Thusness · John Tan

After Anatta · Explorations

The World Itself

If nothing is the ground floor, what is the world standing on?

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This page is the whole picture. Each article zooms into one part of it.

Last updated 31 Oct 2026

Every picture of the world seems to need a bottom layer. This page puts each candidate for that layer through the test of Step 1, and asks what is left when none of them is found.

The question

Watch a whirlpool in a river. It has a shape you could sketch and a place you could point to. Children throw leaves into it to see them spin. Yet not one drop of its water stays for more than a moment. Ask what the whirlpool is, apart from the water passing through it, and nothing is found. Ask whether it is therefore unreal, and the leaves go on spinning.

The question here is about the whole world, not one whirlpool. What is it made of, finally? Debates about mind, matter and physics often stall at the same place. Each side assumes that something must be fundamental, and argues only about which.

The substance reading

The substance view pictures a building with two storeys. Upstairs is the world we live in: cups, people, colours, names. Downstairs is what is simply there and holds it up. Candidates for the ground floor change with the century: atoms or energy, a universal mind, an empty space that would exist with nothing in it, or, more subtly, a field or web of relations out of which things are made.

the world we live in: cups, people, names ground floor: matter, mind, energy, space, field Something simply there, standing on nothing else.
The substance picture of the world.

What the tradition says

Space cannot exist before its mark, the absence of obstruction, and the mark cannot exist without something it marks. Space and what is located in it are designated together.

Nāgārjuna, MMK, chapter 5 · paraphrase

Conventionally, outer objects exist as much as the mind that knows them. Ultimately, neither is found. To deny objects and keep the mind makes mind the last substance.

Candrakīrti, Madhyamakāvatāra 6.45–97 · paraphrase

Nothing is established by its own characteristic, not even conventionally.

Tsongkhapa, on the mark of the Prāsaṅgika view · paraphrase

Applying the logic

1 · What would a substance view say?Beneath the world of cups and people lies something that is simply there: matter, mind, energy, space or a web of relations. The world is built on it.
2 · What does dependency say instead?Each candidate meets the same search, and none is found standing on its own. Mind is known only with its objects. Space is named only with what it holds. A relation needs what it relates. And dependence is not the new floor either: things and their links are designated together, and neither comes first.
3 · What is affirmed conventionally?The whole working world: cups and rivers, inside and outside, near and far, the laws of physics as some of the most reliable designations we have. A wall still stops a hand. My thoughts are still mine and not yours to read.
4 · What is never found?A ground floor. Not matter, mind, energy, space or a field. Not emptiness either: it is not a void beneath things or a fullness within them.

No ground floor, nothing missing

Even the subtlest floor fails. Buddhist logicians such as Dharmakīrti kept one: momentary particulars, met by perception before any concept, real because they alone can do something. Candrakīrti answers that what the world perceives is the pot, not a bare patch of colour. The pot is met as a pot from the start. And a key's power to open is found only together with the lock, the hand and the turning. Working is itself a mark of dependence, as Step 7 shows. When the particular is not found, the two-storey building has no ground floor. Seeing is not a lower layer and concept is not a top coat.

Then why is the world orderly? Barley seeds grow barley, and fire burns. The regularity is dependent arising itself, and it needs no hidden power to make it hold. "But why is there anything at all?" expects one last ground. When none is found, the question stops applying. Cause and Effect takes this further.

What remains is not a final picture of reality, but freedom from needing one.

Two traps

Too much: eternalism

"Fine, not matter. But energy, or pure awareness, or the web of interdependence, is what is really there." The habit retreats to a new floor and calls it progress. Before 1997, Presence was that floor for me: the one reality behind everything.

Too little: nihilism

"No floor, so the world is unreal, a void." Absolute nothingness cannot be posited any more than substance can. The ice is cold, and the chariot carries passengers.

In practice

  • Take a cup. Notice its colour, weight and warmth. Then look for the cup: in the clay, the handle, the shape, the word. Then drink from it. Nothing was lost in the looking.
  • When the looking finds nothing, watch for the next floor: "but energy is real", "but awareness is real". Put that through the same test.
  • Stand at a window at dusk, when the glass shows the room and the street at once. Notice that inside and outside are drawn in the seeing, and still useful.

In the chain: this page goes with The Illusion of the Given (5 of 7); Vivid and Nowhere (4 of 7). The chain starts at Seeing Comes First.

In the books

Talks

Words to know

Substrate
A bottom layer that is simply there and holds everything else up. Never found.
The Given
Something met before any designation, as a floor beneath concepts.
Container myth
Space pictured as an empty box that would exist with nothing in it.
Non-dimensional
No deeper level beneath appearances and no higher level above them.
Conventional truth
The world as it appears and works. Fully valid, and the only "real" there is.