7

‘I Am of the Nature of Seeing’:

Phenomenological Reflections on the Indian
Notion of Witness-Consciousness
WOLFGANG FASCHING

1. Introduction
Irrespective of the often considerable differences between their metaphysical
doctrines, many of the major philosophical schools of India agree in their
basic assumption that, in order to become aware of one’s own true nature,
one has to inhibit one’s self-consciousness in the usual sense, namely one’s
‘ego-sense’ (ahamkāra, literally ‘I-maker’). The normal way we are aware of
˙
ourselves—that is, our self-awareness as a distinct psychophysical entity with
particular characteristics and abilities, formed by a personal history, standing in
manifold relations to other things and persons, etc.—is in this view really the
construction of a pseudo-self that obscures what we really are. One has to
come to realize with regard to all aspects of one’s personality that ‘this is not
mine; this am not I; this is not the Self of me’, as the Buddha puts it (Samyutta
˙
Nikāya XXII.59, Rhys Davids/Woodward 1972–79, vol. III: 60) and as, for
example, Advaitins and proponents of classical Yoga could affirm without
reservation.
Yet, whilst for Buddhism this means that the spiritual aim is to realize that
it is an illusion that something like a self exists at all, for ‘orthodox’ schools
such as Advaita Vedānta or Sāmkhya and Yoga, liberation lies, on the
˙
contrary, in becoming aware of the true self (ātman or purusa).
˙
In this paper, I would like to cast, from a phenomenological point of
view, some reflections on what this overcoming of the ego-sense strived for
by these traditions could possibly mean, and will try to vindicate the view of
194 WOLFGANG FASCHING

Advaita Vedānta that it does not amount to a dissolution of oneself into a

mere flux of substrate-less transient phenomena, but rather to a realization
of one’s self as something that changelessly underlies this flux.1
This ‘self ’ is of course radically different from what we normally experi-
ence as ‘ourselves’: It has no qualities at all, can never become an object of
consciousness (but is nonetheless immediately self-revealed), is identical
neither to the body nor to the mind (qua mental goings-on we can intro-
spectively observe), and neither does, nor wants, anything.
What should this be? It is characterized as the ‘seer’ (dras..t ā) or ‘witness’
(sāksin)—that is, as that which sees (that which is conscious). Yet this is not
˙
supposed to mean that the self is a ‘something’ that performs the seeing or is in
a state of seeing: Rather, it is, as Advaita Vedānta (just as, e.g. Sāmkhya)
˙
stresses, in explicit contrast to Nyāya and Vaiśesika, nothing but seeing
˙
(consciousness) itself. ‘The perceiver’, as, for example, the classical Advaitin
Śaṅkara says, ‘is indeed nothing but eternal perception. And it is not [right]
that perception and perceiver are different’ (Upadeśasāhasrı̄ II.2.79, Mayeda
1992: 241; addition in brackets by Mayeda). Sāks.in is, as Tara Chatterjee
formulates, ‘the never-to-be-objectified principle of awareness present in
every individual’ (Chatterjee 1982: 341).
So the claim against the Buddhists is not that there has to be some entity
in addition to, and behind or beyond, our experiential life as its substrate,
but that there is a stable element within it—yet not as some invariant content
or content-constellation we could experience (such a thing is indeed not
to be found), but as the very process of experiencing itself, as the perma-
nence of ‘witnessing’, in which everything we experience has its being-
experienced, and which is the constant ground of our own being. It is this
notion of witness-consciousness that I wish to make some sense of in the
following.2

1 Although my main point of reference is the Advaitic understanding of the self, I will primarily focus
on aspects it shares with Sāmkhya/Yoga and many other Indian schools, i.e. independent of its monistic
˙
commitments. (For an attempt to make sense of the Advaitic idea that ultimately only one self exists, cf.
Fasching 2010.)
2 I must stress that I intend to pursue, as the subtitle says, ‘phenomenological reflections’ on the
Advaitic understanding, and not engage in a staunch exegesis of the details of the various Advaitins’
theories. I wish to discuss philosophically what I take to be a basic intuition about the nature of
consciousness that seems to provide something like a foundation of the Advaitic speculations.
 ‘I AM OF THE NATURE OF SEEING’ 195

