What the Self Is Supposed to Do

Three counter-images, each attacking a different feature of the sickle.

Fire attacks the localization: a power that genuinely belongs to a thing goes wherever that thing goes. Fire does not burn only in braziers. If seeing is the self's power, it should not be confined to one aperture.

The sickle attacks itself, and this is the sharpest of the three. A reaper without his sickle does not stop being able to harvest; he tears at the stalks with his hands, more slowly and worse, but he does it. That is what having a power and using an instrument looks like: the instrument improves the exercise of a capacity that is independently there. Take the eye away from the Outsider's self and no degraded, clumsy seeing remains. Nothing remains.

The house is the most vivid and the most exacting. A man inside a house with several openings is not stuck at one of them; he looks out at whichever he happens to be standing by. If the self really occupies the body as a tenant occupies a house — which is the picture the Outsider has been working with all chapter — then the doorways should be interchangeable for it. That they are rigidly not is evidence that seeing belongs to the eye, and not to a tenant looking through it.

若爾盲 — if so, it is blind — is three characters and it is the argument of the whole section. The Outsider needs the self to be separate from the eye, because a self identical with its organs would perish with them. But separate means: not having an eye. And a thing with no eye does not see. He has been trying to describe a seer who owns no eyes and yet sees through eyes that are not his, and the phrase names the result exactly.

The dismantling of the potter is a distinction worth keeping. There are two quite different relations that both get called "using a material." The potter and the clay are not two things standing side by side, because the clay becomes the pot — 泥即為瓶, the clay just is the pot. Nothing is left over. But the eye and the color are two persisting things, neither of which turns into the other. So the potter case cannot illustrate a relation between an eye and what it sees; it belongs to an entirely different family.

This is the third time in this chapter a simile has been refuted not by denying it but by locating the joint it was supposed to supply and showing the joint is missing. The pattern is by now the treatise's signature, and it is worth naming what it presupposes: that an analogy is an argument, with a structure, that can be checked.

The watering mouth is a genuinely good observation and it is still the standard example in modern discussions of cross-modal perception. You see fruit; the seeing is visual; and yet saliva arrives, which belongs to taste. Something has carried the report across a boundary the faculties do not themselves cross. The pot in the dark makes the same point about identity rather than sensation: what the hand finds in the dark is recognized as the same pot the eye saw in the light, and neither organ can perform that identification, since neither has access to the other's data.

The reply is brief to the point of curtness, and its brevity is a claim in itself: this is the blind-self problem again in new clothes, already answered. Then one fresh objection, which is a demand that the explanation predict the right amount. If a single self behind the senses is what routes the visual report to the salivary response, that self is equally behind every other faculty — so the sight of fruit should set the whole system going at once, ears and nose and skin together. It does not. What actually happens is narrow and specific, one particular pathway between two particular senses, which is what a mechanism looks like and not what a universal proprietor looks like.

Readers should know that the treatise does not go on to say what does account for the watering mouth, and this is characteristic. Its target is the inference to a self, not the phenomenon; it is content to show that the phenomenon is too selective to be evidence for what it was offered as evidence for.

The wildfire is the whole argument and it is chosen with great care. Take the case the Outsider relies on — a man setting a field alight — and remove the man. Wind moves branches, branches rub, heat builds, fire starts, and a mountainside burns for a week. Everything that happens in the arson case happens here, and 無有作者: there is no doer.

So burning does not require a burner. It requires fuel, heat and air. The man in the arson case is not supplying the burning; he is supplying an occasion, and we credit him with the fire out of a habit of speech that the wildfire exposes as optional. Vasu is blunt about the status of that habit — 言人燒者，是則妄語, to say a man burns is false speech.

Then transpose. The Outsider wants the self to stand to seeing as the arsonist stands to burning. Very well: as the wildfire burns with nobody burning it, so seeing happens with nobody seeing. Eye, light and color meet, and there is sight. This is the same argument the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā makes at length about act and agent, and it reaches the same destination: what ripens is a process, not a proprietor.

This exchange is the philosophical center of the chapter, and both parties are arguing well.

The Outsider's position is a real one and it is still held: a mind cannot be its own object, on pain of regress, so awareness of one's own mental states requires a further, unitary knower — and being unitary, it stops the regress rather than continuing it. That is why he says 我神一故, our self is one. The regress is halted by fiat at a term that does not need a knower.

神亦神 — then the self needs a self — refuses the fiat. If knowing something requires a knower standing behind it, that requirement does not politely exempt the last item in the series; and if the self can know itself, then the mind could have known itself and the whole apparatus was unnecessary. Either the principle holds and the regress continues, or it fails and the self was never needed.

