Three Descriptions, One Taste

Anatta, dependent arising and spontaneous presence: one taste, met three times and described three ways.

A companion to The Post-Anatta Pathway: Part One tells the journey, Part Two draws the map.

In brief

• One thread. Anatta, dependent arising and spontaneous presence each remove the same thing: a doer behind the doing, and with it anything standing on its own. What is met when that removal is complete is one taste.
• The journey (Part One). The first taste comes right after anatta: seeing is just colours, hearing just sound, no effort, not even a process. But the habit of reifying stays. Nāgārjuna’s logic brings it up, the mind gives up what it hinges on (parts, whole, qi, energy, field, relations, substrate), and the same taste is met again, free and stable. Then I re-enter the marketplace and meet it there too.
• The map (Part Two). Three descriptions, one taste: anatta says no one is behind it, dependent arising says nothing in it stands on its own, spontaneous presence says nothing is missing and nothing is making it. Dependent arising lives in the default framework, where it explains, dismantles and describes. Once known, the taste is recognised in many faces.
• In line with the masters. My view does not deviate at the core. Even “dependent arising is spontaneous presence” is understood in Nāgārjuna’s own terms: “not made by causes” read as “unborn by nature”.
• Every mistake on this path is the doer coming back in a bigger coat: a vast Awareness, a cosmic whole, a web, a ground, a saviour.

One thread: the doer behind the doing

When I look back over my books and articles, the same move keeps turning up. Someone or something seems to stand behind an action, doing it. A seer behind seeing. A walker behind walking. A cause behind its effect, pushing it out. A ground behind appearances, giving them off. Each time, when it is looked for, it is not found. And each time, nothing is put in its place.

Anatta, dependent arising and spontaneous presence are three names for that one finding, made in seeing, made everywhere, and met with nothing left to make the appearing. They are not three stages: anatta is a seal, not a stage.

Two ways of saying this run through the article. One is negative: a removal. No doer is found, and nothing is found standing on its own. The other is what is met when that removal is complete: a taste. Nothing is added by it; it is only what is there when nothing is standing behind. So “one removal, made three times” and “three descriptions, one taste” are not two claims. They point at the same thing, once from the side of what is not found, and once from the side of what is met.

Part One: The journey

Anatta: no doer in seeing

The Buddha told Bāhiya: in the seen, just the seen. No one behind the eyes, doing the seeing.

What falls away is one picture: someone standing behind the action, making it happen. Think of the wind. We say “the wind is blowing”, as if the wind were one thing and the blowing another thing it does. But when the blowing stops, no wind is left over, resting somewhere. The blowing is the wind. In the same way, there is seeing, and no seer left over behind it. There is thinking, no thinker.

When the witness is not found, experience does not go blank. The tree is more vivid, not less. Presence is not lost. It is simply no longer behind anything.

But anatta does not do everything. It removes the one who watches. It does not, by itself, remove the things watched. As I put it in my second book: the observer has disappeared, but the world has not. Things, causes, time and space can still be held as solid, each sitting there from its own side. The seer can also come back by another door (Where the doer comes back).

That is why I say anatta is a genuine and thorough insight, but not the whole view.

What seeing is, in real time: the first taste

In anatta there is only seeing, no seer; hearing, no hearer. I see through the agent and understand that it is a reified construct, taken to be there from its own side when it never was.

But then: what are seeing and hearing? We say they are events, processes, not nouns. That is true as far as it goes, but it is still words. So look at seeing and hearing themselves. What are these events, in real-time experience?

Seeing is just colours. No effort at all. Hearing is just sound. No effort at all.

Nothing is doing the seeing, and the seeing is not being done. Even what we called a process does not seem to be a process at all: nothing runs underneath the colours, carrying them along from one moment to the next. It is so seamless and so effortless.

And the colours are not dark. They are clear, known and vivid. The knowing is right there in the colour, and nothing stands behind it, knowing. Clarity is not added to the taste; it is the taste. It is just not lifted out and made into a knower.

So here, right after anatta, is a first-hand taste of spontaneous presence: immediate, without intermediary, effortless and spontaneous. No agent is found, and not even what we called a process. Remember this taste. I will come back to it.

How is this different from a refined non-dual state? A refined non-dual rests in oneness. It is still haunted by substance: it thinks of everything as made of the same luminosity, one clarity that colours, sounds and thoughts are all made of. The seer has merged into the seen, but the “one” it merged into is still a something. That is what anatta changes. Oneness merges the seer into everything; anatta finds no seer there to merge. With nothing merged, no “one” is left for everything to be made of. That is why the first taste comes after anatta, not before it.

