.

Recollecting a past life, read without a substance, would be the same kind of relation over a longer stretch: a present knowing that depends on, and accurately reflects, an earlier stream of events, with no traveler passing between them. The lamp image of the Questions of King Milinda fits exactly. The flame at the last watch is neither the same as the flame at the first watch nor a different one, yet it depends on it. “I was named this, my clan was that” is how the earlier life is designated from within the present one, in the language of a self, which is the ordinary language of the human world. It is not a report that one substance was present in both lives.

The village image fits as well. The traveler in the image goes from village to village and returns home. The point of the image is the reliability of the memory, not the doctrine that the same unchanging person walked the road. A person who remembers a journey is designated in dependence on the journey, as everyone is.

D. Why This Reading Matters

The difference between the two readings is not academic. The ascetics of DN 1 have, on the sutta’s own account, a genuine experience. Their error is not in the experience but in what they make of it: they take it as proof of a self that stands “firm like a pillar.” The non-substantialist reading lets the experience stand while refusing that conclusion. This is the general pattern of the Middle Way with every meditative experience: the experience is affirmed; the reification of it is refused.

5. The Divine Eye

A. What the Texts Say

“With clairvoyance that is purified and superhuman, they see sentient beings passing away and being reborn: inferior and superior, beautiful and ugly, in a good place or a bad place. They understand how sentient beings pass on according to their deeds.” The image is of a person with clear eyes standing in a raised longhouse at the central square, watching people enter and leave a house, walk along the streets, and sit down in the square.

B. The Substantialist Reading

The divine eye seems at first to be the view from nowhere: an overview of all beings in all realms, seeing the whole process of karma and rebirth from above, as it really is. If the argument of Part II, §3, is right, and there is no view from nowhere, then it seems the divine eye must be ruled out.

C. The Non-Substantialist Reading

Look again at the sutta’s own image. The seer stands in a raised house at the central square. That is a place. It is a very good place to see from, with a wide view in several directions, but it is a place, and what is seen is seen from it. The image is not of an eye that looks from nowhere; it is of an eye that looks from a height.

This is precisely the distinction of Part II, §3B: wider is not the same as from nowhere. The divine eye, as described, would be a great widening of the channels of seeing. It would still be the seeing of a particular meditator, at a particular time, with a mind “immersed in samādhi.” It would see beings “inferior and superior, beautiful and ugly,” which are designations made from a point of view, by someone who recognizes them as such.

What the divine eye sees is also, on the sutta’s account, a process of dependence: beings “pass on according to their deeds.” It sees karma ripening. It does not see a substance traveling from body to body; it sees how conditions in one life are followed by results in another. This is continuity without a carrier (Part II, §5), seen rather than reasoned.

D. Seeing Other Worlds From One’s Own

The divine eye sees beings “in a good place or a bad place,” which in the traditional cosmology includes other realms of rebirth. How can one being see into another’s world, if worlds are made by channels?

The Illusion of the Given (Part II, §3) answered that worlds touch in two ways: along shared channels, and, in the traditional account, through dependent conditions without a pipeline. The divine eye would be a third case, or a special case of the first: a channel opened by training, through which beings of other worlds appear to the meditator. But they would appear as seen by the meditator, within the meditator’s field of appearances. Nothing in the description says that the meditator sees the hungry ghost’s world as the hungry ghost does, from the inside. A human who studies a bat with instruments learns a great deal about the bat, but always as a human. A meditator who sees a hungry ghost with the divine eye would see a great deal, but always as the one seeing.

6. The Ending of the Defilements

A. What the Texts Say

The sixth knowledge comes last in DN 2 and last in the Buddha’s own night of awakening in MN 4. The mind, immersed in samādhi in the same words, is extended toward “knowledge of the ending of defilements.” The meditator truly understands: “These are defilements … This is the origin of defilements … This is the cessation of defilements … This is the practice that leads to the cessation of defilements.” And “knowing and seeing like this,” the mind is freed from the defilements of sensuality, of desire to be reborn, and of ignorance. The image is of a person with clear eyes standing on the bank of a transparent mountain lake, seeing the clams and mussels, the pebbles and gravel, and the fish swimming about or staying still.

B. Why It Is Not a Sixth Power

On a substantialist reading, the sixth knowledge would be the greatest power of all: the final channel, the one that at last reaches the bedrock. The first five see further and further; the sixth would see all the way down.

The sutta’s own description does not say this. What the sixth knowledge knows is not a hidden object. It knows the defilements, their origin, their cessation, and the way: that is, it knows the very process by which the mind fixes and grasps, and it knows that process ending. Its result is not that the meditator acquires something new, but that something stops. The image is of clear water: nothing is added to the lake, but what was always in it is seen.