2. Self vs No-Self: The Buddhist Challenge

The central question of Advaita Vedānta is that of the nature of one’s own
self as the subject of experience. I evidently have manifold constantly
changing experiences at each moment, and it is no big problem to observe
them introspectively; but who am I who has all these successive experi-
ences? It is the nature of this experiencer of the experiences that the whole
thinking of Advaita revolves around—not in the sense of some reputed
‘experience-producer’ (so that today one could be tempted e.g. to assume the
brain is the ‘true self ’), but in the sense of a subject-‘I’ as belonging to the
nature of experiencing as such, however it may causally come about.
Buddhism famously denies the existence of such an experiencing ‘I’. In
Samyutta Nikāya XII.12, for example, the Buddha answers the question of who
˙
it is who feels by saying: ‘Not a fit question … I am not saying [someone] feels.
And I not saying so, if you were to ask thus: “Conditioned now by what,
lord, is feeling?” this were a fit question’ (Rhys Davids/Woodward 1972–79,
vol. II: 10; bracketed addition by the translators). So, in the Buddhist
perspective, the mental life is to be characterized as a flux of permanently
changing substrate-less mental events, each caused by some other, previous
event, rather than in terms of a persisting experiencing self (an ātman).
Experiences take place, but there is no one who experiences them.
It goes without saying that in the various schools of Buddhism the
anātman doctrine has seen numerous interpretations (not all implying an
outright denial of the existence of a self;3 indeed, in Mahāyāna and Tibetan
Buddhism one can find views that are quite compatible with the Advaitic
concept of witness-consciousness4). However, for the sake of contrast I here
construe the no-self thesis primarily in the sense of a strictly reductionist
theory, as espoused by the Abhidharma schools. Even in this reading, the
denial of the existence of an experiencing subject is not meant to deny, at

3 For example, MacKenzie (this volume) argues that the Madhyamaka school holds—in contrast to
the reductionism of the Abhidharma—that the self is not reducible to more basic phenomena, but ‘is an
emergent phenomenon that, while real, is not a substantial separate thing’ (ibid.: p. 258). (Whether or not
this makes a crucial ontological difference naturally depends on the precise definition of ‘emergence’.)
4 Miri Albahari even interprets the Pali Canon as implicitly, but centrally, assuming the existence of a
witness-consciousness—‘a reading’, as she admits, ‘that aligns Buddhism more closely to Advaita Vedānta
than is usually acknowledged’ (Albahari 2006: 2; cf. also Albahari this volume).
196 WOLFGANG FASCHING

least on a conventional level, the existence of something like a unitary

‘person’ (pudgala), just as Buddhists would not deny that there are chairs or
states. Yet a chair is wholly constituted by its parts and the way they are
assembled, and is nothing over and above this, and similarly, the existence
of a person does not involve the existence of a self over and above the
manifold ephemeral phenomena that form, if sufficiently integrated, what
we call ‘one person’. A person is, in the Buddhist view, nothing but a
certain ‘psychophysical complex’, that is, an ‘appropriately organized
collection of skandhas’5 (MacKenzie 2008: 252). A person in this sense
‘has’ her experiences only in the sense that a whole ‘has’ parts, and not in
the sense of some self-identical ‘I’-core as the ‘bearer’ of its experiences,
that is, as an experiencer.6
The account of persons in classical Indian Buddhist Abhidharma texts is,
in its rejection of a substantial self, quite in accord with the (at least by
implication) dominant modern Western view on this topic (cf. Siderits
2003): it corresponds to what Derek Parfit calls the ‘reductionist view of
personal identity’, that is, the thesis that a person’s enduring existence
consists in (and is therefore reducible to) more fundamental facts, namely
certain relations of connectedness and continuity between physical and
mental events (Parfit 1987: 210–214)—and that in no way is the trans-
temporal identity of a person due to the continued existence of something
like a ‘self ’ as a ‘separately existing entity’ (ibid.: 210). The many experi-
ences of one person are not unified by each being connected to one
enduring subject, but by being connected with one another, and the very
‘oneness’ of the subject is, the other way around, constituted by this (longi-
tudinal) unification of the experiences.
This sounds plausible enough: What should there be in addition to the
physical and mental events and their interrelations? What else should a
person be but a ‘psychophysical complex’ of some sort? Nevertheless the
‘orthodox’ schools of India vehemently challenge the Buddhist anātman
(‘no-self ’) thesis, and insist on precisely what the Buddhists reject: that