In this taste there is no “made of”. The colour is not made of luminosity; it is clear as colour. The sound is clear as sound. Each is complete with its own conditions, light and eye for the colour, air and ear for the sound, not a wave on one shared ocean. Nothing is found that all of them are made of, and nothing needs to be. Distinctions stay vivid, and nothing has become one. That is why I say clarity is never absent, but never speak of one clarity under appearances: six clarities, not one lamp: one clarity for each of the six streams, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching and thinking, each with its own conditions, and no single lamp lighting them all.

So the test is simple to state. Is there a “one” that everything is made of? If so, it is the refined non-dual, resting in oneness, and substance is still there. If the clarity is the colour, the sound, the thought, each with its own conditions and none made of a shared stuff, it is the taste.

At the same time, I am well aware how intimately different factors take part in the appearing. The colour is there only with light, with the eye, with attention, and against what it is not. The sound is there only with the air, the ear and the car going by. None of these stands outside the appearing, feeding it in.

So three things are found together here, and none of them is anything like a process:

• Effortless: no one is doing it.
• Seamless: nothing strings it together from moment to moment.
• Intimate: the factors are not outside it.

It is like this: the alignment of these related factors is the appearing.

Three cautions, so that the taste is not misheard:

• “Just colours” does not leave an object standing out there. The seer is gone, but not so that a world of colours can stand on its own. “Just the seen” is the appearing itself, not an object apart from it. The colour too is singled out.
• “Alignment” is not two steps. It does not mean factors that exist first and then line up, or someone lining them up. The factors are not found before the appearing. They are how we speak of the appearing when we take it apart. The aligning and the appearing are not two events. Can factors drawn out of the appearing still explain it? Yes, within their framework (The framework is not the prison).
• “Not a process” does not deny change. In everyday terms, things change and causes work. What is not found is a process as a thing, running underneath.

Total exertion: the taste that comes after

This taste does not stay in seeing and hearing. After anatta it widens, often by itself, before I had any view for it. I did not first understand it. I found myself living within it.

Each event seems to spend itself completely. The sound of a car going by is wholly the sound; there is nothing behind it, holding back, directing it. Boundaries lose their solidity, yet distinctions never disappear. The car is still the car and the tree still the tree, more vivid than before. If anatta removes the observer, total exertion shows that nothing stands apart from what is happening, as if outside it, taking part in it.

Dōgen called this total exertion: each thing spending itself fully in its own place. Firewood abides in its own dharma-position, and ash abides in its own. Each is complete. Each lacks nothing, and no wider whole stands behind it to complete it.

Here I have to be careful with my own earlier words. Total exertion is easily heard as “the whole cosmos is present in each moment”. That is holism, which only makes the whole the ground instead of the parts. Nothing has merged, and nothing has become “one”. The event spends itself completely, with nothing held back behind it and no cosmos packed inside it.

Total exertion is a taste, and a true one: the taste of dependent arising arriving early, before there was any view for it. It is met again, now understood, in the marketplace (In the marketplace). But a taste is not yet a view.

The taste is not yet freedom

All of the above is the taste: immediate, without intermediary, effortless and spontaneous. And still the mind has not released its habitual tendency to reify. Ignorance has not been unbound.

How can both be there at once? Because they are not in the same place. The taste is in the immediacy of the senses: this colour, this sound, while it appears. The habit is in how the world is understood and oriented around that moment. While I am seeing a flower, the seeing is just colours, effortless, with no one behind it. Yet the moment I turn away, “the flower” is still assumed to be sitting there by itself, its red belonging to it. A cause is still felt to push its effect. Time still seems to run on as a line that things travel along. Death is still the end of a someone. The taste was free; the world the taste was set in was not. That is what I meant when I said the self had dissolved, but the universe had not.

In my own case, for years after anatta, the taste was there and the view still treated each thing as standing by itself. That gap is what I call the desynchronisation: the experience non-substantialist, the framework still substantialist.

The habit does not announce itself. It does not feel like a view. It is simply how we understand and orient ourselves in our world and our experiences, so deep that it seems to be the world itself. While it stays below the surface, nothing touches it, however good the taste.

