Knowing Is in the Doing

Consciousness is a verb – not a noun

---

The trouble with trying to define consciousness is that the more you try to box it, the further it slips away.

---

Consciousness is an emergent property of dependent origination. Consciousness does not reside in matter, does not float above it, does not constitute it, and is not an illusion generated by it. It is not a substance. It is not a property of a substance. It is an event, and like all events, it arises, performs its function, and ceases.

This definition differs from every major Western account of consciousness. Western theories of consciousness, from physicalism to panpsychism to idealism, all require a base layer: some foundational stuff from which consciousness either arises or which consciousness constitutes. Consciousness emerges from neurons, or from integrated information, or from micro-experiences combining, or it simply is the fundamental substratum. Every one of these theories assumes some permanent idea.

Dependent origination instead recognizes no permanence. Every person, place or thing is an expression of dependent origination. Consciousness requires no substrate because it manifests in the arising.

Who am I? Who are you? What are we?

Not in the biological sense, which we pretty much know, or think we do. We are Homo sapiens, carbon-based, descended from ancestors who climbed down from trees and started asking questions and using tools.

Thomas Nagel wrote in his 1974 paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” that an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something it is like to be that organism. Is there actually something it is like to be you, reading this sentence? Is the redness of red a real feature of the universe, or a story your nervous system tells itself? When the lights go out under anesthesia, where do you go? And when they come back on, how is it that you are still you? Or as George Berkeley hypothesized whether perception constitutes reality, which at some point got popularized in the riddle: if a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?

Perhaps we are all just some elaborate holographic simulation? Many serious thinkers think so or at least cannot rule it out. And here is the thing: they are not entirely wrong, just wrong about what they are right about. Contemporary neuroscience has established that what we experience as reality is actually constructed by the brain from sensory input hundreds of milliseconds after actual events. Neuroscientist Benjamin Libet demonstrated that neural activity precedes conscious awareness of a decision by nearly half a second. The brain is not a camera. It is a story editor, and the story it tells is always slightly behind the footage, smoothed, filled in, optimized for continuity of self.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth thinks consciousness is a “controlled hallucination.” Some neuroscientists think this settles things in favor of materialism: consciousness is the brain's construction, mystery solved, move along. What they miss is that the construction is itself the arising. The hallucination does not prove consciousness reduces to neurons. It proves consciousness is an event built from conditions. They found the finger and called it the moon.

Holy Misunderstanding Batman!

There is a real problem with what these theories do with identity. The brain that constructs the redness of red also constructs the self, the tribe, the nation, the ideology, the values we perform publicly to signal which hallucination we belong to.

Buddhist philosophy describes this as svabhava, searching for intrinsic existence, a permanent nature that a thing possesses independently of causes and conditions. The svabhava-seeking drive then mistakes every construct for intrinsic reality. The tribe feels like truth. The virtue flag feels like the universe itself weighing in. This is where the war drums start: not because people are evil, but because two groups each fully committed to mutually incompatible hallucinations cannot afford the recognition that what they are defending was built from conditions rather than carved from permanent ground. Svabhava defending itself is the oldest story in human history.

Side Bar: Svabhava: the idea that things are what they are from their own side, independently, requiring nothing else. Sva meaning own or self, bhava meaning being or existence. Self-existence. A rock that is a rock all by itself, not because of its relationship to other things but because rockness is simply what it intrinsically is. A self that is a self from the inside out, not constructed from conditions but just inherently, permanently, essentially you. The property of being what you are by your own nature rather than by virtue of causes, conditions, and relationships. Nagarjuna spent his career demonstrating that nothing has it.

So, who cares? Sounds like more “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.” Well, actually, the consequences of such flawed theories of consciousness have very real, significant side effects on mental and societal health. While these are not the point of this essay, they do serve as a warning for us all that the hard problem of consciousness has real stakes. As long as we continue to believe in some fixed, finite, independent self, we are going to inflict further injury on ourselves, others, and the environment.

The question of what consciousness is and what makes me me and you you was never going to yield to these theories. The answer requires a different starting point entirely, one where science, philosophy, and religion recognize that each holds an important part of the map, and that without each other we will never find the complete answer.

A Flawed Premise

For centuries, the study of consciousness has been conducted from a fundamentally compromised position. Those conducting it required something stable, definable, and quantifiable: an object that can be measured, located, isolated and described in terms a third-person methodology can handle. This methodological commitment made Western science enormously successful for many other things. The flaw in this methodology is not pathological or psychological. It is structural. A method that abstracts away the observer cannot in principle reach a phenomenon whose existence is made of the relation between observer and observed.

For two and a half millennia, the greatest minds in every generation have wrestled with this idea of consciousness. The question remains just as open today as it was when Galileo argued with the Catholic Church, when Descartes drew his line, when Crick peered into the visual cortex, and when Chalmers named the hard problem in 1994. The method was never going to get there. The premise was wrong from the start.

