Vivid and Nowhere: What a Phenomenon Is

Most of our confusions come back to one question: what is a phenomenon? We meet phenomena all day. A cup is lifted, a thought passes, a friend's voice is heard on the phone. We rarely ask what they are, because we already assume we know. We take each to be something there, real in itself, whatever else is true of it.

The Observer and the Taste of Presence gives a short answer at the end of Chapter 15. This article gives the reasons behind it, and the sources. Its answer is the same for a ball, a ghost and an excitation of a field: a vivid appearing that is not found when it is looked for. It holds for what changes and for what does not: whatever appears, appears vividly, and whatever is looked for is not found. Section 1 defines a phenomenon, and Section 2 says what "nature" means here. Sections 3 to 6 search for the floor that the habit of seeing wants, in time, in matter and in space. The rest of the article shows that nothing is put in the floor's place, and why that is not a loss.

1. What a phenomenon is

In Buddhist texts "phenomenon" translates dharma (Chinese fa). A phenomenon is whatever can be known. The word is as wide as it can be: the material world and the mental world, what is met directly and what is only thought of, the conditioned and the unconditioned, and the knowing itself. Nothing knows from outside the list. What the Logic Is Looking At sets this out in full.

Whatever is known is known as something, singled out as "this". And a "this" stands out only against what it is not, with this seeing and these conditions. So every phenomenon appears in dependence, and looked for apart from that, it is not found.

A phenomenon is whatever can be known: whatever appears, singled out as "this". Put in full, it is a vivid appearing that is not found when it is looked for.

The Abhidharma schools gave a different answer. A dharma, they said, bears its own mark (svalakṣaṇa): it is a basic element, what it is from its own side, out of which the person and the cup are put together. That answer is exactly the floor that Sections 3 to 6 search for. And phenomena are not made of mind either: the mind is one condition among others, as unfindable as the rest (Section 8).

2. Two senses of "nature"

The question "what is a phenomenon?" can sound like a request for the nature of things, and that word needs care. Buddhist writers use it in two ways, and they point in opposite directions.

Own-nature (svabhāva). In the first sense, a thing's nature is an essence that it has by itself, existing from its own side. Nāgārjuna defines it strictly: "own-nature is not made, and does not depend on anything else" (MMK 15.2). Something that came about from causes and conditions would be made, so it could not have own-nature in this sense (MMK 15.1). This is the nature the whole search of this article looks for, and it is never found. Wherever this article says "own nature" or "a nature of its own", it means this.

The way things are (dharmatā, Tibetan gnas lugs). In the second sense, a thing's nature is simply how it actually exists, its mode of being. Here the word names no essence. Candrakīrti, commenting on Nāgārjuna's chapter on own-nature, even calls emptiness the "nature" of things, their true nature. But he means a nature that is no essence at all. It is only the absence of an essence, and like everything else it is empty, not a further thing standing behind the cup.

The two are easy to confuse, and confusing them undoes the view. If "the nature of phenomena" is heard in the first sense, the search seems to be looking for a hidden core, and emptiness seems to be that core. Heard in the second sense, it says only this: the way a phenomenon is, is that it has no own-nature. To avoid the confusion, this article asks how each thing is rather than what its nature is, and keeps "own nature" for the one thing the search denies.

3. The habit that wants a floor

The first thing to see is that the belief in real things is not a theory. Nobody reasons their way into it. It is a habit of seeing, and it is in place before any thought about it. The tradition calls it innate grasping: the sense, prior to words, that what appears is there from its own side. Book 4, Chapter 3 describes how this habit works.

The habit is hard to dislodge because it retreats rather than gives up. Shown that the cup does not last, it agrees, and moves one step down. The cup changes, it says, but at each instant something must be really there. Even if things last only for a quantum-brief moment, the moment itself must be real. And if the pieces fail, surely space itself is real: the one empty room that everything sits in.

This retreat has a long history in Buddhist thought. The Abhidharma schools took the person and the cup to be designations. Underneath, they looked for what was not designated: basic elements (dharma) each with its own mark, partless atoms (paramāṇu) and partless moments (kṣaṇa), and, among the unconditioned elements, space. These were the floor. The everyday world was built on it.