The non-substantialist reading follows this closely. Freedom, on this view, is not produced by causes, and it is not an uncaused ground uncovered at the bottom of things. It is the recognition that what the defilements spun around was never there to be fixed. Nirvāṇa is not a different world to be reached by a further channel. It is this same appearing, with the fixing ended.

C. Why the Sixth Matters for the Other Five

This is why the tradition ranks the sixth so far above the other five. The first five widen the field of what appears. A mind with them can still fix what appears, and fix itself as the one who sees it. The ascetics of DN 1 did exactly that with recollection of past lives. The sixth does not widen the field; it ends the fixing, whatever the field.

So the five worldly knowledges, however remarkable, are not steps toward a view from nowhere. If they occur, they are widenings of a view from somewhere. The sixth is not a view from nowhere either. It is a view from somewhere that no longer takes its somewhere, or its seer, or what it sees, to exist by itself.

7. The Monk Who Went to the Gods

The Kevaddha Sutta (DN 11) ends with a story that gathers all of this into one image.

A monk in the Buddha’s community wonders: “Where do these four principal states cease without remainder, namely, the elements of earth, water, fire, and air?” He enters a concentration in which “a path to the gods” appears, and he asks the gods of the four great kings. They do not know, and send him to their superiors. He asks the gods of the thirty-three, and Sakka their lord, and the gods of the higher heavens, realm after realm, each sending him on. At last he reaches the host of Brahmā, and then the Great Brahmā himself, who answers only by repeating his own titles: “I am the Divinity, the Great Divinity, the Vanquisher, the Unvanquished, the Universal Seer … the Maker, the Creator.” Asked a third time, the Great Brahmā takes the monk aside and admits that he, too, does not know. The monk’s mistake, he says, was to pass over the Buddha and search elsewhere.

The monk returns, “as easily as a strong person would extend or contract their arm.” The Buddha compares him to a land-spotting bird released from a ship at sea: it flies in every direction, and if it finds no land, it comes back to the ship. Then the Buddha says that the question was asked in the wrong way. It should not be “Where do these four elements cease?” It should be:

Where do water and earth, fire and air have no footing; where long and short, tiny and huge, beautiful and ugly? Where do name and form cease with no residue left behind?

The story makes three points that this article has been making in other words.

1. Psychic power reaches far and does not reach a bedrock. The monk travels through every heaven by the power of concentration. Nowhere along the way does he find where the elements finally end. More reach does not answer the question, because the question was not about reach.
2. No being in any world has the view from nowhere. The Great Brahmā is called “the Universal Seer,” the one who knows and sees everything. He does not know. The highest god of the traditional cosmology is still a being in a world, seeing from somewhere.
3. The question is changed from a place to a fixing. The Buddha turns “Where do the elements cease?” into a question about where they “have no footing,” together with long and short, beautiful and ugly, name and form: all the pairs that are designated together. The answer is not a location at the top of the cosmos.

The verse’s answer begins with the words “Consciousness where no form appears, infinite, radiant all-round.” Some readers have taken this as a description of a luminous consciousness that exists by itself and underlies everything: a ground. This article does not read it that way, for the reason given in Part I, §4: a radiant awareness that existed from its own side would be one more substance, and the search would find it no more than it finds any other. The verse itself ends: “with the cessation of consciousness, here they cease.” Read without a ground, the radiance names the clarity of a mind that no longer fixes, not a hidden light behind appearances.

Part IV: The Later Traditions

For the Sake of Beings, By-Products of Practice, and the Great Power of Ordinary Life

Introduction: Beyond the Early Discourses

Parts I to III drew their examples from the early discourses of the Pali canon. The later Buddhist traditions did not drop the higher knowledges. Indian Mahāyāna, the Tibetan schools, and Chan and Zen in China and Japan all keep them, and all keep the early caution against display and against treating them as proof of a self. But each adds a reading of its own:

1. Indian Mahāyāna and the Tibetan stages of the path turn the knowledges toward compassion. A bodhisattva cultivates them in order to help beings, and holds them as empty while using them.
2. The Tantric teachings, Mahāmudrā, and Dzogchen treat them as by-products of practice: experiences to be neither grasped nor feared, never to be mistaken for realization.
3. Chan and Zen turn the question around. The great spiritual power is not flying through the sky but carrying water and serving tea, and meeting the six senses without being deceived by them.

All three fit the view of this article. None of them treats the knowledges as a view from nowhere, and none of them makes them a proof of a self.