5 The term skandhas refers to the five types of phenomena (dharmas) that constitute the person
according to Buddhism.
6 Expressions like ‘Devadatta’s desire’, as the Buddhist argues in Bhatta Rāmakantha’s Nareśvarapar-
˙˙ are ‘just ˙indicating
ı̄ksā, do not imply that there is something beyond the desire as its agent, but ˙ that [the
˙
desire] is connected with a particular stream of cognition, like [such expressions] as “the flow of the
Vitastā [river]” ’ (Watson 2006: 190; bracketed additions by Watson).
 ‘I AM OF THE NATURE OF SEEING’ 197

there is more to the existence of a person than this complex of skandhas, that
there exists a ‘self ’ in addition to the body and the experiences, which is the
‘who’ of experiencing.
Is this more than just a dogmatic assumption? Can anything be said in
favor of this view? I think, on closer consideration, one has indeed to admit
that it is hard to avoid feeling a certain unease about a purely ‘selfless’
account of one’s own existence. Is it really true that there is no experiencing
‘I’? Are there really only experiences, but no one who experiences them?
Undeniably there seems to be a clear difference between an experience
being experienced by me and an experience not being experienced by me.
Speaking only of mental events, connected by some interrelations on the
basis of which a permanent ‘I’ is constructed, deals with experiences more
or less as if they were just objective occurrences, without taking their
subjective mode of being—their ‘first-person ontology’ (Searle 1992:
16)—sufficiently into account. After all, experiences do not just lie about
like stones or chairs, equally accessible in principle to everyone: Experiences
only exist in being subjectively experienced, and that seems to mean: in being
experienced by a respective subject. And obviously, all of my experiences, no
matter how different they may be, have this one thing in common: that I
experience them. In this sense, experiences are not thinkable as being
‘ownerless’: they are essentially experiences of an experiencing ‘I’. And
the big question of Advaita Vedānta is precisely what this ‘I’ that experiences
its experiences (this ‘first person’ of their ‘first-person ontology’) is.
Yet, the anātmavādin (denier of a self) might reply that even if one
concedes this subjective character of experience, this does not at all necessi-
tate positing an additionally existing subject. Rather, the subject searched
for (the ‘experiencer’) is simply the experience itself and not something
‘behind’ it (cf. e.g. Strawson 2003). The experiences, as the taking place of
subjective appearance (as ‘events of subjectivity’, as Strawson puts it: 2003:
304), constitute the respective ‘inner dimension’ of a subject, and are
therefore not ‘had’ by an additionally existing self.
This is indeed the position advanced by Yogācāra Buddhism and the
school of Dignāga: This line of Buddhist thought expressly acknowledges
the subjectivity (the being-subjectively-experienced) of experience, but
rejects interpreting this fact as the experience’s being experienced by a
subject—rather it is supposed to refer to its self-givenness (svasamvedana)
˙
198 WOLFGANG FASCHING