The next three sections search for that floor in time, in matter and in space. The point is not that time, matter and space are disproved. Moments, particles and room stay as useful as they ever were. What is looked for is the one thing the habit wanted: a piece of reality, however small or however vast, that is real in itself.

4. The moment: Nāgārjuna dissects the present

Nāgārjuna does not attack the floor with a new theory. He asks whether it can be found. Start with time, and take what we call the present moment.

A moment that passes has parts. In the Precious Garland (Ratnāvalī) Nāgārjuna points out that a moment has an end, so it must also have a beginning and a middle. Having three parts, it is not a partless moment, and the world does not abide even for that long (1.69).

A present with duration splits into past and future. Look more closely. Does the present last for some time, however short? If it has any duration at all, divide it. Its first part is already gone; its last part is not yet here; only the middle is present. But the middle also lasts for some time, so divide it again. Each time we look for the present, it splits into a past that is no longer and a future that is not yet, and no present is found standing between them. The same pattern runs through MMK Chapter 2: on a road there is the part already crossed and the part not yet crossed, and no "being crossed" is found apart from them (MMK 2.1).

A present without duration cannot make up time. Then perhaps the true moment has no duration at all, a mere point of now. But a point with no length is not long enough to be anything. Line up as many as you like, and they never add up to a second.

Either way. A present with duration falls apart into what is gone and what is to come; a present without duration cannot make up time. Either way, the partless moment is not found. In Chapter 7 of his Middle Way (the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, MMK) Nāgārjuna takes the three marks the Abhidharma gave every conditioned thing: arising, abiding and ceasing. If arising is itself conditioned, it needs its own three marks, and so on without end; if it is not conditioned, it cannot be a mark of conditioned things (MMK 7.1). Looked for one by one, none of the three is found. The chapter ends not with a denial but with a description: "Like a magic show, like a dream, like a city of gandharvas in the clouds: so arising, so abiding, so ceasing have been taught" (MMK 7.34).

The dividing is a search, not a discovery of tiny pieces. It does not show that time is made of infinitely many smaller instants, and it does not reveal a timeless reality behind the clock. It shows only that no present is found standing by itself, at any size. Clocks still keep time.

5. The atom: Vasubandhu's six directions

The partless atom was the Abhidharma schools' idea, not Vasubandhu's. Vasubandhu argued against it. In his Twenty Verses (Viṃśikā 12–13) he takes their atom and puts it to a test.

Atoms must join. For anything to be built out of atoms, they must join. So place one atom in the middle, with neighbours on all six sides: above and below, in front and behind, to the left and to the right.

If all six touch the same spot. Does the neighbour on the left touch the very same spot as the neighbour on the right? If all six touch the same spot, they all occupy one place, and however many atoms are heaped together, the heap is no bigger than one atom. A mountain would be the size of one atom.

If they touch different places. Then the atom has a left and a right, a top and a bottom, a front and a back. Six sides are six parts. The partless atom has parts. These two horns are Vasubandhu's own.

The edge. Press the question one step further. Where two atoms meet, is the edge part of this atom or of that one? If it has any width, it has two sides of its own, and the question comes back. If it has no width, it is nowhere, and nothing meets there. This step extends Vasubandhu's reasoning; it is not in his verse. Either way, no partless piece of matter is found. Bricks still make walls.

Vasubandhu stopped there. He concluded that the physical world is not found, and kept the mind as what is really there. Madhyamaka asks the same question of the mind, as Section 8 shows.

6. Space: Śāntarakṣita's "neither one nor many"

The habit has one more place to hide. It has lost the moment and the atom. But surely, it says, space itself is real: one still, empty room in which the cup and the bell sit. Some Abhidharma schools counted space as real, unconditioned and permanent, and other Indian schools took it to be a single substance that pervades everything.

Śāntarakṣita, the eighth-century Indian master who later helped bring Buddhism to Tibet, built his Ornament of the Middle Way (Madhyamakālaṃkāra) on one test. Whatever is really there, from its own side, must be really one or really many. There is no third choice. If something is neither, it has no own-nature, like a reflection.