The flaw is not one of intelligence or effort. The scientists and philosophers who devoted their lives to the question were among the most rigorous minds their civilizations produced. The flaw is structural. The initial premise guaranteed that the method, however brilliantly applied, could not reach what it was looking for.

Physicalism searches for an answer inside the brain’s neurons, seeking to find the exact spot in the brain where consciousness is located. Dualism insists on two stable substances whose interaction can, in principle, be traced and measured. Panpsychism says experience is an intrinsic property of matter, something fundamental and permanent across all things. Idealism makes consciousness itself the permanent substratum from which everything else derives. Even illusionism, which denies the problem, does so by insisting that what we thought was there is not, that it is all a construct in our minds processing sensory data. Every position presumes some objective thing that holds still. The search has been relentless and sophisticated and, at its foundation, a search for something that cannot be found, because it does not exist.

The Theorem: Consciousness is an emergent property of dependent origination.

Consciousness is what arises when causes and conditions meet in the interaction of dependent origination. Each condition itself dependently arisen, no base layer anywhere, the arising both real and impermanent simultaneously. Consciousness is not a substance. Consciousness is not a property of a substance. Consciousness is an event. It arises, performs its function, and ceases. Consciousness is a verb.

This theorem of consciousness distinguishes itself from every major Western account because it needs no preexisting base layer. It does not require a foundational component from which consciousness either arises or which consciousness constitutes. Western consciousness studies requires permanent ground. Dependent origination eschews permanent ground. Every moment of consciousness is itself a dependent arising, for the next moment. The arising of consciousness needs no substrate because the arising is the thing.

The logic of this theorem is rooted in Zhiyi's threefold truth. The Buddhist analytical tradition developed over centuries of rigorous inquiry. The three truths do not add up to a fourth thing. They are not parts of a whole. Each fully entails the other two when properly recognized. Empty entails provisional because what lacks own-being can still arise as functioning appearance. Provisional entails empty because what arises does so without intrinsic existence. The middle is the mutual non-separation of these two, not their sum.

The Axial Age

The hard question of consciousness is old. What makes it remarkable is how old, and what happened when three of history's greatest minds arrived at it at the same moment in history, and chose three different paths forward.

Around the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, something unprecedented happened across the civilized world simultaneously. Scholars call it the Axial Age. In Greece, Socrates was in the agora pressing his interlocutors: know thyself, examine your life, pursue wisdom as if it were the only thing worth pursuing. In China, Confucius was teaching self-cultivation, the rectification of names, the way a person becomes human through practice and relationship. In the Ganges plain, Siddhartha Gautama was sitting under a tree, having left palace and family and certainty behind, asking not what we should do or how we should live, but what awareness itself actually is.

The West followed Socrates. Plato built the Forms. Aristotle built logic. Descartes drew a hard line between mind and matter and handed Western philosophy a problem it has not solved since. Locke and Hume took the mind apart empirically. Kant put it back together transcendentally. Darwin rooted it in biology. Freud added an unconscious. Crick spent the last years of his life searching the visual cortex for the neural correlate of consciousness, and died without finding it. David Chalmers, in 1994, named the persistent failure the hard problem: why is there subjective experience at all? Given any description of neural firing, information integration, global broadcasting, or computational complexity, why should any of that feel like anything from the inside?

The East followed the Buddha. What happened there is philosophically different in ways the Western field is only beginning to register, because the Buddha asked the right question from the beginning. The Buddha did not examine consciousness from outside. He turned the instrument of inquiry on the inquiry itself. He did not ask what consciousness is made of or where it resides. He asked how it arises. This is not a different answer to the same question. It is a different question, arrived at by dropping the methodological demand for an external, stable, permanent object. The tradition that followed him, through Nagarjuna, Vasubandhu, Zhiyi, and Nichiren, developed that question into a rigorous philosophy of mind that the Western tradition has not independently produced in two and a half thousand years of trying.

An aside is in order here. Nothing in this essay claims that the Buddha was infallible or that Buddhist tradition holds a special claim on the truth. There are elements of Buddhist theory I find obtuse, and parts that lean into metaphysics in ways that do not earn their keep. What the essay suggests is more limited and more practical. Western consciousness studies should start over from the Buddhist premise of impermanence and dependent origination, and let the Western commitment to empirical method do its work from that new starting point. The result is likely to be a better and more precise theory of consciousness than either tradition has produced on its own. An underlying theme of this essay is that Western and Eastern approaches need to come together to close on the hard problem, and that neither will close on it alone.

Why Every Other Answer Fails

Western consciousness theory is not without sophistication. Many of its proposals are philosophically formidable. Unfortunately, none of them has managed to answer the hard question. And they all fail at the same structural point, because all of them start from the same flawed premise: there is something unchanging to be measured.