A note on sources. The Chinese texts quoted in this Part (the Treatise on the Great Perfection of Wisdom, the Vimalakīrti Sūtra, Vasubandhu’s Treasury of Abhidharma, the Transmission of the Lamp, the records of Layman Pang and of Linji) were checked against the CBETA edition of the Chinese canon; the translations are this article’s own. The Tibetan sources and Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō are reported here from standard translations and studies, not checked against the original texts, and so they are paraphrased rather than quoted.

1. Indian Mahāyāna: For the Sake of Beings

A. Vasubandhu’s Map

Vasubandhu’s Treasury of Abhidharma (Abhidharmakośa, chapter 7, on knowledge) gives the standard scholastic account. There are six higher knowledges: of magical powers, the divine eye, the divine ear, others’ minds, past lives, and the ending of the defilements. All six are forms of wisdom. The first five rest on the four meditative absorptions. And while “the sixth belongs only to noble beings,” Vasubandhu says, “ordinary people can also attain the first five” (Xuanzang’s translation, Taishō 29, 142c).

This is the early line of Part III, Introduction C, set out as doctrine: five worldly knowledges that anyone with deep concentration may have, and one that is the end of the defilements.

B. The Perfection of Wisdom: Wings That Do Not Cling

The Mahāyāna sūtras of the Perfection of Wisdom (Prajñāpāramitā) make the higher knowledges a duty of the bodhisattva, the one who seeks awakening for the sake of all beings. The Treatise on the Great Perfection of Wisdom (Mahāprajñāpāramitāśāstra, Chinese Dazhidulun, traditionally attributed to Nāgārjuna and translated into Chinese by Kumārajīva), in a passage addressed to the Buddha’s disciple Subhūti, puts it in an image:

Subhūti, just as a bird without wings cannot fly high, a bodhisattva without the higher knowledges cannot freely teach and transform beings. (Taishō 25, 715c–716a)

A bodhisattva who stays away from the higher knowledges, the passage says, cannot benefit beings and cannot reach awakening. So the knowledges are cultivated, and on purpose. But in the same passage the bodhisattva who sees good qualities with the divine eye and teaches them to others is “not attached to good qualities, because their nature is empty” (715b). Elsewhere the treatise says that the powers of a buddha are “all like a dream, like an illusion” (668c), and describes the bodhisattva teaching beings “like a magician,” with “all kinds of supernormal transformations,” “without hatred and without love” (703a).

This is the Mahāyāna pairing in its plainest form. The knowledges are used, and they are empty. They are not a possession that sets the bodhisattva apart, and they rest on no hidden ground; they are like the work of a magician, vivid and effective, found nowhere standing by itself. That is exactly the status this article gives them: working, and empty.

Precision. “Like an illusion” does not mean that the knowledges, or the beings they help, are nothing. In the Middle Way an illusion is the image of something that appears and works while lacking the nature it seems to have.

C. The Vimalakīrti Sūtra: How a World Appears

The Vimalakīrti Sūtra (Vimalakīrtinirdeśa) uses displays of power to teach how worlds appear.

In its first chapter, the disciple Śāriputra cannot see why the Buddha’s world looks so impure: hills and pits, thorns and gravel, filth everywhere. A Brahmā god tells him that the fault is in his own mind, which has highs and lows. Then the Buddha touches the ground with his toe, and the whole universe appears adorned with countless jewels. “My buddha-land is always pure like this,” the Buddha says. It is shown as full of evils “in order to save inferior beings” (Kumārajīva’s translation, Taishō 14, 538c).

In the chapter called “The Inconceivable” (chapter 6 in Kumārajīva’s translation), Vimalakīrti, a householder, is asked where all his visitors will sit. By his supernormal power, thirty-two thousand lion-thrones, each eighty-four thousand leagues high, arrive from a distant world and enter his small room. The room holds them all “without obstruction,” and the city of Vaiśālī and the rest of the world are “not crowded either; everything is seen as before” (546b).

Read in the terms of this article, these are not displays of a hidden reality behind the ordinary world. The first shows that how a world appears depends on the one who meets it: what one being meets as gravel another meets as jewels. The Illusion of the Given makes the same point with a single bowl of liquid. The second shows that size and distance are not fixed measurements inside a container that exists by itself (Part II, §4): nothing had to be shrunk or stretched, because there was never a neutral box for the thrones to overfill.

Precision. “Always pure” is not a pure world hidden behind the impure one, waiting to be uncovered. Pure vision is a way of meeting the same appearing without the habit that splits and fixes it; it is not a second reality underneath.