It is only when it is challenged by Nāgārjuna’s MMK that these habitual, inherent tendencies are brought to the surface. That is what the logic is for. Not to give a better taste, but to bring out the habit, and then to dismantle and unwind it with the right tools: seeing, case by case, how illogical and untenable it is, and how it does not match experience. Each time it is seen, the mind becomes clearer, and clearer, until it is free.

The logic does not do this alone. The habit is deeper than thought. It is in perception itself, the knot that ties the appearings of an apple into one apple out there, and it is even held in the body. No argument, however good, unbinds that by being won. What the logic does is bring the habit up where it can be seen, and point to the place to look. Then I look, and check it against the taste: is a whole found apart from its parts? Is a cause found pushing? Is anything here from its own side? Each time the answer is seen in experience, not only agreed to in thought, the habit loosens a little. It is the seeing, again and again, that unwinds it. The logic and the taste work together. Insight without the logic drifts back into nouns; logic without the taste stays a clever argument about words.

What closed the gap was not a deeper taste, but this logic, checked against the taste. Nāgārjuna makes the same move as anatta, again and again, on one thing after another. Each time he takes something that seems to stand behind an action, doing it, and asks: is it the same as the action, or other than it? Each time it is found as neither.

• The seer and seeing (chapter 3): “There is no seer, either bound up with seeing or apart from it” (3.6). This is anatta, reached by reasoning.
• The walker and walking (chapter 2): “A goer does not go, and a non-goer does not go” (2.8).
• Fire and burning (chapter 10): if fire were the fuel, the one who acts and what is acted on would be one; if it were other than the fuel, it could exist without fuel (10.1).
• The cause and its effect (chapter 1): “Not from itself, not from another, not from both, and not without a cause: no thing anywhere, of any kind, is ever found to have arisen” (1.1).

Chapter one goes furthest. It takes the doer out of causes. A self is the doer behind the doing, and a causal power is the doer behind the causing. When the first is not found in seeing, the same seeing, carried by the logic, finds the second nowhere either.

The bridge for me was Nāgasena’s chariot. A chariot is not found apart from its parts, and not as the parts either. It is designated in dependence. The participants cannot be found before the participation. In that, the taste of total exertion recognised itself: what I had tasted as “each event wholly this” was what the logic says as “nothing here stands from its own side”.

And then the logic turns on itself. Dependence too is not found. The conditions are not a web or a machine standing behind what appears. They are not a basement on which appearances are built. Conditions are the appearing. By appearing, a thing is already empty.

So the two teachings meet. Anatta finds no doer in seeing, by looking; Nāgārjuna finds none anywhere, by reasoning, and shows why none could be found. This is the move from the first fold of emptiness to the second.

What the mind hinges on

Before that freedom, the mind will always hinge on something. First it hinges on parts: a thing is made of its pieces, and the pieces are what is there. When the parts are seen through, it does not let go. It hinges on what we call the “whole”. When the whole is seen through, it finds something finer to stand on: qi, energy, a field, relations, a substrate. Each time, it is looking for a foundation.

The tools meet each hinge in turn. The chariot is not found among its parts, nor as their collection, nor as a whole apart from them. Qi and energy are not a stuff under appearances; they are singled out and designated like everything else (I take this up in Isn’t Energy the Substrate? and Energy Practices). A field is the whole again, in a softer form. Relations are not found either: dependence too is designated. And a substrate is the foundation the mind was looking for all along. It is not found.

When all of these are exhausted, neither parts nor whole, with nothing left to hinge on, the mind becomes free from all elaborations, and in a stable way. This is not a state held up by effort. The habit itself has unwound.

Stable does not mean the habit can never stir again. It means the freedom no longer needs looking, effort or the right conditions to be there. Some tendencies still turn up, often in areas I had not yet looked at, or when conditions are strong. When they do, they are met by the same seeing, and they do not take root as they did. That is why I also say the path goes round more than once: not because the freedom keeps being lost, but because the habit is unwound wherever it is still found.

Spontaneous presence: the taste revisited

Then appearance is again tasted as vividly present, spontaneous and free. This is the taste of What seeing is, in real time: the first taste, revisited. It is the same taste. What has changed is the understanding around it: a much more matured understanding of the habitual tendency, of ignorance, of dependent designation, and of how the mind is confused. The first time, the taste sat inside a view that could still pull it back into things. Now the view no longer does.