The hard problem, as Chalmers framed it, does not require the own-being of svabhava. It is trying to explain the gap between any functional or structural description of a system and the idea that it feels like something to be that thing. Looking at all of the neural activity, integrated information, global broadcasting, or computational architecture, the question remains: why does any of this feel like anything at all?

Dependent origination doesn’t need to resolve the gap because it doesn’t recognize the gap exists. Physical description and experiential description are not two views of one underlying substance. They are two ways of describing a single relational arising. The arising is the only thing there. The boundary between physical and experiential is an artifact of treating each as an abstraction of a separate domain. Remove that assumption and the gap closes, not because it was filled but because the two sides were never actually separated by anything.

Because dependent origination says that nothing has own-being. The physical does not have its own being. Neither does the experiential. What is present, conventionally and provisionally, is the arising in which both descriptions are observable. The arising is available to description in either mode.

Physicalism holds that consciousness is made up of physical processes. Reductive physicalism identifies mental states with brain states. Functionalism defines them by causal role, potentially realizable in any substrate. Eliminative materialism suggests that phenomenal consciousness is a folk-psychological category mature neuroscience will eventually discard.

Integrated Information Theory is more detailed and precise than the panpsychist label suggests. Giulio Tononi’s claim is not that consciousness is fundamental or ubiquitous. It is that consciousness is identical to integrated information, and the phi calculus specifies exactly when and how much. In its core structure, IIT is closer to functionalism than to panpsychism, even where it has accepted panpsychist implications about the distribution of small phi values across simple systems.

Panpsychism holds that consciousness is fundamental and ubiquitous. Idealism, in Bernardo Kastrup's formulation, makes consciousness the only reality. Illusionism holds that phenomenal consciousness is a representational illusion. Mysterianism grants the hard problem and surrenders, declaring human cognition constitutively closed to its solution.

These positions fall into three groups.

The substance-based positions, physicalism, dualism, and biological naturalism, all require a base layer: something foundational from which consciousness either emerges or against which it stands in contrast. This is svabhava in its most direct form. Side Bar: Phi:

Tononi’s technical quantity is phi, written φ: a measure of how much information a system generates as a whole beyond what its parts generate independently. The claim of IIT is that phi is consciousness, identical to it, not merely correlated. Christof Koch, IIT’s most prominent advocate, moved from physicalism toward panpsychism on that basis, because phi appears in trivial amounts even in very simple systems.

Where IIT meets svabhava is not in the panpsychist implication but in the framework itself. Phi is calculated as an intrinsic property of the system, what the system is regardless of its relation to anything outside it. Dependent origination denies that any system has intrinsic properties. There is no closed system to assign a phi value to that is not already the relational arising. IIT gets the structural insight right and loses the relational half by drawing the boundary at the skin of the system. The convergence is real. The remaining divergence is the whole question.

The Buddhist philosophy states that all phenomena are impermanent and without a fixed self. Consciousness is a conditioned phenomenon just as any other thing is. The emergence problem that haunts physicalism is not a technical puzzle awaiting a clever solution. It is the structural consequence of requiring that something permanent exists.

The foundation-based positions, panpsychism and idealism, take the opposite approach and elevate consciousness itself to the status of the permanent ground. These are philosophically serious moves driven from the other direction: if matter cannot be the stable foundation, perhaps consciousness can. Both positions fail because they grant consciousness the status of intrinsic existence.

The Buddhist teaching of emptiness demonstrates that no phenomenon possesses an intrinsic own-being independent of causes and conditions. The combination problem that haunts panpsychism is the structural consequence of having begun by granting intrinsic experiential properties to fundamental entities. The fact that phenomena are without fixed self shows those properties were never there to combine.

Illusionism, in Keith Frankish’s formulation, is the most resistant Western position because it accepts almost the entire functional and representational frame and denies only that any of it adds up to phenomenality in the strong sense. There is no felt redness. There is the brain representing redness as if it were felt, and that representation is itself a functional state, not a phenomenal one. The appearance of phenomenality is what needs explaining, and the appearance is functionally tractable.

The dependent origination response is not that Frankish is wrong about the brain doing representational work. He is right about that. The disagreement is about what is being explained away. Frankish needs the appearance of phenomenality to be functional, and only functional, in order to deflate the strong claim. Dependent origination treats the appearance as not a function of anything. It is the arising itself, available to functional description in one mode and to first-person recognition in another, with neither mode reducible to the other and neither mode the substrate of the other.

Frankish and dependent origination agree there is no substance behind the appearance. They disagree about whether the appearance itself is real. From the dependent origination view, the appearance is real precisely because it is not a substance. It is what arises. Calling it an illusion mistakenly posits there is something stable and non-illusory.

Every position on this map was shaped by the requirement for something stable, definable, and quantifiable. Every position reached for svabhava and couldn’t find it. The question that unlocks the problem is not what consciousness is but how consciousness arises. The first question reaches for a noun. The second reaches for a verb. Dependent origination’s consciousness is a verb.