belonging to the very nature of experience:7 An experience, in revealing its

object, is simultaneously revealing itself, ‘self-illuminating’ (svaprakāśa) (just
as a lamp does not need to be illumined by a second lamp in order to be
visible). ‘Svasamvedana thus provides a continuous, immediate, and internal
˙
first-person perspective on one’s own stream of experience’ (MacKenzie
2008: 249), without presupposing a ‘first person’ in addition to experience
itself. The stream of experience is given to itself and not to a self.8
Of course I do not experience myself qua experiencer as just being the
present experience experiencing itself, but as someone who, as one and the
same, lives through permanently changing experiences, and hence is to be
distinguished from them. Yet for the Buddhist/reductionist account, this
apparent diachronic identity of the subject is wholly constituted by relations
between the experiences (most prominently memory-relations): The expe-
riential life of a person is, in this view, a series of causally connected mental
events without any underlying enduring self, and an important part of the
relevant causal connections that constitute the unity of one person is that the
contents of one experience leave memory-traces in the succeeding one.
Nothing more (especially not an enduring self) is necessary to account for
my remembering ‘my’ past experiences (and hence my experience of my
continued existence) (cf. Dreyfus this volume p. 133; Siderits this volume
pp. 314–15; Watson 2006: 153–165). It is true that I do not just remember
that, anonymously, experiences have occurred, but my past experiencing
them9—but this is simply due to the fact that the very meaning of the
sameness of the self, of ‘one person’, is co-constituted by these very
memory-connections (cf. Siderits 2003: 25): I remember my experiences
as mine not because I remember my ‘I’ experiencing them, but because they
are mine precisely insofar as I can remember them (i.e. insofar as they stand in
the right form of causal connection to my present experience).
Advaita Vedānta, in contrast, insists that the subjectivity of experience
refers to an experiencing subject. Just like Yogācāra Buddhism, it rejects the
Nyāya thesis that an experience of an object only becomes itself manifest by
becoming the object of another, subsequent experience (comparable to

7 Cf. MacKenzie 2007: 47–49; MacKenzie 2008; Dreyfus 1997: 339–340, 400–402; and the
contributions of Dreyfus, Krueger and Thompson in this volume.
8 This view is comparable to non-egological accounts in phenomenology, for example by Sartre,
Gurwitsch and the Husserl of the Logical Investigations.
9 As Śaṅkara stresses against the Buddhist view: Brahmasūtrabhās.ya II.2.25, Deussen 1920: 353–354.
 ‘I AM OF THE NATURE OF SEEING’ 199

modern ‘higher-order representation theories’): rather, for an experience,

to be means to be conscious.10 But at the same time they reject the Yogācāra
idea that it is each experience that is conscious of itself, ‘self-illuminating’
(svaprakāśa)—rather I, the subject, am immediately aware of my experiences
as they come and go (cf. Timalsina 2009: 20–21).11 For example, if I am in a
melancholy mood, this mood is not conscious of itself—for Vedānta this does
not make much sense—rather the mood exists in virtue of my experiencing it
(cf. Chatterjee 1982: 343).
And indeed, one might question whether it is really sufficient to account for
the subjectivity of experience—its being-experienced-by-me (respectively)—
in terms of its phenomenal self-givenness (svasamvedana), as ‘an awareness of
˙
what one’s experience is like both in the sense of how the experience
represents its object and how it feels to undergo the experience’ (MacKenzie
2008: 249). The question is for whom there is something it is like to be in a
particular mental state. And it is far from clear that it really makes much sense
to say that it is for the mental state itself to be (in) this state.
This ‘who’ of experiencing is an additional fact with regard to the
experience and its phenomenal character: No facts whatsoever about an
experience or its ‘what-it-feels-like-ness’ can ever imply its being experi-
enced by me (except, precisely, that it is I who experiences it). It appears
to be perfectly conceivable that this very experience with all its relations to
other experiences of the same stream of consciousness, to this body and
to the rest of the world, could have existed without the ‘I’ which experi-
ences it being me. This seems to be a contingent (and even, as Thomas
Nagel states, ‘outlandish’ (Nagel 1986: 55)) fact (as I argue in Fasching 2009;
cf. also Madell 1981; Klawonn 1987).
This quite enigmatic additionality of the being-experienced-by-me with
regard to all other properties of an experience, changes, I believe, the
perspective on the question of the diachronic unity of the subject. It seems