The same taste does not mean nothing has changed. Two things differ. The first is reach. At first the taste lives in seeing and hearing, in the senses, while I look. Revisited, it covers everything the habit had held: thought, the body, things, causes, space, time and death. The second is stability. At first the taste is there when I look, and the habit takes it back when I stop. Revisited, it no longer depends on looking. Nothing was added to the taste. What it was held inside of has gone. The shape is the same throughout: no one behind it, nothing standing on its own, nothing missing. That is why it is one taste. The reach is not the same, and that is why anatta, as the first insight, is only a partial description (Three descriptions, one taste): the shape was met, but only in the senses.

Look at it once more. Take away the doer from everything, and put nothing in its place: no seer, no producing cause, and not even dependence kept as a new thing. Then nothing is making the appearing. If nothing makes the sound of a car going by, the sound is not a product. It shows up whole and vivid, exactly as its conditions meet.

That is what spontaneous presence (lhun grub) means to me. Appearing is already complete, because nothing is hidden behind it, doing it. It is the last of the seven phases, and it is not a new state reached at the end. It is how it always was, once the doer is gone everywhere.

It is not uncaused, and it is not a source (Three descriptions, one taste). Effortlessness belongs here too. Holding, pushing and managing are the agent itself. When no doer is found anywhere, there is no one left to push. The ease that anatta first gives in seeing now runs through everything. Mind and matter lose their weight, and become light, magical and plastic.

In the marketplace

After freedom from all elaborations, I re-enter the marketplace and dirty my hands. The marketplace is ordinary life: work, family, money, arguments, other people’s troubles, choices that have to be made. Back in the framework of parts and conditions, the same taste is met there too. Conditions are seen as the taste: this light, this eye, this attention, met, and nothing more needed. Emptiness is no longer a conclusion; it is tasted in the appearing. Total exertion, which came early, is met here again, now understood. Is this a crude understanding (The framework is not the prison), or a direct taste? Both at once. The taste is met directly, and the words the marketplace has for it are crude. The crudeness belongs to the words, not to the taste.

Why does this encounter come after freedom from all elaborations, and not before? Because one can only re-enter a place one has been free of. Freedom from all elaborations does not stay apart. It goes back to work. The last of the Zen ox-herding pictures, Entering the marketplace with helping hands (Kuoan Shiyuan, twelfth century), shows it: barefoot and bare-chested he comes into the market, smeared with mud and ashes, smiling broadly. I borrow only the tenth picture. The ninth, Returning to the origin, is easily read as going back to a source; I read it as nothing behind appearing, not as a ground to return to. When I first wrote out the seven phases, in 2009, I put this as maha and ordinariness.

Here dependent arising changes its role. Before, it was the tool that brought each hinge up and took it apart. In the marketplace I deal in causes and conditions all day: what helps, what harms, what follows from what. Dependent arising is how help works. Now the same parts and conditions are no longer reified, so they no longer need taking apart. They are seen as the taste. The marketplace is also the test of “stable”: a freedom that holds only in quiet is not yet stable. And it is where the habits still left come up, to be met by the same seeing.

Who decides? The marketplace is full of choices: whom to help, what to say, when to say no. Nobody disappears. I still act, choose, keep my promises and answer for what I do, as a conventional person, designated in dependence like everything else. What is gone is the doer behind the doing: someone standing apart from the choosing, pulling the levers. Intention and choice are themselves conditions among conditions; they work, and they are not found from their own side. So acting without a doer is not passivity, and it is not a way of escaping responsibility. Responsibility is answered first, in the everyday sense, and nothing in the taste cancels it.

Why help, if no one is there? The return is for others; that is why the hands are helping hands. But if others are not found from their own side, whom am I helping? Others are not found from their own side, and their suffering still functions, validly, and it arises in dependence. Because it is not fixed, it can be eased. Dependent arising is not a reason to stop helping. It is why help can work. A suffering that stood by itself could not be touched.

This is not an eighth phase. It is Phase 7 rounded out: spontaneous perfection not only free from elaborations, but at home in the marketplace. Its guards are in Where the doer comes back.

Three encounters, one taste

Looked back on, the journey has met one taste three times. In the taste itself there is no order. In a life there is one, and mine went like this:

1. Anatta (Phase 5), around 1997: no seer, no doer, in seeing; just colours, just sound. Then the desynchronisation, and the work of syncing the view (Phase 6, The taste is not yet freedom and What the mind hinges on).
2. Freedom from all elaborations (Phase 7): when every hinge is exhausted, the same taste met again, stable and wide. No maker, no knower, no background.
3. Dependent arising and emptiness, in the marketplace: the same taste met in ordinary life, with dirty hands.