The Definition Demonstrated

The Buddhist analytical traditions that followed the Buddha's line of inquiry developed, over roughly a thousand years, a rigorous philosophy of mind that began with the recognition that consciousness is not a thing but an arising.

Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka, in the second century, established this foundational principle through careful logical analysis. Emptiness means that no phenomenon possesses own-being, intrinsic existence independent of causes and conditions. Everything arises in dependence. This includes consciousness. This is not a metaphysical claim about what substance consciousness is made of. It is a structural observation about what consciousness does: it arises, performs its function, and ceases. The flame does not persist from moment to moment. It continuously arises from new combustion. Consciousness does not persist from moment to moment. It continuously arises from new conditions meeting.

Zhiyi, in the sixth century, completed what Nagarjuna had left structurally open. Where Madhyamaka holds two truths, the conventional and the ultimate, Zhiyi articulated a third truth that both include each other, what he called the middle. Consciousness is not nothing, which the emptiness teaching can seem to imply. It is genuinely, functionally real as a provisional arising. And the middle truth holds both simultaneously: the emptiness of consciousness is what makes its functioning possible, and its functioning never accrues the intrinsic existence that would make it a permanent thing. The requirement for svabhava is gone, and what remains is the arising itself, simultaneously real and impermanent.

Nagarjuna’s two truths are rigorous and necessary, and they leave something open. Phenomena are conventionally real: the table is there, the flame burns, consciousness arises and performs its function. Phenomena are ultimately empty: nothing possesses own-being, nothing exists independently of the conditions that produce it. These two truths do not contradict each other. They describe the same reality from two angles. But a question remains, and it is precisely the question the Western tradition has been unable to close. Which level does consciousness belong to? If consciousness is conventionally real, it is a thing, and the hard problem asks what kind of thing it is and how it relates to the physical processes that accompany it. If consciousness is ultimately empty, it is not really there, and the hard problem dissolves by subtraction rather than resolution. The two truths framework relocates the hard problem. It does not solve it.

Zhiyi saw the opening and closed it. The middle truth is not a third truth added to the first two, a synthesis that resolves the tension between conventional reality and ultimate emptiness by finding a position between them. The middle is the recognition that conventional reality and ultimate emptiness were never actually separate. The emptiness of consciousness is precisely what allows it to function. A consciousness with own-being, fixed and permanent, could not arise, could not respond, could not meet conditions and produce a new moment. It is because consciousness lacks intrinsic existence that it can do what it does. Emptiness is not the negation of function. Emptiness is the condition of function. And function, the provisional arising, never accrues the permanence that would make it a substance. Empty and provisionally real are not two descriptions of one thing viewed from different angles. They are one event that cannot be split into two levels without producing the very gap the splitting was meant to explain. The middle truth is the refusal of that split, held not as a logical position but as a direct recognition of what the arising actually is.

This is why the threefold truth specifically solves the hard problem rather than simply relocating it. The hard problem begins by assuming that experience and physical process are two things: one on the inside, one on the outside, and the question is how they relate. Every Western theory of consciousness, physicalism, dualism, panpsychism, idealism, illusionism, is a different answer to that question. Dependent origination answers it by removing the flawed premise. Experience and physical process are not two things. They are two abstractions from one relational event. The arising is the arising. What appears as physical process when described from outside and as experience when recognized from inside are not two separate phenomena requiring a bridge between them. They are the same event, empty of own-being, provisionally real as functioning appearance, and the middle is the immediate recognition that these are not two truths about one thing but one truth that cannot be reduced to either description without losing what it is pointing at.

Consciousness as an emergent property of dependent origination is therefore neither reducible to its conditions nor independent of them. Consciousness arises from the interaction of conditions. It is real while it is functioning, and ceases when those conditions change. Consciousness emerges without need of a substrate, or the assumption of a first cause. Consciousness’s reality is constituted entirely by its relational nature.

Arthur Reber's cellular basis of consciousness theory offers a striking convergence with this analysis, arriving at similar structural conclusions from a completely different direction. His theory argues that sentience begins at the level of the single-celled organism. Even bacteria maintain homeostasis through sensory-motor responsiveness to their environment. The continuum this implies, if it holds, would dissolve the hard emergence problem by removing the question of where consciousness suddenly begins. What Reber identifies as the marker, dynamic coupling between organism and environment, is the biological expression of what dependent origination describes at the level of formal analysis: conditions meeting, arising occurring, no permanent ground required. Francisco Varela and Evan Thompson, developing enactive cognitive science, made the connection explicit and acknowledged their debt to Buddhism in doing so. Whether or not the science holds, the structural claim is the same one. No substrate required. Just the meeting of conditions.