10 Cf. Chatterjee 1982: 342: ‘The Advaitists say, that when we have an awareness of an object, the
object is indeed manifested, but it is not the only thing revealed; here we have an automatic awareness of
the awareness too. The two awarenesses are simultaneous, but they are not of a similar structure, in fact
they are the two aspects of the same awareness.’
11 Śaṅkara argues against the Yogācārins that even if the experience, like a lamp which need not be
illuminated by a second lamp in order to be visible, is revealed by itself, it still has to be revealed to a
subject (otherwise it would be ‘like lamps, and be they thousands, burning in the midst of a mass of
rocks’ (Brahmasūtrabhās.ya II.2.28, Deussen 1920: 361–362), i.e. without anyone seeing them). Cf.
Ingalls 1954: 301.
200 WOLFGANG FASCHING

that what happened once can happen again: that an experience happens as the
taking place of me. This refers to something radically different from the
question of whether there are experiences that are connected to, or continuous
with, my present one. When I ask whether I will still exist tomorrow, I do
not ask whether there will be experiences that, for example, have a first-
personal access to my present one. I do not refer to any aspects of the
contents of some experiences in the future at all, but simply and irreducibly
to the question of whether these experiences will be experienced by me.12
And this seems to be logically compatible with a complete loss of memory
or any other kind of psychological change (cf. Williams 1973).

3. Self as Consciousness
What, then, is this ‘me’? Interestingly, for Advaita Vedānta13 the true ‘I’ (or
rather ‘self ’: cf. Ram-Prasad this volume) is in no way some trans-experi-
ential entity (as is the view of Nyāya and Vaiśesika), but is in a certain sense
˙
nothing but experience itself. For Advaita, ‘the self is the object-experien-
cing … , i.e., ‘experiencing of something’, and is not only becoming mani-
fest in it as something which stands, as it were, behind or beyond it’ (Hacker
1978: 275). So in this view experience does not take place for a subject, but
simply as the subject.
Where, then, is the dissent from Buddhism and its rejection of an
experiencing self in addition to experience? The crucial difference is that
‘experience’ is meant here in the sense of consciousness (cit or caitanya), which
in Advaita Vedānta is strictly distinguished from the mind (in the sense of the
changing mental states). When, for example, Advaitins speak of jñāna
(‘cognition’ or, in the terminology of this paper, ‘experience’) as being

12 Cf. Brahmasūtrabhās.ya II.2.25 where Śaṅkara stresses that my continued existence refers to strict
numerical identity and not to some similarity (Thibaut 1962: 415; this sentence is missing in Deussen’s
translation)—and observes that while, with regard to external things, it is admittedly possible to mistake
similarity with identity, this is impossible with regard to oneself as the subject (which today is called the
‘immunity to error through misidentification’).
13 Just as for Sāmkhya and Yoga, and, by the way, for the Śaiva Siddhāntin Bhatta Rāmakantha: cf.
˙ ˙˙ ˙˙
the interesting study by Alex Watson (2006). In his Nareśvaraparı̄ks.āprakāśa, Bhatta Rāmakantha initially
˙˙
lets the Buddhist win over Nyāya and Vaiśesika, which assume the existence of˙˙a self as a further entity
beyond cognition. But while Buddhism concludes ˙ that there actually is no self, only the cognitions,
Rāmakantha holds that cognition itself is the self (ibid.: 213–217). He thereby repeats earlier debates
˙˙
between Buddhism and Sāmkhya (whose view of the self he largely inherits) (ibid.: 93).
˙
 ‘I AM OF THE NATURE OF SEEING’ 201

