by Tang Huyen

Sensation delivers a continuous field that is fully differentiated — but there are no distinctions of things and objects in there, nor are there relations or separations, self or others. All of those take thought to get going. They are thought-up (gedacht, cetayita).

In the world, as in us, there are relations, that is a
fact that cannot be denied, but in our sensation,
there are no relations. It takes thought to figure
out the relations — both their existence and their
nature.

Which is why I keep criticising the Buddhists
who automatically say that the Buddhist sage
sees Dependent Arisal or the interdependence
of the universe or the interrelatedness of the
universe. The followers of the Tibetan religion
make this error as an automatic article of faith
of the Tibetan religion.

The Buddhist sage doesn't see things or
objects, either, because things and objects
require thought to set them up, namely as
things and objects. Sensation delivers a
continuous field that is fully differentiated (and
not a blank, even less a homogeneous blank),
but there are no distinctions of things and
objects in there — nor are there relations or
separations, self or others. All of those take
thought to get going. They are thought-up
(gedacht, cetayita).

We never directly perceive relations (including
relations that we call things and objects, self
and others), we only infer and reconstruct
them, sometimes at many removes. Of course if
we act and react in the world, we need our
thought and language, but in meditation it is
possible to quiesce them and take sensation
shorn of them.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on July 12, 2004, in reply to a thread on emptiness and Dependent Origination. Interlocutors: Awaken21 and naked_ape. Author: Tang Huyen (Laughing Buddha, Inc.). Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

Tang Huyen here draws a line that has deep roots in Sautrantika epistemology: raw sensation (pratyaksa) is unmediated, pre-relational, pre-categorical. It is thought (anumana, mentation) that carves up the continuous sensory field into things, relations, self, and other. The Buddhist sage in cessation-attainment does not "see Dependent Origination" — that would require precisely the thought-up relational framework that meditation suspends. The critique of Tibetan Buddhism on this point is pointed: the claim that awakening consists in perceiving interdependence conflates the conventional-reality reading (a valid map of mentation's products) with the ultimate-reality state (where mentation's products have been quiesced). Dependent Origination is a description of how mentation operates, not a vision the freed mind enjoys.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

🌲