by Tang Huyen

Tables and chairs, cats and people are fictions created by mentation. The self is a much more abstract fiction created by the fourth aggregate, the compositions, as the linking pin for the entire interpretation.

Normal, deluded people are dispersed, and do not pull themselves together to reflect on themselves — even less pull themselves together to reconnect themselves to themselves and become whole. Broken people break themselves up and float in unconnected fragments that do not know each other.

Buddhist practice basically helps us reverse our dispersion, pull ourselves together to reflect on ourselves, then pull ourselves together to connect ourselves to ourselves, reclaim our alienated parts, come to peace with ourselves, let go of dispersion and become whole. Ultimately this process of becoming whole entails the dropping of mentation, because mentation always disperses and splits up into bits and pieces what it deals with — that's how desire ratifies itself. Then we shall have no self to defend or protect, for or against. We are so at peace with ourselves that we can allow our self to drop off, as it is of no use any more.

The process to arrive at raw sensation includes some understanding of thought — especially the understanding that thought is divisive, veiling and distorting — and the seeing through of thought, the seeing past thought, so that the state without thought can be experienced and reflectively compared with the state with thought. Of course that reflection and comparison cannot be made whilst in the state without thought, but only afterward; yet once made, the clarity and transparence of the state without thought are incomparably more satisfying than the confusion and opacity of the state with thought.

The paradox is that in the state without thought, there is perception without relating (making relations), intuition without understanding of what has been taken in, its significance, its relational import — for precisely those are functions of thought. And with thought, the intuition of the whole is impossible.

I refer to the saying by Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (Die Welt als Wille und Darstellung), in Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Paul Deussen, I, 519–521 (tr. R. B. Haldane and John Kemp, II, 34–35, modified), where he first cites from memory "the oft-repeated, meaningless expression: 'the empirical of the intuition is given from without [Das Empirische der Anschauung wird von Aussen gegeben].'" He then cites in paraphrase Kant's assertion of "the two sources" (zwei Quellen; Kant says zwei Grundquellen, "two originary sources," A50, B74), and continues a short while later: "He leaves the intuition, taken for itself, to be without the understanding [verstandlos], purely sensible, therefore wholly passive, and only through thinking (category of the understanding) does he allow an object to be apprehended [Er lässt die Anschauung, für sich genommen, verstandlos, rein sinnlich, also ganz passiv seyn, und erst durch das Denken {Verstandeskategorie} einen Gegenstand aufgefasst werden]."

That's what Buddhist awakening is:

"He [Kant] leaves the intuition, taken for itself, to be without the understanding (verstandlos), purely sensible, therefore wholly passive, and only through thinking (category of the understanding) does he allow an object to be apprehended."

So the intuition of the whole in awakening is objectless — not that it is a blank, even less that it is a homogeneous blank, for it is as differentiated as that in delusion; but it is objectless in that it does not cut up the whole sense-field into bits and pieces (the objects of daily life) according to concepts and categories, structures and frameworks.

Tables and chairs, cats and people are fictions created by mentation. They are empirical units (piṇḍa) or concept-delimited thing-events (saṃjñāka-dharma) carved out from the whole sense-field by the third aggregate, notion, idea, concept (saṃjñā). The self is a much more abstract fiction created by the fourth aggregate, the compositions, as the linking pin for the entire interpretation.

In modern critical philosophy, there is the widespread idea that even physical objects of our daily life, like tables and chairs, are logical constructs — which don't exist as such in sensation but are constructed from bits and pieces of the sense-field. All the more so for non-physical entities or non-entities that we construct on a much more abstract level, by much more complicated constructions, like "I," "self," "soul," "God," and so on.

The Buddha twenty-four centuries ago in India had understood such ideas and even pushed them to their logical end. To him, our basic problem is that we follow speech to chase realities, and the most basic errors that we commit in that direction and inflict as problems on ourselves are "I," "mine," "self," "soul," "God" — not to mention concrete physical objects like tables and chairs, which we logically construct from bits and pieces of the sense-field. We build our lives on such words and concepts, stabilise and congeal the flowing reality around them, and thereby offer resistance to the flowing reality. Suffering comes from such resistance, and the ending of suffering comes from no longer putting up such resistance.

So the Buddhist method (dharma) comes down to dissolving such resistance to the flowing reality. One part consists in paying attention to what happens — and therefore reversing the usual scattering of thought in memories of the past and expectations of the future, memories and expectations that converge on "I," "mine," "self," "soul," "God." Another part consists in examining whether there is anything that corresponds to such words and concepts, or whether they are mere ideas without referent.

The referents in total are admitted only in so far as they are received into some sense-fields, and all that surpasses the sense-fields altogether is banished as outside of range, without object, and mere figments of the imagination. Thus the referents are admitted as they fall into the five classes of experience called the five aggregates — except for those constructions (those compositions, belonging to the fourth aggregate) that surpass the sense-fields, like "I," "mine," "self," "soul," "God."

As one advances on the fore-mentioned practice, one learns to undo the patterns that create suffering and substitute other ones that don't. In meditation, one even calms down all mental activities other than mere cognition of raw sensation, and thus quiesces all mentation altogether. In such a state, even the ideas of "I," "mine," "self," "soul," "God" don't arise. One doesn't create a self for oneself to carry around, doesn't inflict the problem — a false problem, built on language — of "I," "self" on oneself. Thus one has no problem to solve, for one doesn't create problems for oneself.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on March 5, 2004. Author: Tang Huyen (Laughing Buddha, Inc.). Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

Tang Huyen was a scholar of Buddhist studies with deep command of Pāli, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan sources. Posting to talk.religion.buddhism and related groups from 2003 to 2008, he was among the most rigorous analytical voices in the English-language Buddhist Usenet world. This post integrates Schopenhauer's analysis of objectless intuition, the Buddhist five-aggregate model, and Kantian critique of the constructed object into a single argument: awakening is not a mystical blank but the intuition of the whole sense-field prior to the mentation that carves it into fictions.

Note: Sanskrit technical terms (piṇḍa, saṃjñāka-dharma, saṃjñā) and German quotations have been restored from context where the original encoding was corrupted.

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

🌲