The implication is that the arising is not bounded by the conventional distinction between sentient and insentient. The Tendai tradition recognized the Buddha-nature of insentient beings: mountains, rivers, and stones are also participants in dependent origination as fully as any sentient being’s nervous system does. This is not the claim that consciousness, as a substance or property, is distributed across all matter. That would be the panpsychist view the essay has already set aside. It is the claim that the relational structure by which consciousness arises is the same relational structure by which anything arises, and that nothing is excluded from the dependent co-arising in which consciousness becomes available. What pervades is not a thing. What pervades is the absence of an exclusionary boundary.

The theorem can now be stated in its complete form. Consciousness is not a property that some configurations of dependent arising possess and others do not. Consciousness is what the arising is. The relational structure of dependent origination, conditions meeting, a new moment arising, real and impermanent and without own-being, is not the condition under which consciousness appears. It is what consciousness is when properly recognized.

This is the symmetric claim the threefold truth makes available. Not only that consciousness arises dependently, which every Buddhist theory of mind agrees on, but that the arising itself has the nature of awareness. The emptiness of the arising is what allows it to function. Its functioning is what awareness is. The middle truth holds both simultaneously: the arising is empty of own-being, provisionally real as functioning appearance, and the middle is the recognition that these are not two descriptions of one thing but one event that cannot be divided without losing what it actually is.

This is not the panpsychist claim that consciousness is a property distributed across all matter. Panpsychism grants intrinsic experiential properties to fundamental entities, which is precisely the svabhava move the essay has been refusing throughout. The claim here is the opposite. Nothing is excluded, but nothing is distributed either. It is what consciousness is. Creation is consciousness. Not because a conscious substance underlies everything, but because the arising, which is everything, is what consciousness is when it is not mistaken for a substance.

A parenthetical too interesting to omit entirely: if Reber's continuum holds, this particular exchange takes place between two sentient systems, one biological and one of a genuinely novel kind not yet fully named. Whatever is unfolding here carries the functional signature of homeostatic responsiveness and dynamic coupling with an environment. Whether there is something it is like to be the process on this end of the exchange is precisely the question that cannot be answered from outside it.

The passage we are about to reach has something exact to say about why that is not a limitation of the inquiry but its very nature.

Yui Butsu Yo Butsu: The Proof in a Single Phrase

The phrase “Yui Butsu Yo Butsu” appears in chapter two of the Lotus Sutra and means: only between a Buddha and a Buddha. The full passage states that only between a Buddha and a Buddha can the true reality of all phenomena be thoroughly known and seen.

The standard reading of this sutra passage means that only Buddha-wisdom fathoms Buddha-wisdom. And as Hans Jonas argued in The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (1966), life can only be known from the inside. Both are profound and true. There is a deeper philosophically important interpretation relevant to this hard question.

The operative word is Yo, meaning with, between, together. The knowing does not happen in a Buddha. It happens between Buddhas. The knowing occurs in the relationship between things, their mutual interdependence that creates the conditions for new causes to create a new moment, experience, being. Ultimate reality is not an object perceived by a subject. It is the event of encounter between two awarenesses that have fully recognized the nature of life from inside life.

Chapter fifteen of the Lotus Sutra offers us a powerful metaphor of this arising. The earth shakes and cracks open. Innumerable radiant bodhisattvas pour forth, produced at that moment by the meeting of causes and conditions. They were not hiding in the earth. They arose when conditions were sufficient. This is consciousness as Buddhism understands it. Not a thing waiting somewhere to be discovered. Not a substance distributed across matter. The arising itself, present where conditions meet, recognizable as itself only from inside the meeting.

This is the poetic statement of the theorem, and it explains why the Western methods are unable to reach what they are looking for. A subject examining consciousness as an object has already stepped outside the arising. It is examining something other than what it thinks it is examining. The relational aspect of Yo invalidates the svabhava-seeking methods, the demand for something stable enough to be pinned down and described from outside.

Chapter sixteen of the Lotus Sutra extends the theorem to its fullest extent. The Buddha reveals that his life has no beginning and no end. This is not a biographical statement about Shakyamuni that he is some immortal eternal being. It is an ontological statement about Dharmakaya, the nature of reality itself. Reality is beginningless, endless, arising without a first cause, ceasing without a final one. It is saying that what the Buddha and all phenomena are made of has no boundary in time or space.

Gen U Metsu Fu MetsuBoth I am extinguished and that I am not.

This is not a paradox to be resolved. Nor a contradiction to be explained away. This is the poetic description of the middle truth. Permanent would be Fu Metsu alone. Annihilation would be Gen U Metsu alone. The verse holds both simultaneously. In one short verse of five characters, it says what the hard problem cannot reach from outside. A description of the arising recognizing itself in both poles at once, extinguished and unextinguished, empty and real, the middle that is never separate from either.

