Note. This is a machine-assisted translation of a Chinese original. Where wording matters, please consult the Chinese original.

Tianwen · III · Phenomenon and essence

The pursuit of essence may be a pursuit that humanity has never abandoned since first becoming conscious.

From Plato's "world of Forms" onwards, no one has ever doubted that essence exists. The dispute has never been over whether essence exists, but over what that essence ultimately is.

Plato held that the world our senses meet is only a shadow or copy of eternal "Forms". Aristotle proposed that essence is internal to things themselves and can be grasped by observing phenomena. Kant divided the world into the "phenomenal world" and the "thing in itself", maintaining that human beings can know only the phenomenal world and that the "thing in itself" is forever unknowable. But however much they argued, one point was common to all of them: the world has essence first, and essence then produces phenomena. Even modern existentialism, which insists that "existence precedes essence", still acknowledges that essence exists.

Our enquiry into phenomena is like eating a peach. We keep peeling back the skin and the flesh until at last we reach the pit — and that pit is the inner, unchanging essence of the peach. Anything, including ourselves, seems to have such an "essence". Different people understand essence differently, but no matter what essence ultimately is — material or spiritual — once you grant that essence exists, the enquiry into it sooner or later leads, unavoidably, to "God".

In asking "Who am I?", what we are really asking after, when we ask after that "I", is the essence of the I. We always assume that there is some inner, unchanging thing that stands for "me", which produces all the various external phenomena, and that we then come to know those phenomena.

"All phenomena are without self" opens up another possibility: the essence we have been bitterly searching for may not exist at all.

Phenomena do not arise out of essence. The only thing in this world that is real is the phenomena themselves.

Our enquiry into phenomena is not eating a peach but peeling an onion — layer after layer comes off, and in the end we find that the inside is empty.

If essence exists, the arising of phenomena is easy to understand. But if essence does not exist, then we have to answer one question: how do phenomena arise?