The encounters are when the taste is met; the descriptions in Part Two are how it is spoken of. They overlap without lining up one to one, and keeping them apart stops the descriptions being heard as stages. When I say the marketplace comes after spontaneous presence, I mean after the spontaneous presence met in the second encounter.

The taste comes before the view and again after it; the logic does not produce the taste, it unbinds the habit. And it is not a ladder climbed once. It goes round more than once, wherever the habit of fixing returns, and each turn clarifies one seeing rather than adding a floor.

Part Two: The map

Three descriptions, one taste

This is why I say dependent arising is spontaneous presence. They are not two things. Dependent arising is how the taste is described when we analyse: these conditions, met together, designated, working. Spontaneous presence is how it is described when the habit of fixing stops: complete, effortless, with nothing behind it. And there is a third description, anatta. Three descriptions, one taste.

Description	What it says about the taste	Its guard
Anatta	No one is behind it: no seer, no doer.	Not a blank; nobody disappears.
Dependent arising (emptiness)	Nothing in it stands on its own: conditions met, none found from its own side.	Not a web, not a ground.
Spontaneous presence	Nothing is missing, and nothing is making it: complete, effortless.	Not uncaused: every appearing has its conditions; what is gone is the maker, not the order. Not a source: nothing stands behind appearing, not even “spontaneity”.

They are three angles on one face. Each is a whole description, and none of them is the taste. None is higher: not a lower truth and a higher one, and not stages, first analysis and then recognition. Nor does one turn into another. I do not say that dependent arising becomes spontaneous presence, any more than we say summer becomes winter. That way of speaking brings back a traveller that crosses from one to the other. Nothing crosses.

Anatta needs one note to stand here. As the first insight, anatta covers only the subject: the observer has disappeared, but the world has not. That would make it a partial description, and that is how it was met in the first encounter: the shape was there, but only in the senses. But anatta is a seal, not a stage. As the seal, all dharmas are without self: not only no seer behind seeing, but no self-nature in the seen, in the cause, in the condition. Read as the seal, anatta describes the whole taste, from the side of “no one”.

Freedom from all elaborations is not a fourth description. It says nothing about the taste; it says that nothing reified is added to it. It is one of the times the taste is met (Three encounters, one taste).

The descriptions keep each other honest. Dependent arising keeps spontaneous presence from being heard as “from nowhere”, or as coming from a hidden ground. Spontaneous presence keeps dependent arising from being heard as a mechanism: a web of causes working in the dark, waiting for a knower to light it up. Dependent arising is never a machine in the dark. Clarity is never absent from what appears; the only question is whether it is abstracted out and made into a thing.

It helps to keep two questions apart. How does this appearing come about? Through causes and conditions; always. What is its nature? Empty: not produced, so “why?” has nothing to point to. “Beyond cause and effect” answers the second question. It never cancels the first. It means beyond intrinsic cause and intrinsic effect, never beyond dependent arising. How this fits the Dzogchen saying that spontaneous presence is not made by causes and conditions, I take up in How the masters define it, and where I stand.

The framework is not the prison

Dependent arising has to be understood as living within the default framework: the one that cuts the appearing into pieces so that it can be explained. Parts and whole, before and after, cause and effect, agent and action, each named and set in a time sequence, within a set of agreements and a setting. “How does this come about?” is a question only that framework can ask, and dependent arising is its answer. Without the framework, there is one complete stroke. Factors drawn out of the appearing still explain it, within the framework: the cook, the chemist and the physicist each cut the same loaf into different factors, and each cut works within its own agreements (Causal Efficacy Without Causal Power, “Conditions are the appearing”).

This does not mean that we live in a matrix and must escape it. The framework of parts and conditions is not what binds us. What binds us is living in it with reified thoughts: taking the parts, the conditions and the sequence to be there from their own side. That is the matrix: a habit of seeing, not a world and not a field. Dependent arising is not the matrix. It is the wisdom that shows the matrix up.

So keep two frameworks apart. The default framework is the conventional cutting itself. It works, and we need it to speak, to cook and to keep promises. The inherent framework is the habit of taking what the cutting singles out as standing by itself. Dependent arising lives in the first and unbinds the second. If the two are run together, “dependent arising lives in a framework” is heard as “dependent arising is only a story”, and that is the slide into annihilation.