Then the Buddhist alternative, in a single line that is the constructive core of the entire chapter: 以現在意知過去意，意法無常故無咎 — the present mind knows the past mind, and because mind is impermanent no fault follows. This is the crucial architectural point. The regress arises only if the knower and the known must be simultaneous, which forces the knower outside the series. Let them be successive and the problem dissolves: each moment of mind takes the previous moment as its object, and there is no need for anything standing outside time to hold the sequence together. What the Outsider treated as a fatal weakness — impermanence — is exactly what makes the account work.

The fire's heat then answers the last question. "Without a self, how does the mind know?" carries a hidden assumption: that knowing is an activity requiring an agent to perform it. Fire is hot without anything heating it — its heat is not something done to it, and there is no such thing as a fire waiting to be made hot. So with mind: knowing is not an operation the mind performs on the instruction of an owner. It is what mind is. The image is precisely chosen, because heat was the very example used back in Part 4 to show that a mark cannot be separated from what bears it. The same fire that began the chapter's argument now ends it.

Notice first what is not disputed. Rebirth is common ground; so is the continuity of habit across lives. The Insider never suggests the newborn's grief needs no explanation. The dispute is entirely about whether the explanation requires a permanent carrier, and it is fought on the carrier's own specifications.

Those specifications are what make remembering impossible. Memory is an event — it happens now and was not happening a moment ago. But this self is pervasive and always aware of everything; on its own terms 無不念時, there is no time when it is not remembering. A thing already remembering everything cannot suddenly remember something, because nothing has changed. Recollection requires a transition, and a permanent omnipresent knower has no transitions available to it.

The Outsider's repair is to relocate the event: the self is constant, but memory fires when self and mind conjoin and an impulse is triggered. This concedes a great deal — the actual work has moved to the conjunction and the impulse — and it walks into the question that has been closing on him all chapter. If memory is present exactly when knowing is present and absent exactly when knowing is absent, then memory is knowing; and the self, which is constant through both, correlates with nothing. 神復何用, what further use is the self, is asked here for the third time on this page, and by now it has the character of a refrain rather than a question.

This passage looks, at first glance, like a copyist's accident — a bare list of six sūtra lines strung together with "furthermore." It is not. It is a deliberate technique, and the root line announces it: 共答二眼, one answer covers both eyes. The objection is a recombination of moves already refuted, so the refutations are simply cited back by their tags, in the manner of a debater saying: answered, answered, answered.

A reader can check the fit. "Knowing in part is not knowing" and "if so, there is no self" hit the assumption that a self can do one thing here and another there. "Being pervasive, how does it remember?" and "if memory is knowing" hit the recognition half, which is a memory claim. "Why not see with the ear?" and "if so, it is blind" hit the seeing half. Six previously established results, each landing on a different joint of the new objection.

Then the fresh stroke, and it is the good one. The Outsider's own premise was that it is impossible for one thing to see and a different thing to recognize — that is why he needs a self. But his self is extended and does its work part by part: it is present at the left eye and present at the right, and those are two places. So his solution has the identical structure as the problem. If seeing in one location and recognizing in another needs to be bridged, then his self, spread across two locations, needs the same bridge. The unifier has to be unified.

The Outsider is now arguing entirely from usage, and the two examples are both perfectly ordinary. We do say the body acted when only the hand moved. We do say a coat is burned when a sleeve is scorched. If speech works this way generally, a self that knows in one small region can be called a knower.

The reply about proportion has real bite. In this doctrine the self is boundless and the mind is a point; so the knowing, which arises where the two meet, is a point too. Call the whole boundless thing a knower because of that point, and the labeling is decided by an infinitesimal fraction and ignores the rest. Why not weigh it the other way? Why do you not say that on account of a great deal of not-knowing, the self is called a non-knower? The Outsider's rule for extending a predicate from part to whole has no principle in it; it just happens to give the answer he wants.

The garment then shows what such usage costs when it is taken as metaphysics. The observation is deliberately homely: the coat still works — 是衣多不燒，實有用故, most of it is unburned and you can still wear it. So "burned garment" is an entirely serviceable thing to say and an entirely useless thing to reason from. It tells you a corner is gone. It does not tell you the garment has the property of being burned.

And so the chapter ends: 莫著語言 — do not cling to language. It is the right ending, because the whole of Chapter Two has been an argument conducted through similes, and the Outsider's case has rested throughout on the fact that we talk as though there were a self. We say a man burns the field, that the body acted, that the coat is burned, that I saw and I remember. None of these are lies. They are how the language works. The error is to look at the grammar of a sentence and conclude that a thing must exist to satisfy it. This is why the treatise refuted a dozen similes rather than stating a doctrine, and it is where Part 7 begins — because the next chapter takes the plainest sentence anyone can utter, there is one pot, and asks what in the world could make it true.