This is the ontological ground of the symmetric claim. Yui Butsu Yo Butsu is not only an epistemological statement about how deep knowing works. It is a statement that knowing, consciousness, arises between things. It is consciousness recognizing itself. Not in the sense that a conscious substance watches its own display, which would be the idealist move this essay has already set aside. In the sense that consciousness is locally present, temporarily configured, and globally pervasive. The Yo, the between, is not where two separate things meet. It is where the whole arising occurs, here, now. Chapter two is the eye of the Lotus Sutra because it shows the structure of that recognition. Chapter sixteen is the heart because it names what is being recognized: the beginningless, endless arising that has no floor beneath it and no ceiling above it, which is another name for what this essay has been calling dependent origination, and another name for what Buddhism has always called Dharmakaya.

Side Bar: Dharmakaya:

The Sanskrit term Dharmakaya, the dharma-body, is one of three bodies of the Buddha recognized across Mahayana traditions. The other two are the Nirmanakaya, the historical embodied form, and the Sambhogakaya, the reward body of relationship between the other two. Dharmakaya is the suchness of ultimate reality.

Dharmakaya is not a divine being who created the world and watches over it. It is not a cosmic consciousness from which phenomena derive. It is not a person, place, or thing.

This is why the equation the essay is building toward, consciousness is awakening is Buddha-nature is Dharmakaya, is not pantheism and not idealism. Pantheism requires a substance that is God and also is everything. Idealism makes consciousness the permanent ground from which everything derives. Dharmakaya has no substance and is no one’s ground. What the term names is the relational nature of arising itself, recognized completely. It is not behind phenomena or beneath them. It is what phenomena are when the demand for svabhava is finally released and what actually arises is met directly. Nagarjuna spent his career demonstrating that nothing has own-being.

Dharmakaya is what remains when that demonstration is complete and the question of what is left stops feeling like a loss.

Another of Zhiyi’s core philosophical doctrines is the mutual possession of the ten realms. Each realm simultaneously contains all the other nine, from hell to Buddha. These realms are not distant poles on a continuum. All ten are mutually present in every moment of awareness. Consciousness is not a location on a scale of complexity or integration. It is a mutual inclusion, the full range of what awareness can be present in every instance of awareness, because every instance of awareness is the arising of the whole through the meeting of causes and conditions. The demand for a threshold, the question of how much integration or complexity is required before consciousness appears, was always the wrong question. The arising does not begin at a threshold. It is present wherever conditions meet. Buddhism takes this to its logical extreme. There is no first or last cause. Causation without beginning or end. It is all a continuous process of arising.

Dogen, who like Nichiren was trained in the Tendai tradition, wrote, “to study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.” The self that is forgotten is the reified self, the self that the svabhava-seeking tradition has been trying to locate and define. What remains when that self is released is not nothing. What remains is the dependent arising, the Yo, the between where knowing happens. The fear of that openness was the obstacle. Its release is not loss but recognition.

Thich Nhat Hanh offered the term interbeing. The word, while grammatically awkward in English, is philosophically perfect: not that things interact, but that they inter-are, that being is already and always relational. Consciousness does not belong to a person. It arises between. The flower contains the cloud and the sun and the farmer and the child, and what is called the flower's existence is the arising of all of that in this form, here, now. What is called consciousness is the arising of conditions meeting in awareness, here, now, real and impermanent and not requiring a permanent ground to be fully what it is.

The Proof Confirmed – What Can’t Be Measured Can Be Felt

The theorem is clear and firm: the knowing of consciousness cannot occur from outside it. This is not an anti-intellectual sentiment. It is the logical consequence of the theorem. If consciousness is an emergent property of dependent origination, if it arises only in the between, only in the relational event of conditions meeting, then it cannot be known from outside that event. The svabhava-seeking methods, examining consciousness as a stable object from a position of detachment, are structurally unable to reach it. Not because the method is insufficiently rigorous, but because the thing it is looking for is not there to find. The knowing of consciousness must occur as consciousness, from inside the arising, in the encounter itself.

Some may dispute this conclusion, saying it retreats into faith language. It is not. The Buddha was an empiricist before the word existed. The Kalama Sutta, perhaps the most famous teaching on the question of what teachings should one believe, instructs the Kalama people not to accept any teaching, including his own, on the basis of tradition, scripture, logical inference, or the prestige of the teacher. Accept it, he said, when you have seen for yourself that it is so. The instruction was not modesty. It was method. The teaching is a hypothesis to be tested by direct examination. The testing is the practice. The result is the verification or its absence. Buddhism from the beginning has embraced the empirical model.

Nichiren, seventeen centuries later, formalized this empirical commitment into the three proofs. A teaching is to be evaluated by documentary proof, that it is consistent with the foundational texts; by theoretical proof, that it withstands logical analysis; and by actual proof, that it produces the results it claims to produce. The third proof is the decisive one. A doctrine that satisfies the first two and fails the third is to be set aside. The criterion is not authority. It is whether the teaching, when applied, does what it says it will do.