2. Tibet: Compassion, Accomplishment, and Experience

A. Atiśa: The Bird Needs Its Wings

The Indian master Atiśa, who taught in Tibet in the eleventh century, set the pattern for the Tibetan “stages of the path” (lam rim) in his Lamp for the Path to Awakening (Bodhipathapradīpa). In a well-known group of verses he takes up the Perfection of Wisdom’s image: as a bird whose wings have not grown cannot fly, someone without the higher knowledges cannot work for the good of others. The merit such a person gains in a day, he adds, could not be gained in a hundred lifetimes without them. And because the knowledges come from calm abiding (śamatha), the practitioner should work to achieve it.

Tsongkhapa follows Atiśa on this in the section on calm abiding of his Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path (Lam rim chen mo). In both, the reason to cultivate the knowledges is compassion: to know accurately what will help a particular person. And in both, the knowledges arise from conditions, from a mind made stable and workable, as Part III’s suttas also say.

B. Two Kinds of Accomplishment

The Tantric teachings speak of two kinds of accomplishment (siddhi). The ordinary accomplishments include the traditional list of eight, among them invisibility, swift travel, and flying through the sky; they correspond closely to the worldly higher knowledges. The supreme accomplishment is awakening itself, often called Mahāmudrā, the “great seal.” The ordinary accomplishments are welcomed only when they serve the supreme one. Pursued for their own sake, or for influence, they are counted as obstacles.

This is the early line again: five worldly knowledges and one that liberates, now in Tantric terms.

C. Experiences, Not Realization

The meditation manuals of Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen (the Great Perfection) distinguish passing meditative experiences (nyams) from realization (rtogs pa). The experiences are usually listed as bliss, clarity, and the absence of thought, and unusual perceptions are among the things that can arise with them. The manuals give the same instruction for all of them: do not reject them, and do not cling to them. A meditator who takes such an experience for realization, and builds pride or a sense of attainment on it, has gone astray; the manuals call this a deviation.

This is Part V, §5A, in the tradition’s own words: the experience is affirmed; the reification is refused. In Dzogchen the qualities of awakening are said to be spontaneously present (lhun grub). Read as this article reads everything, that does not mean a hidden source that emits them or a self that owns them. It means appearing that owes its arising to no producer: dependent arising without a maker.

3. Chan and Zen: The Great Power Is Ordinary

A. Layman Pang: Carrying Water

The Chinese Chan tradition made the most striking move of all. The eighth-century lay practitioner Layman Pang (Pang Yun) wrote a verse about his daily life that ends:

Spiritual power and wondrous function:
carrying water and hauling firewood.
神通并妙用，運水及搬柴 (Recorded Sayings of Layman Pang)

“Spiritual power” (shentong) is the standard Chinese word for the higher knowledges. Pang does not deny them. He finds the great power in drawing water and carrying wood, done without picking and choosing, as the same verse says: “in each thing, no grasping or rejecting.”

B. Guishan’s Dream

The Transmission of the Lamp (Jingde chuandeng lu) tells a story about the master Guishan. He is lying down when his student Yangshan comes in, and he turns his face to the wall. Then he gets up and says: “I just had a dream. Try to interpret it for me.” Yangshan brings a basin of water for him to wash his face. A little later another student, Xiangyan, comes in, and Guishan asks him the same. Xiangyan brings a bowl of tea. Guishan says: “The understanding of you two surpasses Śāriputra’s” (Taishō 51, 265c).

The Japanese Zen master Dōgen tells this story in the “Jinzū” (“Spiritual Powers”) chapter of his Shōbōgenzō, where Guishan praises the two students’ spiritual powers as surpassing those of Śāriputra and Maudgalyāyana, the Buddha’s foremost disciples. Dōgen distinguishes small spiritual powers, such as flying and transforming the body, from the great spiritual power of the buddhas and ancestors, and he finds the great power in a basin of water and a bowl of tea.

C. Where Is the Old Monk Now?

The Transmission of the Lamp also tells the story behind the “Tashintsū” (“Reading Others’ Minds”) chapter of the Shōbōgenzō. An Indian master known as Daer came to the Chinese capital claiming to have the eye of knowing others’ minds. The emperor Daizong asked the National Teacher Huizhong to test him.

“Do you know others’ minds?” Huizhong asked. “I would not dare to say so,” Daer replied. “Tell me where the old monk is right now.” “You are the teacher of a nation; why have you gone off to western Sichuan to watch the boat races?” Huizhong asked again. “You are the teacher of a nation; why are you on the Tianjin Bridge watching the monkeys perform?” Huizhong asked the same question a third time. For a long while Daer did not know where he was. “You fox spirit!” Huizhong said. “Where is your knowing of others’ minds now?” Daer had no answer (Taishō 51, 244a).