And when I live in the framework of parts and conditions with the wisdom of dependent arising, I begin to see that even spontaneous presence can be understood within it. Crudely and clumsily, because the framework still speaks in pieces and in sequence. But truly: conditions are the appearing; nothing produces it; it is complete as its conditions meet. Spontaneous presence is not a place beyond concepts, waiting outside the framework. That would make it a new ground.

How is this different from reading a taste through a concept, which I warn against when “one’s radiance clarity” is read with the old framework? The difference is not concepts. It is reification. There, the concepts are taken as found, so the taste is fixed into a self or a source. Here, the same concepts are held as designations, so they point and do not fix. Understanding is still not the taste. It is the taste understood rightly.

Three uses of dependent arising

Dependent arising does three kinds of work in this article, and it helps to name them.

1. It explains. In the default framework it answers “how does this come about?”: these conditions, met together. This is its conventional use.
2. It dismantles and demonstrates. It is the reason that takes reified constructs apart and shows emptiness. Because a thing arises in dependence, it is not there from its own side. That is the work it does in The taste is not yet freedom and What the mind hinges on, on parts, whole, qi, field and substrate. In Tsongkhapa’s tradition it is called the king of reasons, and Nāgārjuna opens his verses by paying homage to the one who taught it.
3. It describes the taste. Seen through, it is the taste itself: nothing standing on its own. That is how it is met in the marketplace.

The three hang together. Dependent arising can dismantle because it explains: a thing that validly depends cannot also stand by itself. So the conventional use is what gives the reasoning its force, and that is also why the reasoning does not destroy the world it takes apart. What goes is only the “from its own side”. Nāgārjuna joins the three in one verse: what arises in dependence is what we call emptiness; that is a designation in dependence, and that itself is the middle way (MMK 24.18).

Two guards belong with the second use. It puts nothing in place of what it removes: the emptiness it demonstrates is the absence of inherent existence, not a new something, or emptiness becomes the next hinge. And it dismantles itself too. As The taste is not yet freedom says, the logic turns on itself; dependence is not found from its own side either. A reason held as the final truth would be one more construct.

Dependent arising is an enlightened view. We do not already live in its wisdom; we live reading the matrix as inherent, within the framework. Within the framework it is right knowing by concepts: the net is conventional and empty, presenting itself upon conditions for functional purposes, and dependent arising shows its emptiness and corrects the inherent reading. Freedom from all elaborations is the other mode of right knowing, not within the framework. This may part from how some masters read dependent arising.

Some readings say dependent arising originates with ignorance, since the twelve links begin there. That reading needs refining. The twelve links in forward order describe how suffering runs while ignorance is present; in reverse order, how it ends. Dependent arising as a view originates as the corrective antidote for ignorance. Otherwise the praise of it would make no sense: Nāgārjuna bows to the Buddha for teaching dependent arising, the stilling of elaborations; he says emptiness, dependent arising and the middle way have one meaning; Tsongkhapa praises it as the best of the Buddha’s teachings, because seeing it reverses the root of the round; and the Buddha says whoever sees dependent arising sees the Dhamma. No one praises ignorance. They praise the seeing that undoes it.

So the framework can be held three ways:

• Without the framework: one complete stroke.
• In the framework, reified: the matrix. Things, causes and a self, each standing by itself.
• In the framework, with the wisdom of dependent arising: the same parts and conditions, now light. Spontaneous presence understood there, crudely.

Many faces

From the taste, I recognise its many faces in very different situations: a sound, a thought, a flash of anger, a cause and its effect, a stretch of time, a death, washing the dishes. It is much like an AI model that recognises faces. It knows a face across light, angle and age, not because it has stored one photograph, but because it has learned the face’s structure. A sameness of structure is what mathematicians call an isomorphism. In the same way, once the taste is known, it is recognised by its shape wherever it shows up.

Four things keep this recognition honest:

1. Name the shape. Recognition needs something to recognise. Here the shape is: no doer, nothing standing on its own, nothing added, complete as its conditions meet. That is what the three descriptions describe, and that is what is recognised in each situation.
2. No one is doing the recognising. “I recognise” is a way of speaking. The recognising is itself an appearing, singled out and designated, with no recogniser standing behind it. And the comparison with the face model stops at “known by its shape”. A model keeps what it learned in stored weights. Familiarity is valid in the everyday sense, a condition among conditions, but it is not a store sitting behind the seeing, and not a someone inside it, using it.
3. The shape is not a thing that carries across. A face model finds something stable in every photograph. Here nothing stable sits inside each situation, passing from one to the next. If the taste became an essence present in everything, it would be the carrier, or the ground, again. That is why isomorphism is the right word: the same form, not the same stuff.
4. Recognition can misfire. A model can match the wrong face, and so can we. The I AM presence, a blank quiet, a refined non-dual resting in oneness, all made of one luminosity (What seeing is, in real time: the first taste): each can look like the taste. The test is the shape. Is a witness, a source or a background still left? Is something being kept up? Here the logic keeps the recognition honest.