the essence of the self, they expressly distinguish it from what they call the
vr.tti-jñānas, that is, the manifold transient mental states (Chatterjee 1982:
342; cf. also Hiriyanna 1956: 344 and Timalsina 2009: 17).14
So, in Advaita Vedānta, consciousness is not equated with the single
ephemeral experiences or with some property of them. Rather, it is under-
stood as something that abides as that wherein the coming and going
experiences have their manifestation (being-experienced). Consciousness
is, so to speak, the witnessing (experiencing) of the experiences, and while
the experiences change, experiencing itself abides. After all, the succession
of the experiences consists precisely in one experience after another becom-
ing experientially present, which presence as such therefore does not change.
Just like Yogācāra Buddhism, Advaita Vedānta espouses the idea of the
‘self-luminosity’ (svaprakāśatva) of experience—yet not as a feature of the
individual mental states—these are things that become manifest in experi-
ence (qua consciousness)—but rather of consciousness itself (cf. Chatterjee
1982: 342–344, 349).15 Consciousness, like light, is the medium of visibility
of all things and does not have to be illuminated by another light (i.e. become
the object of consciousness) in order to be revealed—it is the shining itself as
the principle of revealedness.16 Light is not visible in the way illuminated
objects are, but at the same time, it is not concealed:17 It is present, and it is
precisely its presence that is the medium of the presence of everything—first

14 Quite similarly, Bhatta Rāmakantha differentiates between two meanings of jñāna, namely on the
˙˙
˙˙ cognitions,
one hand the many transient and on the other, the one abiding cognition which is our very
self (and which he also terms, when it comes to contrasting the two senses of jñāna, prakāśa =
‘illumination’ or samvit = ‘consciousness’): the latter being a permanent witnessing or experiencing of
˙
the passing cognitions (Watson 2006: 354–373).
15 In Brahmasūtrabhās.ya II.2.28, Śaṅkara lets the Buddhist ask whether, with his stressing of the self-
revealedness of the cognizer, he is not actually adopting, only in other words, the Buddhist’s own view of
the self-givenness of cognition, and answers: ‘No! Because cognition is to be distinguished [from the
cognizing subject] insofar as it is originating, passing away, manifold, etc.’ (Deussen 1920: 362, addition
in brackets by Deussen).
16 Cf. e.g. Śaṅkara’s Upadeśasāhasrı̄ I.15.40–41: ‘[It] has the light of knowledge as Its nature; [It] does
not depend upon anything else for [Its] knowledge. Therefore [It] is always known to me. The sun does
not need any other light for its illumination’ (Mayeda 1992: 145–146, bracketed additions by Mayeda).
17 Cf. Upadeśasāhasrı̄ I.15.48 and 50: ‘Ātman Itself … is by nature neither knowable nor not know-
able’. ‘Just as there is neither day nor night in the sun, since there is no distinction in the nature of light,
so is there neither knowledge nor ignorance in Ātman, since there is no distinction in the nature of
knowledge’ (Mayeda 1992: 146). ‘Though light is an illuminator, it does not illumine itself [since it has in
itself no difference as between illuminator and illuminated]…In like manner Ātman [which has homo-
geneous knowledge] never sees Itself ’ (ibid.: I.16.12, Mayeda 1992: 150, bracketed additions by
Mayeda). Cf. Ram-Prasad this volume, section 5, and Ram-Prasad 2007: 78–79.
202 WOLFGANG FASCHING

and foremost of the experiences whose very existence consists in their

being-present.18
Hence for the Advaitins—although they hold that mental states are mani-
fest essentially, and not by virtue of being the object of some further, higher-
order mental states—it is not adequate to say that they are immediately self-
aware. Rather, they exist in manifesting themselves in the medium of the
luminosity of consciousness, which is immediately self-revealed. Experiences
have their very being in their being-consciously-present (in being manifest in
‘primary presence’, as Erich Klawonn (1987, 1998) calls it), and while these
experiences are permanently fleeting, conscious presence as such abides
(Klawonn 1998: 59; cf. Zahavi 1999: 80; Zahavi this volume: p. 59).
So, in this view, the manifold transient experiences have their manifesta-
tion in one consciousness. Yet why should we assume this? Why should we
draw a distinction between the individual experiences and consciousness,
thereby obviously hypostasizing consciousness into a ‘something’ in addi-
tion to experience? Why should we assume an irreducible sameness of
consciousness, if, quite evidently, constantly new consciousness-events are
transpiring? Conscious experiences admittedly share the feature of being
conscious, but it seems to be an obvious fallacy to speak here of something
like a persisting consciousness-entity. So is there any justifiable sense in
which consciousness is to be distinguished from the individual experiences
and in which a multitude of experiences can be the taking place of the same
consciousness?
I think there is. Already in a purely synchronic perspective, consciousness
comprises many experiences, that is, I am actually seeing, hearing, thinking, etc.
manifold things at the same time. The question is how one should account for
this oneness of the experiencing ‘I’ across its manifold simultaneous experiences
(i.e., what binds these experiences together as ‘mine’). Naturally, the reduc-
tionist cannot explain the synchronic unity of experiences by their being
experienced by one subject (by me). For, in her view, there is simply no
subject one could presuppose as explanans; rather, it’s the other way around:
just like diachronic unity, the unity of being-experienced-by-one-subject at a
time is to be explained by the being-unified of the experiences by unity
relations that hold between them.