Earlier Chan masters debated why Daer could find Huizhong the first two times and not the third. According to Dōgen’s chapter, that question already goes wrong: Daer did not know the National Teacher’s mind even the first two times. Dōgen criticizes the earlier commentators for assuming that he did.

Read in the terms of this article, the story is a picture of Part III, §3. Daer is looking for a mind as one looks for a person in a city, at a location: on a river, on a bridge. That is the sealed-room picture of mind, a thing in a place that can be tracked or hidden. A mind is not found that way, not because it hides in a deeper place, but because it is not a thing standing in a place at all. Knowing another person is real, and it happens through real channels; what fails is the search for a mind as an object with an address.

Precision. This does not make all minds one, or a single field of mind in which they float. Two minds remain two by convention (Part III, §3D). The story removes the sealed room; it does not put a universal mind in its place.

D. Linji: Walking on the Earth

The ninth-century master Linji addressed the higher knowledges directly. “You say that a buddha has six powers and that they are inconceivable,” he told his students. But “all the gods, immortals, asuras, and mighty spirits also have powers; are they buddhas?” Such powers, he says, are powers of karma and powers that depend on things. The six powers of a buddha are different:

They enter the realm of form and are not deceived by form; enter the realm of sound and are not deceived by sound; enter the realm of smell, of taste, of touch, of mental objects, and are not deceived by them. So they understand that form, sound, smell, taste, touch, and mental objects are all empty marks, which cannot bind them. This person of the Way, who depends on nothing, though made of the five leaking aggregates, has the power of walking on the earth. (Record of Linji, Taishō 47, 500a)

Linji does not deny that gods and spirits have powers. He refuses to make powers the measure of awakening. For him the six powers of a buddha are freedom within the six senses: meeting each appearance without being deceived or bound by it. That is the article’s sixth knowledge in Chan words. It does not widen the field of what appears. It ends the binding, whatever the field.

4. What the Later Traditions Add

Taken together, the later traditions add three things to the early discourses, and none of them moves away from the view of this article.

1. Compassion. The Perfection of Wisdom and Atiśa give the higher knowledges a purpose: to help beings accurately. And they hold them as empty while using them, “like a magician,” not attached. This answers a question the early texts leave quiet: why cultivate them at all? Not for display and not for proof, but for others.
2. Discipline about experience. The Tantric accomplishments and the Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen manuals teach the practitioner what to do when unusual experiences come: neither reject nor cling. This is the article’s rule, “the experience is affirmed; the reification is refused,” made into instruction.
3. The ordinary as the great power. Layman Pang, Guishan, Dōgen, and Linji find the highest power in carrying water, serving tea, and walking on the earth without being deceived. They agree with the early discourses that the ending of the defilements is what matters, and they place it in ordinary life.

None of them treats a higher knowledge as a view from nowhere. Vasubandhu’s five rest on absorption and are open to ordinary people. The bodhisattva’s knowledges are like a magician’s work. Daer’s search fails because it looks for a mind with an address. And Linji’s six powers are found in the senses themselves.

The limits of Part V, §4, apply here too. These later readings no more prove that the higher knowledges exist than the early discourses do; they show how the traditions held them, as working and empty, and why they kept them in their place.

Part V: Holding Them Rightly

Logic, Tradition, Evidence, and Practice

Introduction: Three Ways of Holding a Claim

Part III argued that none of the higher knowledges, as the early texts describe them, needs a substance. This Part asks how they should be held. It begins with how the tradition itself handles them, which is with striking caution. It then separates the three kinds of claim that Part I, §6, distinguished, and looks at the two opposite mistakes that a substantialist habit produces. It ends with the limits of this article and with what the view means for practice.

1. How the Tradition Treats Them

A. Not for Display

The Kevaddha Sutta (DN 11) opens with a reasonable request. The householder Kevaḍḍha tells the Buddha that the town of Nāḷandā is prosperous and populous, and asks him to have a monk “perform a superhuman demonstration of psychic power.” Then, he says, Nāḷandā will become even more devoted. The Buddha refuses: “I do not teach Dhamma to the mendicants like this.”

Asked a third time, the Buddha explains. There are three kinds of demonstration: of psychic power, of revealing (another’s thoughts), and of instruction. Suppose someone with faith saw a monk perform the first, and told someone without faith. The one without faith would say: “There’s a spell named Gandhārī. Using that a mendicant can perform such superhuman feats.” The same would be said of revealing: there is a spell named Māṇikā for reading thoughts. “Seeing this drawback,” the Buddha says, “I’m horrified, repelled, and disgusted by demonstrations of psychic power,” and likewise by demonstrations of revealing.