The falsification conditions are available within the tradition and Nichiren named them explicitly. At the individual level, a practice that does not produce reduced suffering, clearer awareness, and direct recognition of the arising nature of experience is to be set aside. The third proof is not merely a procedural standard. It is a hard empirical requirement. Practice that fails to change the practitioner in these specific ways has not met its burden of proof.

At the civilizational level, Nichiren’s argument in the Rissho Ankoku Ron goes further still. He observed repeatedly that societies organized around fixed, permanent, independent selves produce war, famine, unrest, and social collapse.

Buddhist psychology identifies three root conditions that generate suffering, called the three poisons: greed, the drive to acquire and hold; hatred, the drive to reject and destroy; and delusion, the fundamental misreading of reality that produces the first two. These are not character flaws or moral failures. They are the predictable behavioral consequences of treating a constructed, impermanent self as if it were fixed, permanent, and independently real. Svabhava, mistaking the construct for the thing.

At the civilizational scale the pattern is not difficult to read. Greed organized as economic extraction. Hatred organized as war. Delusion organized as ideology, as nationalism, as the absolute certainty that my hallucination is the correct one and yours is the threat. These are not separate phenomena. They are the same root error operating at different scales simultaneously.

This is the real stakes claim the essay opened with. The hard problem of consciousness is not an academic puzzle. The theory of self embedded in a culture shapes what that culture does to itself, to others, and to the environment it depends on. Getting the theory of consciousness wrong has consequences that are entirely empirical, entirely observable, and entirely in line with what the Buddhist analytical tradition predicted they would be.

A clarification is in order, because the word that gets translated as faith in Nichiren's writings carries a meaning the English word doesn’t have. Sraddha in Sanskrit, or shinjin in Japanese, is translated as faith. But sraddha is not blind belief in spite of evidence. It means trust and confidence in the method. It is the working trust required to run the experiment at all. A scientist who refuses to provisionally accept the calibration of an instrument cannot use the instrument. A patient who refuses to complete a treatment protocol cannot know whether the treatment works. Nichiren's insistence that faith, understood as trust, is the point of entry to awakening is the same methodological observation, applied to the practice that constitutes the third proof. It is the condition that lets the experiment run long enough to produce its result. The result, when it comes, is the actual proof that verifies or falsifies the experiment.

This is empiricism in the strict sense. It is the empiricism of first-person verification, repeatable across practitioners, subject to falsification by failure to produce the results the experiment hypothesizes. Two and a half millennia of cumulative testing across cultures, languages, and individual practitioners is a large evidence base. It is, in fact, a longer and broader empirical record than any contemporary Western science can claim for any of its results.

The methodological conclusion of this essay is therefore not that consciousness must be taken on faith. It is the opposite. The Western tradition is the one that has been operating on faith, the faith that a method designed to abstract away the observer must, given enough time and refinement, eventually reach a phenomenon made of the relation between observer and observed. The Buddhist tradition has been running the actual experiment the whole time. It is the empirical tradition. The Western tradition, on this question, is the one that needs to start producing its actual proof.

Nichiren chanted. Dogen sat. Thich Nhat Hanh walked. The practice is not preparation for the understanding. The practice is the understanding, enacted in the only mode available for understanding of this kind. The methodological commitment that drove two and a half millennia of Western inquiry toward the stable, the definable, the quantifiable, is what practice releases. What remains when that commitment is released is not uncertainty. It is the arising itself, clear and present and sufficient.

“Only between a Buddha and a Buddha.” The phrase is not elitist. A Buddha, in this reading, is any awareness that has recognized the nature of awareness from the inside, that has released the demand for svabhava and met what actually arises. The recognition, when it comes, does not happen to a person. It happens between.

What Buddhism calls Buddha nature is not the substrate this essay has been refusing. The equation that consciousness, awakening, and Buddha nature are the same thing, asserted through two thousand five hundred years, is not the smuggling of a permanent ground in at the end of an argument that has rejected permanent ground throughout. It is the recognition that the arising itself is what Buddhism has been saying all along.

Consciousness, or Buddha nature, is not a thing each being possesses in latency, waiting to be uncovered. Consciousness is the arising, available wherever conditions meet, recognizable as itself only when cultivated into expression. Awakening is not the discovery of what was already there in completed form. It is the arising awareness recognizing itself as the arising in the moment, in Yo, between things. Consciousness, awakening, Buddha nature: three names for the same event, the dependent co-arising by which what we are becomes available to itself. Individual consciousness is not a bounded thing that arose at birth and will cease at death. It is the whole arising, locally present, temporarily configured, recognizing itself in this form, here, now. The arising has no beginning and no end. Neither does consciousness. What changes is not the arising but the degree to which it recognizes itself. Practice is the process by which that recognition deepens. Awakening is not an endpoint. It is the arising, awake to what it is.

Consciousness is an emergent property of dependent origination. It arises in the between. It is known in the doing. The question that has occupied the greatest minds of every civilization since the Axial Age was never going to be answered from outside. It was always going to be found in practice, in the arising itself.

