There is suffering, but none who suffers
Doing exists, although there is no doer
Nirvana exists, but no one who attains it
There is the path, but no one who walks it.
Visuddhimagga 16
Start with the view that how we carve up our world with concepts and words is arbitrary, though generally practical.
The arbitrariness is fairly obvious in some cases, such as the borders between countries. For example, we know that with a bit of process and high-level agreement – and some complaints from cartographers – state borders could be moved and Hartford, South Dakota would become Hartford, Nebraska.
Less obvious is the arbitrariness in the borders between physical things. There’s a book on the desk in front of me. I consider it to be a separate identifiable thing. I could pick it up and put it in the bookcase and refer to the whole bookcase, including the book, as a separate identifiable thing. That’s not too controversial; it’s just a thing full of things, or a thing made up of things.
The book itself, of course, is a thing made up of things. There are a few hundred pages of paper inside. Ripping one out would not prevent me from calling it a book. (Ripping them all out might.) So the book is kind of a thing of things, too. And within the pages, of course, are atoms, so they’re things of things too.
But the book is on the desk. I consider it to be a separate thing from the desk by convention, and because I can pick it up and read it. But while it’s sitting on the desk, there’s nothing stopping me from treating the book and desk both as a single object: bookdesk. The bookdesk is in front of me, made up of atoms, etc. I can move the bookdesk with a gentle shove.
Okay, so I can’t. I just tried. Let’s pretend I’m much stronger.
We can keep expanding this out. The bookdesk is on the floor. So we have floorbookdesk, all one thing. My chair is on the floorbookdesk, so I’m sitting on the chairfloorbookdesk. And so on. I can expand these arbitrary divisions out to include the whole room. The whole room, a single thing.
That includes the air, of course. And it includes me.
For a great many perfectly good reasons, I consider myself to be a separate thing too. The thing that just failed to shove the bookdesk. Silly puny thing. And I generally consider all of these other things to be outside of myself. I’m sitting on, in front of, under, near various other things, things outside of myself. I see them, feel them, interact with them.
The lines between me, or my body, and these other things, my environment, are actually a bit more obviously fuzzy than the distinction between the book and the desk. I’ve been breathing air in and out, maybe nibbled at a granola bar, skin cells have been quietly flaking off. Pretty constantly, things “outside” have been coming in and things “inside” have been going out.
But anyway, we’re considering the whole room as a single thing, and that includes me. So what was previously me breathing external air in and internal air out, oxygen molecules making their ponderous way up to my brain, etc., is now simply something that the room as whole is doing.
From the previous perspective, I was breathing air in and out. From the new perspective, the room is breathing. Breathing itself, if you like.
Now, how do we approach the question of perception from this new perspective?
Before, I was looking at the book in front of me, just as I was breathing the air outside of me. We generally think of sight as something outside (light) bouncing off something else outside (the book) and entering me through my eyes to the inside (retina, brain, whatever you like).
But now the whole room is a single object. Before I was breathing air in and out. Now the room is breathing itself, or simply doing breathing. Before I was seeing the book in front of me. Now the room is seeing itself, or doing book-seeing.
If I close my eyes, I stop seeing the book. Or, if the room does eye-closing, the room stops doing book-seeing. So the arrangement of the room determines whether or not it’s doing a seeing. Certain arrangements (eyes open, lights on, book within field of vision) give rise to book-seeing. Certain arrangements (eyes closed, lights off, oxygen cut off to brain) do not give rise to book-seeing.
In this arrangement, who is book-seeing? The room is a single object in such a configuration that it gives rise to an event of book-seeing. Book-seeing occurs, the room is doing it. And the angle from which the book is seen, the colours, its position relative to its background, possibly even its immediate significance are all seen from “my” perspective. The room is book-seeing-from-Hakunin’s-perspective.
But the fact that this particular perspective is a quality of the book-seeing event doesn’t change that it is the whole room, the only object we’ve defined, that is performing it. And if the room object was arranged slightly differently, the perspective quality of the book-seeing event – its angles, its lighting, its colours – would be slightly different.
So the arrangement of this single object, the room, gives rise to an event of perception, and the things that previously seemed so important and separate (me, the book, perhaps the light) become just qualities, just flavours of the event of perception to which it happens to give rise.
That seeing, that perception, previously seemed like a tenuous link between two very real separate things, things that are there whether or not one sees the other. Now both the seer and the seen become qualities – more like the shape and colour of a thing than like a thing themselves.
Before, Hakunin was in a room looking at a book on a desk, light from the lamp bouncing off one thing and on to another. Now, the room is doing a Hakunin-style-book-seeing.
Of course, it was equally arbitrary for us to draw the lines at the borders of the room. The lamp, whose aspect of the arrangement is integral to the book-seeing, is being powered by the city grid, which is in turn powered by a hydroelectric dam, whose dynamos are turned by water, which precipitated after being evaporated by the heat of the sun, which is eight light-minutes away. That light and heat from the sun is, in a small measure, influenced by the gravity of the other stars in the galaxy, whose position is itself a product of a confluence of forces extending to include the entire universe.
It may not be particularly useful, but it is nonetheless true, that if the nearest black hole was a few inches to the left, this room’s book-seeing would be imperceptibly different.
When you expand these boundaries out to the limits, to include the universe, to include everything, you are left with the observation that this event of book-seeing, at this very moment, is given rise to by the arrangement of everything that is, and due to the causal chain of everything that ever was.
And even though it’s a book-seeing-from-Hakunin’s-perspective, it’s a book-seeing-from-Hakunin’s-perspective that is performed by the entire universe. “My” location, “my” concerns, “my” perspective of the book are simply qualities of that event.
Perception, then, is a non-local event. It doesn’t occur in any particular place. My perception of this book and your perception of these words are both events being performed by the entire universe, not taking place here in my seat and there in yours, but both being performed nowhere and everywhere. The same arrangement of everything that gives rise to my perception of the book is the arrangement that gives rise to your perception of these words.
This may seem interesting but an impractical, irrelevant way of looking at things. But according to Buddhism, it is ignorance of this perspective – not intellectually, but intuitively – that is the root cause of all suffering. This is, in a roundabout way, the doctrine of anatta, or “no-self”.