The third demonstration is the one he offers: “Think like this, not like that. Focus your mind like this, not like that. Give up this, and live having achieved that.” The sutta then unfolds the demonstration of instruction as the whole graded training: ethical conduct, the absorptions, and the knowledges that follow them.

B. Experienced Only by the One Who Performs It

The Saṅgārava Sutta (AN 3.60) sets out the same three demonstrations to a brahmin named Saṅgārava. His judgment of the first two is worth noticing. A demonstration of psychic power, he says, “is experienced only by the one who performs it, occurring only to them,” and the same is true of revealing another’s mind. “This seems to me like an illusion.” But instruction, he says, is the finest of the three.

Saṅgārava’s reason fits the view of this article closely. A psychic power, if it occurs, belongs to a particular knower’s field of contact. It does not hand anyone else a view from nowhere. An onlooker sees only an event in their own world, which can be explained in many ways, as the skeptic in DN 11 explains it by a spell. Instruction is different. Anyone who follows it can test it in their own experience. It is the one demonstration that does not depend on trusting another person’s private field.

C. A Rule of Restraint

The monastic code puts the same caution into practice. Rule 8 of the Pācittiya offenses in the Vinaya concerns a monk who “truthfully tells a person who is not fully ordained of a superhuman quality.” Even when the claim is true, it is an offense entailing confession. The origin story is telling: during a famine, monks praised one another’s attainments to householders in order to be fed, and the Buddha rebuked them for doing so “for the sake of your stomachs.” The higher qualities, on this rule, are not credentials to be shown.

D. Grounded in Ordinary Virtue

The Discourse on One Might Wish (Ākaṅkheyya Sutta, MN 6) lists many things a monk might wish for: to be liked by companions, to receive robes and food, to master fear and dread, to attain the absorptions, and each of the higher knowledges in turn. For every one of them, the instruction is the same: “let them fulfill their precepts, be committed to inner serenity of the heart, not neglect absorption,” and be endowed with discernment.

This is significant. There is no special technique for the higher knowledges, separate from the ordinary path. They are described as arising from the same conditions as everything else in the training: ethics, calm, concentration, and insight. They are dependently arisen, not gifts from outside the causal order.

E. What the Caution Shows

Taken together, these passages show a tradition that affirms the higher knowledges and at the same time refuses to make anything rest on them. They are not offered as proof of the teaching. They are not to be displayed. Their pursuit does not differ from the ordinary path. And the knowledge that matters, the sixth, is not a power at all.

This caution is exactly what the non-substantialist view would predict. If the five worldly knowledges are widenings of a view from somewhere, they cannot settle anything for anyone else. If the sixth is the ending of fixing, it cannot be displayed, because there is nothing to display.

2. Three Kinds of Claim

Part I, §6, separated what the logic shows, what the tradition affirms, and what only evidence can decide. The table sets them out for each knowledge.

Three things follow from the table.

1. The first column never proves the second. In every row, the logic only removes an objection. It does not establish the claim.
2. The second column is held conventionally. A Buddhist reader holds these claims as the tradition teaches them, in the way the tradition holds everything: as designated, as working, as empty.
3. The third column is not settled by the first two. Neither logic nor tradition can confirm a particular report. That is a matter of evidence, examined in the ordinary ways, with the ordinary care about error, wishful thinking, and fraud that the Buddha himself showed in DN 11.

3. Two Opposite Mistakes

A. Dismissal From a Substance

The first mistake is to dismiss the higher knowledges as impossible because they “violate the laws of physics” or “contradict what matter is.” This sounds hard-headed, but it rests on a substance: matter, or the laws governing it, taken as the bedrock that exists by itself and decides in advance what can happen.

Physics, as practiced, does not make that claim. It offers models of how things behave under the conditions studied, models that are among the most reliable designations we possess. It does not, by itself, say that those models describe a bedrock beyond all frames, or that nothing outside their domain can occur. To turn the reliability of physics into a metaphysics of matter is to stop the search of Part I one step early, and to exempt matter from it.

None of this means that skepticism is wrong. Doubting a particular report, asking for evidence, and noticing how easily people deceive themselves are all sound. The mistake is only in thinking that the matter has been settled in advance by the nature of matter.