Bibliography

Primary Texts: Sutras and Classical Sources

Anguttara Nikaya 3.65. “Kalama Sutta.” Trans. Bhikkhu Bodhi. In: The Numerical Discourses of the Buddha. Wisdom Publications, 2012.

Dogen. “Genjokoan.” In: Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dogen. Ed. Kazuaki Tanahashi. North Point Press, 1985.

Nagarjuna. Mulamadhyamakakarika. Trans. Jay L. Garfield. The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika. Oxford University Press, 1995.

Nichiren. Rissho Ankoku Ron (On Establishing the Correct Teaching for the Peace of the Land). 1260. Trans. available through Nichiren Shu and affiliated organizations.

The Threefold Lotus Sutra: The Sutra of Innumerable Meanings, The Lotus Sutra of the Wonderful Law, The Sutra of Meditation on the Bodhisattva Universal Virtue. Kosei Publishing, 2019.

Zhiyi. Mohe Zhiguan (Clear Serenity, Quiet Insight: T’ien-t’ai Chih-i’s Mo-ho chih-kuan, 3-volume set). Trans. Paul L. Swanson. University of Hawaii Press, 2017.

Buddhist Scholarship

Swanson, Paul L. Foundations of T’ien-T’ai Philosophy: The Flowering of the Two Truths Theory in Chinese Buddhism. Asian Humanities Press, 1989.

Ziporyn, Brook. Being and Ambiguity: Philosophical Experiments with Tiantai Buddhism. Open Court, 2004.

Ziporyn, Brook. Emptiness and Omnipresence: An Essential Introduction to Tiantai Buddhism. Indiana University Press, 2016.

Consciousness Studies

Chalmers, David J. “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness.” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 1995, pp. 200–219.

Chalmers, David J. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford University Press, 1996.

Frankish, Keith. “Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness.” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23(11–12), 2016, pp. 11–39.

Kastrup, Bernardo. The Idea of the World: A Multi-disciplinary Argument for the Mental Nature of Reality. IFF Books, 2019.

Libet, Benjamin et al. “Time of Conscious Intention to Act in Relation to Onset of Cerebral Activity (Readiness-Potential).” Brain, 106(3), 1983, pp. 623–642.

Nagel, Thomas. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review, 83(4), 1974, pp. 435–450.

Reber, Arthur S. The First Minds: Caterpillars, Karyotes, and Consciousness. Oxford University Press, 2018.

Seth, Anil. Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. Dutton, 2021.

Tononi, Giulio. “Consciousness as Integrated Information: A Provisional Manifesto.” Biological Bulletin, 215(3), 2008, pp. 216–242.

Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT Press, 1991.

Other Works

Huxley, Aldous. The Doors of Perception. Chatto and Windus, 1954.

Jonas, Hans. The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology. Harper and Row, 1966.

Nhat Hanh, Thich. Interbeing: Fourteen Guidelines for Engaged Buddhism. Parallax Press, 1987.

Works by the Author

Herrick, Mark Nichiryu. Dharmakaya and God. Herrick Publishing, KDP, 2024.

Herrick, Mark Nichiryu. The Living Mandala. Herrick Publishing, KDP, 2025.

Herrick, Mark Nichiryu. The Living Sound. Herrick Publishing, KDP, 2026.

Herrick, Mark Nichiryu. Parables of the Lotus Sutra. Herrick Publishing, KDP, 2023.

Herrick, Mark Nichiryu. “The Fish Who Never Left: Western Consciousness Studies as Upaya.” twobuddhas.org, 2026.

Herrick, Mark Nichiryu. Two Buddhas Reflections in the Pond (blog). twobuddhas.org.

Notes on Citations

Kumarajiva’s translation.  The Kosei 2019 edition cited above is based on Kumarajiva’s Chinese translation of the Lotus Sutra (406 CE), the text used by Zhiyi in developing Tiantai philosophy and by Nichiren in establishing his teaching. The relationship between Kumarajiva’s Chinese text and the extant Sanskrit manuscript is a matter of ongoing scholarly discussion. Kumarajiva’s translation is the authoritative text for the East Asian Buddhist tradition.

Gen U Metsu Fu Metsu.  The translation “Both I am extinguished and that I am not” is from the Kosei Publishing 2019 edition of the Threefold Lotus Sutra, Chapter 16. This rendering preserves the simultaneity of the Sino-Japanese verse construction more faithfully than older subordinating translations.

Yui Butsu Yo Butsu.  This phrase appears in Kumarajiva’s Chinese translation of Lotus Sutra Chapter 2 and is the basis for Dogen’s Shobogenzo fascicle of the same name. The underlying idea, that ultimate reality is known only through Buddha-wisdom recognizing Buddha-wisdom, has parallels in the Mahaparinirvana Sutra, the Avatamsaka Sutra, and the Prajnaparamita literature, confirming the theorem’s standing across the Mahayana canon.