Is space one? There is space here, around the cup, and space over there, around the bell. Is the space around the cup the very same space as the space around the bell? If it is exactly the same, then here is there: the cup would be where the bell is, and the whole room would shrink to a single spot. So the space here and the space there must be different. But then space has a part here and a part there, an east and a west, an above and a below. Something with parts is not one. This is Śāntarakṣita's own question: how can something pervasive, like space, be one, when it is related to different directions?

Is space many? Then perhaps space is many: a great number of small pieces of space, side by side. But "many" means many ones. Take one piece, the space just around the cup's handle. It too has a side towards the cup and a side away from it. Divide it, and each half has two sides again. However small the piece, it is never one thing without parts. With no real one to be found, there is no real many either, because many is only ones counted together.

Either way. Space is neither really one nor really many, so it is not found as a thing standing by itself. None of this takes away room. There is still room to set the cup down and a doorway to walk through. "Space" names that: the absence of obstruction, designated in dependence on the things around it. What is not found is space as a container standing there by itself, before and apart from what is in it.

Two cautions belong here. First, empty space is not emptiness. The room in a house and the emptiness of phenomena are different things, and emptiness is not a vast space in which everything sits. Second, Śāntarakṣita applies the same test to everything, the person and the mind included; he does not stop at mind as Vasubandhu did. But he is known for joining Madhyamaka with Yogācāra, describing things conventionally as mind-only. These books follow Nāgārjuna and Candrakīrti, and use him here only for this argument.

Three searches, one result. Time breaks into before and after. Matter breaks into this side and that side. Space breaks into here and there. In all three, the floor the habit wanted is not found. And the clock still keeps time, the wall still stands, and there is still room in the house.

7. Three ways of appearing, none privileged

Phenomena present in very different ways.

Some appear solid and undeniable. A ball can be tossed and caught. An apple can be bitten. A car can knock a person down.

Some appear ghostly and dreamlike. A thought, a feeling, a memory, the taste of tea: mental events with no weight and no edges.

Some are not met at all except as descriptions. Physics speaks of probability clouds, wave functions and excitations of fields.

The habit ranks them. For one person the solid is the most real and the mental is a shadow of it. For another the mental is most real and matter is its projection. For a third, the equations are the reality and the apple is just how they look to us.

The view of these books ranks none of them. The solid is not more real than the dreamlike, and the mental is not more real than the physical. All three are ways of appearing and of being described, and all three meet the same search. That is why the view is neither realism nor mind-only. Making matter the floor and making mind the floor are the same mistake.

The scientific descriptions deserve a careful word. They are among the most reliable designations we have, within their domains. But they are conventions too, built from measurements, models and agreements. They do not show that things are empty, and emptiness does not need them. A field is no better a candidate for "what is really there" than an apple.

Insubstantial Appearances, a bonus article for Substrateless World, shows how solid an empty thing can be. This article asks what that thing is.

8. Vivid, and not found anywhere

So what is a phenomenon? It is a vivid appearing that cannot be found, even while it is appearing vividly.

"Cannot be found" is meant precisely. Candrakīrti's chariot is the classic test. The chariot is not its parts, and not something apart from them. It is not the collection of parts, nor their shape, nor something that owns or contains them. Searched for in each of these ways, it does not turn up. Yet the chariot still carries its passenger.

The same search can be turned on a sound, a colour or a thought. It is not here, and not there. It is not anywhere. It is not inside one's own mind, and not inside someone else's. This last step matters. It closes the way out that the mind-only schools offered: if the cup is not out there, perhaps it is in here, as a mental image. Candrakīrti, in Chapter 6 of his Entering the Middle Way (Madhyamakāvatāra), refused that way out. The mind is looked for in the same way and is not found either.

It is not even "nowhere". This is the easiest step to miss. Having failed to find the thing, the mind quietly makes its absence into something: a void, a space, a background that remains when the things are gone. But the absence is not a place and not a thing. Nāgārjuna warns that those who make emptiness into a view are incurable (MMK 13.8), and that even "empty" is said only for the sake of designation (MMK 22.11).