Where the doer comes back

Every mistake on this path has the same shape: the doer, put back somewhere else.

• After anatta: a vast Awareness, a pure witness, a field of presence in which everything happens. The seer in a larger coat.
• In total exertion: a cosmic whole present in each moment, or a fluid substrate flowing under the verbs. Holism instead of a self.
• In dependent arising: a web, a net, a mechanism standing behind things. Dependence made into the new foundation.
• In spontaneous presence: a source or ground that gives off appearances, or appearances “without causes”. The demand for a producer, granted one final exemption.
• In the marketplace: the helper, someone who has arrived and now saves others; or quietism, “it is all empty, so nothing needs doing”. The first puts the doer back as a saviour, the second as a bystander.
• In the marketplace, misheard: freedom kept outside the marketplace, a place beyond concepts, a refuge; or the return heard as a descent from a higher place to a lower one. Neither is higher; the marketplace is where the freedom lives. “Dirty” is a figure of speech: nothing is defiled, because no self was there to be stained. And that is not a licence: actions still bear fruit, harm is still harm, mistakes are owned and set right. “No one there, so no consequences” is the annihilation view again.
• In practice: a state to keep up. Maintenance would be the split again. None of this is kept. It was always so. It is recognised.

How the masters define it, and where I stand

The great masters define dependent arising in different ways. Though their definitions differ, I do not believe my view deviates from the orthodox view and understanding. Here is how I see it, master by master.

Dependent arising is spontaneous presence, in their terms too

The equation I make most often, dependent arising is spontaneous presence, is not mine alone. It is understood in the orthodox texts too. In his opening homage, Nāgārjuna praises dependent arising as without arising and without ceasing. For him, dependent arising is itself non-arising: what arises in dependence does not arise from its own side. Candrakīrti quotes a sūtra that says it plainly: whatever is born from conditions is unborn; it has no birth by nature.

So two statements that seem to clash meet. Dzogchen says spontaneous presence is not made by causes and conditions. Madhyamaka says dependent arising is unborn by nature: it appears through conditions, yet nothing is produced. If nothing is produced, what do the conditions do? The two questions of Three descriptions, one taste answer it: how it comes about is through conditions, always; what it is, is unproduced. Read this way, “not made by causes” does not mean “appearing without conditions”. It means not produced: no maker, and no birth from its own side. That is what I mean by spontaneous presence: dependent arising without a producer, complete because nothing is hidden behind it, making it.

So I do not narrow spontaneous presence. I read “not made by causes” as “unborn by nature”, which is Nāgārjuna’s own sense of dependent arising. Where a difference is left, it is not with Dzogchen as such, but with one reading of it: spontaneous presence as a ground whose qualities are there before and apart from any dependence at all. That would be the own-nature that Nāgārjuna’s chapter 15 refutes. I read Longchenpa’s ground as empty, as Mipham does, and many Nyingma teachers read it that way.

Where I do part

• From Tsongkhapa, on three points. First, what anatta means. For him, the selflessness of persons and of phenomena negate the same thing and are equally subtle. My anatta is the experiential insight, no seer in seeing, which can come first while things are still reified; in his terms, my Phase 5 is not yet the full selflessness of persons. Read as the seal (Three descriptions, one taste), anatta is his selflessness of all dharmas; the first insight is only its first door. Second, the order of the path. His is study, reflection, then meditation: the view first. Mine was the taste first, and the view syncing with it later. That is a difference of route, not of content. Third, the bridge. He keeps disintegratedness, a functioning thing, and the mere I to link an act to its fruit across time. I keep neither carried nor cut, with no bridge (Causal Efficacy Without Causal Power).
• From the Gelug account of meditative equipoise. There, emptiness is seen alone and appearances do not appear; illusion-like appearance comes after the session. In the taste I describe, appearing is vivid and empty at once. That is nearer Mipham’s union.
• From Huayan and “interbeing”, on the web, as above.