B. Credulity From a Substance

The second mistake runs the other way. It takes the higher knowledges, or reports of them, as proof of a substance: that the soul exists and travels, that mind is independent of the body, that the meditator has seen reality “as it is” from beyond every perspective, or that Buddhism has been scientifically confirmed. Each of these is the implicative reading of Part I, §4: a substance has been removed in one place, and a new one has been installed in its place.

The early texts warn against this mistake more often than against the first. The ascetics of DN 1 recollect past lives and conclude that the self is eternal. Sāti in MN 38 takes consciousness as the traveler. The Great Brahmā of DN 11 is called the Universal Seer and does not know. In each case a real or reported capacity has been turned into a ground.

C. The Middle Way Between Them

The Middle Way between these mistakes is not a compromise. It does not say that the higher knowledges are half possible, or that they are possible for some readers and not for others. It says that the question cannot be settled by appeal to a substance on either side. Matter is not the bedrock that rules them out; mind or soul is not the bedrock that they prove. Whether they occur is held as the tradition holds it, and examined as evidence is examined, without a final floor on either side.

D. Common Misreadings at a Glance

4. The Limits of This Article

1. It does not prove that the higher knowledges exist. It shows that, as the early texts describe them, they do not need a hidden substance, and that one family of objections to them fails. The tradition affirms them; this article holds them as the tradition does, conventionally, and leaves the question of whether they occur in any given case to evidence.
2. Physics does not confirm them. Dark matter, neutrinos, telephones, and instruments appear here as illustrations of patterns: channels, degrees of coupling, and distance that depends on the means of contact. They are not evidence for psychic powers, and most of the scientists who study them would not endorse that use.
3. It offers no mechanism. To say that a knowledge “would be a change in the channels of contact” is to say what kind of thing it would be, not how it comes about. The tradition’s own account of how it comes about is the training: ethics, calm, concentration, and insight.
4. It does not make any knower exempt from emptiness. Even if the higher knowledges occur, they reveal no hidden bedrock and establish no knower, awareness, or radiant ground that exists by itself.
5. It is one reading within Buddhism. The Abhidharma traditions classify the higher knowledges in great detail; Mahāyāna texts extend them to the buddhas and bodhisattvas in vast forms; and Buddhist schools read them in different ways. Part IV sketches how the later traditions read them. What is presented here follows the Middle Way of Nāgārjuna and Candrakīrti, as read through Tsongkhapa, applied to the early discourses and to those later readings.
6. It does not tell anyone to seek them. The texts this article relies on are almost unanimous that the five worldly knowledges are not the goal, and that pursuing them for their own sake is a distraction or a danger.

5. What This Means for Practice

A. The Experience Is Affirmed; the Reification Is Refused

Meditators often have unusual experiences: a sense of knowing what someone else is feeling, vivid images, a feeling of vastness, a recollection that seems to come from beyond this life. A substantialist habit does one of two things with such an experience. It dismisses it as nothing, or it builds on it as proof of a self, a soul, a higher reality, or a special status.

The non-substantialist view does neither. The experience is real as an experience: neither mistaken nor fabricated merely because it is unusual. What is refused is the step that turns it into a ground: the step the ascetics of DN 1 took when they concluded, from real recollection, that the self is “steady as a mountain peak.” The same discipline applies to every meditative experience, unusual or ordinary, and above all to experiences of clarity, vastness, or pure awareness, which are the most tempting to make into a new self.

B. Instruction Is the Finest Demonstration

The Buddha’s preference in DN 11 is the right guide. The demonstration that matters is the one anyone can test: “Think like this, not like that. Focus your mind like this, not like that. Give up this, and live having achieved that.” This is not a lesser substitute for psychic power. It is the path that leads to the sixth knowledge, the only one of the six that the tradition calls liberating.

C. Compassion and Humility

The view of this article carries the same two lessons as The Illusion of the Given. If even the widest knowing is a knowing from somewhere, then no one, however accomplished, sees the whole from outside it, and every being we meet lives in a world we cannot fully enter. That is a reason for humility. And if the minds of others are not sealed rooms but streams we are already in contact with, then the ordinary channel of empathy is not a weak imitation of telepathy. It is a real knowing of another, available now, and the ground of compassion.

D. Knowing From Somewhere

The title of this article names its conclusion. Every knowing, ordinary or extraordinary, is a knowing from somewhere: by someone, of something, through a channel, and dependently arisen. The higher knowledges, as the early texts describe them, are no exception. They would widen the somewhere, perhaps enormously, but they would not abolish it. What the tradition values most is not reaching further. It is no longer fixing what is reached, or the one who reaches it. As Nāgārjuna said, “For whom emptiness works, everything works.”