This is what a non-implicative negation means. The search removes the assumed thing and puts nothing in its place. It does not reveal a hidden emptiness, or a silent ground, or an indescribable reality beyond words. When all the identifying stops, nothing unidentified is left over.

9. The conditions are just as empty

When the conceptual mind tries to say what an appearance is, it reaches for dependence. The red depends on the light, the eye, the surface and the attention. The sound depends on the bell, the air and the ear. An appearance, it seems, sits at the centre of a web of relations.

That is true as far as it goes, and it is a better picture than a self-standing thing. But it has a trap in it. The web can quietly become the new floor. The apple is unfindable, we say, but the conditions are surely real; the relations are what is really there.

Nāgārjuna examined the conditions first. "The own-nature of things is not found in their conditions or the like" (MMK 1.3). Things without own-nature have no existence of their own, so "when this exists, that comes to be" cannot describe one real thing producing another (MMK 1.10). In Chapter 14 he examines contact and connection themselves: "Coming into contact, having come into contact, and the one who brings them into contact are not found" (MMK 14.8).

So the conditions are as unfindable as what they condition. They are not a solid network hidden behind the appearance. They too are appearances, and as dreamlike as the apple. Relation and the things related are designated together; neither is prior, and neither is the ground.

10. Appearing already is dependent arising

There is a subtler trap: first a raw appearance, and then the mind describes it as dependent. That is not how it is. The red is dependent in the very moment it is red. There is no undependent layer underneath that the concept of dependence then covers, and no undesignated layer on which labels are placed. Designation is not a label on top of a thing. It is the whole status the thing has.

What the Logic Is Looking At shows this with one simple example. In a world of only blue, blue is never seen. Let a spot of red appear, and blue and red appear at once: neither comes first, nothing waits, nothing produces the other, and each is empty and vivid in the same moment. Book 4, Chapters 5 and 6 test the same point against the two strongest alternatives, a raw Given beneath concepts and concept all the way down, and find no floor in either direction.

This is why Nāgārjuna can say that dependent arising is what is called emptiness, that this is itself a designation, and that this is the middle way (MMK 24.18). Since there is no phenomenon that has not arisen dependently, there is no phenomenon that is not empty (MMK 24.19). Dependent arising and emptiness are not two facts that happen to coincide. They are one fact, seen from the side of convention and from the side of analysis.

11. Illusions that work

If phenomena are unfindable, are they unreal? The tradition answers with images: the magic show, the dream, the city of gandharvas seen in the clouds (MMK 7.34); a mirage (MMK 17.33).

The images are chosen for their two sides. A magician's elephant walks across the stage and the audience gasps. It is seen; it frightens; it is not an elephant. A dream can make the dreamer weep. A mirage is seen, and thirsty travellers turn toward it. None of these is nothing. What they lack is a nature of their own, found when looked for.

Nāgārjuna presses the point. Suppose the Buddha made a magical person, and that magical person made another (MMK 17.31). The second is made, and it acts. In the same way, actions, agents and their fruits are like magical creations, and they work (MMK 17.32–33). In a related text he answers the objection that an empty argument cannot refute anything: one magically created man can stop another (Vigrahavyāvartanī 23).

So the effects are fully real. The car with no essence still injures. The grief is still grief. The medicine still heals.

One way of putting this needs care. It is tempting to say that things can work because they are empty, as if emptiness were a power that makes function possible. Emptiness does not do anything. It is not a cause, a condition or a ground. The point is rather this: function never needed an essence in the first place. And the reasoning runs the other way. If a thing had a nature of its own, fixed from its own side, it could not arise, change or end, and nothing could be done with it (MMK 24.16–20). That is a reductio of own-nature, not a power granted by emptiness.

Longchenpa built a whole book on these images: Finding Rest in Illusion, the third of his Trilogy of Rest. Its eight similes come from the Perfection of Wisdom sūtras: a dream, a magical illusion, a trick of the eye, a mirage, an echo, a city of gandharvas, a reflection and an apparition. Each is vivid and each is not found. As the title says, the point is not to make the world seem thin. It is rest: nothing in it needs to be held.