What I add

The words “taste”, “encounters” and “many faces” are mine. No master defines dependent arising as a taste, though Zen, Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen speak of realisation this way. “Clarity is never absent” brings in Dzogchen and Mahāmudrā language, guarded by Madhyamaka. And “the default framework” is a plain, modern wording of Candrakīrti’s worldly convention and Tsongkhapa’s conventional valid cognition. On its own, “agreements within a setting” can sound like relativism, which is why I tie it to Tsongkhapa’s three tests in Causal Efficacy Without Causal Power.

So at the core, what dependent arising is, what it negates, and that it puts nothing in its place, I stand with Nāgārjuna and Candrakīrti, and I think Tsongkhapa and Mipham would both recognise it. Where Gelug and Nyingma disagree with each other, I mostly side with Mipham, while keeping Tsongkhapa’s guard. These are my readings. Some lineages see it differently, and you should read them for yourself.

Try it

Listen to a sound nearby: a car, a fan, a voice.

1. Look for the hearer behind the hearing. Is anyone there, receiving it? Then look at the hearing itself. Is there a process, running underneath? Or just sound, with no effort at all?
2. Now look for what makes the sound. The engine, the road, the air, the ear, the attention: are any of them standing behind it, pushing it out? Each is found only with the others, and none is found holding the sound.
3. Then stop looking. The sound is complete, exactly as its conditions meet, with nothing behind it. Do not try to keep this. When the next sound comes, it is complete too.
4. Later in the day, when a thought or a flash of irritation comes, look for the same shape: anyone behind it? Anything in it standing on its own? Anything missing? Recognise the face; do not hold on to it.

Read more

• Decoding Anatta and MMK Chapter 3: the full chain from anatta to spontaneous presence.
• Seeing Comes First: the four key insights.
• The Taste of Total Exertion and The Great Desynchronization, in The Transition from Anatta to Emptiness.
• The Chariot Comes Alive: where the taste met its grammar.
• Causal Efficacy Without Causal Power: causes that work, with no power found.
• Neither Carried Nor Cut: the one stroke and the time sequence.
• Mind and Consciousness: Both Are Also Singled Out: the path after anatta, and one appearing, two descriptions.
• Isn’t Energy the Substrate? and Energy Practices: why qi and energy are not a foundation either.
• The Limits of the Tools: the two questions, and conditions without production.

Words to know

• Anatta: no-self. In seeing, only the seen; no seer or doer is found behind experience. The first fold of emptiness.
• Dependent arising: whatever appears does so in dependence on conditions, and is not found apart from them. The relations are not found either.
• Total exertion: Dōgen’s word for each thing spending itself fully in its own place, complete, with nothing held back. A taste, not a cosmic whole: the taste of dependent arising arriving early, before the view.
• Dependent designation: a thing is picked out and named in dependence on its parts and conditions; that is the whole status it has.
• Spontaneous presence (lhun grub): appearing that is already complete, because nothing is hidden behind it, making it. Not uncaused, not a source.
• Desynchronisation: the gap after anatta, when experience is free of a self but the view still treats things as standing by themselves.
• Elaboration: whatever the mind adds to appearing to have something to stand on: a part, a whole, an energy, a field, a relation, a substrate.
• Habitual tendency: the deep, unnoticed way of understanding and orienting ourselves that takes things as there from their own side. Its other name is ignorance.
• Taste: what is met directly, before any description. Anatta, dependent arising and spontaneous presence are three descriptions of one taste.
• Default framework: the conventional cutting of the appearing into parts and whole, causes and effects, before and after, within agreements and a setting. Dependent arising lives here. It is valid, and not the prison.
• Inherent framework (the matrix): the habit of taking what the default framework singles out as standing by itself. This is what binds.
• Isomorphism: a sameness of structure. Here: the same shape recognised in different situations, not the same stuff carried between them.
• Marketplace: ordinary life re-entered after freedom from all elaborations: work, people, choices, helping. From the tenth Zen ox-herding picture. Where the third encounter happens.
• Unborn by nature: appearing through conditions, yet not produced, with no birth from its own side. Nāgārjuna’s sense of dependent arising, and how I read Dzogchen’s “not made by causes and conditions”.
• Refined non-dual: subject and object felt as one, resting in oneness, with everything taken as made of the same luminosity. Still haunted by substance. Not the taste.
• Dharma-position: Dōgen’s term for each thing complete in its own place, before and after cut off; designated, not found.