In the chain: this page goes with The Illusion of the Given (5 of 7). The chain starts at Seeing Comes First.

Sources and Further Reading

Texts Referred to in This Article

Early Buddhist Discourses and Monastic Law

Quotations from the early discourses follow the translations of Bhikkhu Sujato, and the quotation from the Vinaya follows the translation of Bhikkhu Brahmali, both published by SuttaCentral.

• Brahmajāla Sutta (The Divine Net, Dīgha Nikāya 1): ascetics who recollect past lives and conclude that the self and the cosmos are eternal.
• Sāmaññaphala Sutta (The Fruits of the Ascetic Life, Dīgha Nikāya 2): the higher knowledges that follow the absorptions, each with its simile.
• Kevaddha Sutta (With Kevaḍḍha, Dīgha Nikāya 11): the three kinds of demonstration; the monk who went to the gods; the simile of the land-spotting bird.
• Bhayabherava Sutta (Fear and Dread, Majjhima Nikāya 4): the three knowledges of the Buddha’s night of awakening.
• Ākaṅkheyya Sutta (One Might Wish, Majjhima Nikāya 6): the higher knowledges grounded in ethics, serenity, absorption, and discernment.
• Mahātaṇhāsaṅkhaya Sutta (The Longer Discourse on the Ending of Craving, Majjhima Nikāya 38): Sāti’s view that the same consciousness transmigrates; consciousness as dependently originated; the simile of fire named after its fuel.
• Saṅgārava Sutta (With Saṅgārava, Aṅguttara Nikāya 3.60): the three demonstrations, and instruction as the finest.
• Vinaya, Pācittiya 8: the offense of truthfully telling an unordained person of a superhuman quality.

Later Buddhist Sources

• The Questions of King Milinda (Milindapañha): the chariot; the lamp burning through the night.
• Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way): chapter 5 on space; 13.8 on emptiness and views; 15.2 on intrinsic nature; chapter 17 on karma; 21.18–21 on continuity; 24.14 and 24.18 on emptiness and dependent arising.
• Candrakīrti, Madhyamakāvatāra (Entering the Middle Way), chapter 6: the critique of Mind-Only and the sevenfold analysis of the chariot.
• Tsongkhapa, Illumination of the Thought (dGongs pa rab gsal), his commentary on Entering the Middle Way: emptiness as a non-implicative negation.
• Dharmakīrti, Santānāntarasiddhi (Proof of Other Mental Streams); Ratnakīrti, Santānāntaradūṣaṇa (Refutation of Other Mental Streams).

Later Traditions (Part IV)

The Chinese texts were checked against the CBETA edition of the Taishō canon and the Xu zangjing; the translations are this article’s own. The Tibetan sources and Dōgen are paraphrased from standard translations.

• Vasubandhu, Abhidharmakośa (Treasury of Abhidharma), chapter 7, in Xuanzang’s Chinese translation (Taishō 29, no. 1558, 142c): the six higher knowledges.
• Mahāprajñāpāramitāśāstra (Dazhidulun, Treatise on the Great Perfection of Wisdom), traditionally attributed to Nāgārjuna, translated by Kumārajīva (Taishō 25, no. 1509, 668c, 703a, 715b–716a): the bird without wings; the powers like a dream, like an illusion; the bodhisattva like a magician.
• Vimalakīrti Sūtra (Vimalakīrtinirdeśa), translated by Kumārajīva (Taishō 14, no. 475, 538c, 546b): the Buddha’s toe; the lion-thrones in Vimalakīrti’s room.
• Atiśa, Bodhipathapradīpa (Lamp for the Path to Awakening): the verses on the higher knowledges and calm abiding. Tsongkhapa, Lam rim chen mo (Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path), the section on calm abiding.
• Recorded Sayings of Layman Pang (Pang jushi yulu, Xu zangjing 69, no. 1336): “Spiritual power and wondrous function: carrying water and hauling firewood.”
• Jingde chuandeng lu (Transmission of the Lamp, Taishō 51, no. 2076, 244a, 265c): National Teacher Huizhong and Daer; Guishan’s dream.
• Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō, the chapters “Jinzū” (“Spiritual Powers”) and “Tashintsū” (“Reading Others’ Minds”).
• Record of Linji (Linji lu, Taishō 47, no. 1985, 500a): the six powers of a buddha and “the power of walking on the earth.”

Philosophy and Science

• Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans (1934; English translation 2010).

Companion Article

• The Illusion of the Given, the bonus article on agreement without a hidden substance and on a multi-dimensional worldview, which this article draws on in Part II.