12. Clarity without a knower

Every appearance is clear. The colour is seen as colour, the sound is heard as sound, the thought is known as thought. This clarity runs through all appearing, the solid, the dreamlike and the described alike. The habit reads it as a light behind the appearances: a knower, a witness, a background awareness. That is the observer returning in a quieter form. Looked for, it is not found. The clarity is the appearing's own, and it is empty too.

Book 4, Chapter 2 calls this vividness without a viewer. What the Logic Is Looking At, "The clarity, mistaken as self and Self", follows how it is mistaken first as "me" and then as a vast Self, and Decoding Anatta and MMK Chapter 3, "Not mind either", why it is not all mind.

13. The Dzogchen words, read without a ground

The Dzogchen tradition of Longchenpa and Mipham has its own words for this. Read carelessly, they can sound like a ground behind appearances. Read as these books read them, they say what the earlier sections have said.

Primordial purity (ka dag). From the beginning, appearing was never fixed and never had a nature of its own. "Pure" names no cleaning that took place, only the absence of what was never there. It is the emptiness of appearing, named from the side of the basis.

Spontaneous presence (lhun grub). Appearing is already complete; it owes its completeness to nothing hidden. This is not an uncaused source. Spontaneous presence and dependent arising describe the same appearing: dependent arising as it is analysed, spontaneous presence as it is met when the fixing stops. Neither is higher than the other. Decoding Anatta and MMK Chapter 3 shows how the chain ends here: with no doer anywhere, and nothing put in its place, appearing is complete by itself.

Display (rtsal). Thoughts and appearances are display. But display must not be heard as the display of something standing behind it. It means only this: dependent arising, vivid and unobstructed, with nothing behind it.

Self-release (rang grol). A thought recognised as unfixed releases itself as it arises, like a drawing on water, which needs no eraser. Nothing outside is applied to it, and no one does the releasing.

Appearance-emptiness (snang stong). Appearing and emptiness are inseparable. This is not a mixture of two things. It is the vivid appearance and its not being found, two aspects of one appearing.

Rigpa. Some sources call rigpa the pristine awareness that is the basis itself. These books take it only in the other sense the tradition gives it: the knowing of the basis, recognising appearing as unfixed, dependent and empty. Rigpa is not a witness, not a self-standing knower and not a ground. The basis (gzhi) is the emptiness of appearing, not a ground behind it. Longchenpa says the ground is called a ground only from a relative point of view, and in the true nature of things it is empty of being one.

Three cautions belong here. First, reading Dzogchen together with Nāgārjuna's Middle Way is these books' synthesis (Book 4, Chapter 19). It is a defensible reading of Longchenpa and Mipham, not the only one in the Nyingma tradition. Some lineages treat Dzogchen as its own vehicle, not reducible to Madhyamaka analysis. Primordial purity and Prāsaṅgika emptiness are read together here; they are not claimed to be the same term. Second, none of these words is exempt. Singled out, each is designated and empty like everything else.

Third, traditional Nyingma teaching says more here than this article does. It speaks of the clear nature of mind, and sets ordinary mind (sems) apart from rigpa as wisdom (ye shes); this article takes clarity only as the clarity of appearing. In Longchenpa, spontaneous presence also includes qualities said to be present in the ground, and display is spoken of as the ground's own dynamism; this article keeps only the sense that rules out a hidden source. Recognition usually comes through a teacher's direct introduction (ngo sprod), not at the end of a search. And compassion (thugs rje), the third aspect of the basis, is not taken up here. These narrowings are deliberate, so that no ground returns, and a reader from that tradition will rightly find more there.

14. Recognition, not search

The search of Sections 3 to 9 does real work. It catches the habit in the act. Each time the mind looks for the floor and finds nothing, the assumption that there must be one loosens a little.

But the search is not where it ends. Phenomena do not become unfindable when the search is finished. They were never findable. The search only shows what was already the case. And the searching itself can harden into a habit: a dividing mind that keeps one last place for itself, the place from which it searches.

What the Dzogchen tradition points to is recognition. When appearing is recognised as it is, nothing needs to be looked for. Each appearance is met as vivid, unfindable and releasing itself as it arises, with nothing to hold and no one holding.

Recognition is not an achievement. It is not a state built up by effort, and the moment it is held as an accomplishment, the fixing has returned. Nor is it passive. It still takes clear knowing, the same clear knowing that undoes the habit wherever the habit returns. It is recognised again and again, not reached once and kept.

And then the ordinary world is simply the ordinary world. The apple is red, the car is dangerous, the friend's voice is warm. Nothing is lost. What has gone is only the floor that was never there.

The tradition has a word for meeting appearances in this way: wonder (ngo mtshar). Colours, sounds, tastes, thoughts, cars, planes and birds appear, vivid and precise, whenever their conditions come together, and none of them is found standing anywhere. That is not a problem to be solved. It is magical, and miraculous.

The chain, 4 of 7. Next: The Illusion of the Given, the fourth insight: there is no given world behind what appears.

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Notes on sources

Translations of MMK verses are from Nāgārjuna's Middle Way on this site, made from the GRETIL Sanskrit text.

• MMK 1.3, 1.10, 7.1, 7.34, 13.8, 14.8, 17.31–33, 22.11, 24.18 and 24.19. Checked against the GRETIL Sanskrit. Conditions are the subject of MMK Chapter 1, and contact and connection of Chapter 14. MMK 24.16–20 is the argument that a thing with its own nature could not arise, change or end.
• MMK 2.1 and 15.1–2. Checked against the GRETIL Sanskrit and this site's translations. MMK 15.2: own-nature "is not made, and does not depend on anything else".
• Candrakīrti on the "nature" of things. His commentaries on MMK Chapter 15 (Prasannapadā) and on his own Madhyamakāvatāra call the true nature (dharmatā) of phenomena their lack of own-nature. Checked through search summaries of the scholarship only; no passage is quoted.
• "Dharma bears its own mark." The Abhidharma gloss of dharma as what holds its own characteristic (svalakṣaṇa), as in Vasubandhu's commentary on the Abhidharmakośa. Summarised, not quoted.
• Śāntarakṣita, Madhyamakālaṃkāra. The neither-one-nor-many test (no third option), its use on pervasive things such as space and the directions, and the image of a reflection in the first verse. Checked through search summaries only (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; the Blumenthal and Padmakara translations); no verse is quoted and no verse numbers are given. The cup-and-bell steps apply his reasoning.
• Ratnāvalī 1.69 (the moment with three parts). Verse 69 of Chapter 1 in Jeffrey Hopkins's translation, Nāgārjuna's Precious Garland; the next verse applies the same test to the beginning, middle and end. Verse numbers differ between editions. The argument is not in the MMK; Chapter 7 of the MMK, on the three marks, is the nearest.
• Viṃśikā 12–13 (the partless atom). Vasubandhu's argument against the partless atom from its six sides, as discussed by Ching Keng (2019) and Yufan Mao (2024). Numbering differs between editions. The step about the edge (Section 5) extends his argument.
• Candrakīrti's chariot. Madhyamakāvatāra 6.150–165 (Dhivan Jones, 2023). The article describes the search without quoting a verse.
• Candrakīrti against mind-only. Madhyamakāvatāra, Chapter 6.
• Vigrahavyāvartanī 23. "One magically created man can stop another."
• Longchenpa, Finding Rest in Illusion. Translated by the Padmakara Translation Group (Shambhala, 2018), the third volume of the Trilogy of Rest. The book is built on the eight similes of illusion from the Perfection of Wisdom sūtras; the list given here follows Longchenpa's set. No passage is quoted.
• Longchenpa on the ground. Summarised, not quoted, as in Book 4, Chapter 19.
• Tibetan terms. snang stong, "appearance-emptiness", and ngo mtshar, "wonder, marvel": Rangjung Yeshe Wiki (Dharma Dictionary). ka dag, lhun grub, rtsal, rang grol and rigpa follow the glossary of The Observer and the Taste of Presence.