18 For an insightful discussion of the understanding of consciousness as ‘luminosity’ in Indian

philosophy, cf. Ram-Prasad 2007: 51–99.
 ‘I AM OF THE NATURE OF SEEING’ 203

Yet what sort of relations could these be? One must not forget that it is
not just any relation, any unity between experiential contents that is at
stake here, but the unity of being-present-in-one-consciousness. Certain
experiential contents can be more strongly associated than others, and
thereby bound together to form experiential ‘fields’ (experiential unities)
in contrast to a background; they can be coordinated as constituting one
coherent space, and the like—but all such relations that might bind together
experiences into ‘total experiences’ actually presuppose their being-present-
together (cf. Dainton 2006: 240–244). Only what is co-present in this sense
can be associated.
And this presence is nothing other than the being-experienced of the
experiences in which, in the sense of their ‘first-person ontology’, the
experiences have their being. So they do not exist and additionally become
somehow unified. Rather, it is their very being (namely their being-
experienced) wherein they have their unity.
One could counter that it was inadequate to speak of many simultaneous
experiences in the first place. Rather, it is one total experience with an inner
complexity.19 But the crucial question is precisely wherein the unity of this
‘one total experience’ lies. Nothing on the content-side can do this job. So
one obviously has to distinguish between the one experience and the many
experiential contents that manifest themselves within it. And if one wishes
to call the latter ‘experiences’, it is important to understand that the one
experience is not a sum or a composition of these many experiences (qua
experiential contents), but rather it is ‘experience’ in the sense of the
experiencing of the experiences (cf. Zahavi 1999: 80): that wherein they
have their being-experienced, their primary presence—quite in the sense
of the Advaitic notion of jñāna (or sāksi-jñāna, as it is occasionally called) in
˙
contrast to the vr.tti-jñānas. So when we speak of many simultaneous ex-
periences, their difference lies in what is present, not in presence itself.
This, I would suggest, is how the talk of ‘witnessing’ in Advaita Vedānta
should be interpreted: We stated that the ‘witness’ (sāks.in) is not understood
as an observing entity standing opposed to what it observes, but as the very
taking place of ‘witnessing’ itself, and ‘witnessing’ is nothing other than the
taking place of the experiential presence of the experiences, in which the
experiences have their very being-experienced and thereby their existence.

19 Cf. the suggestion of Bayne and Chalmers in Bayne, Chalmers 2003: 56–57.
204 WOLFGANG FASCHING

In this sense, consciousness can be understood as the existence-dimension of

the experiences (cf. Klawonn 1987; Zahavi 2005: 131–132; Zahavi this
volume: p. 58; Fasching 2009: 142–144). A dimension comprises a multitude
of elements that stand in manifold relations to each other, yet it is not the
sum of these elements or a result of their interrelations, but what makes
them, together with all their relations, possible in the first place. In this
sense, ‘the self ’ qua consciousness is to be distinguished from its experiences,
but not as a ‘separately existing entity’—just as space is not a separately
existing entity in addition to the spatial objects, yet also not identical to
them or reducible to their relations (since any spatial relations presuppose
space).20
So the unity of being-experienced-together is irreducible to the many
experiences and their relations, being rather that wherein they have their
being, and this is nothing other than what Advaita Vedānta calls the ātman as
‘the immediately co-experienced unity of experiencing’ (as Paul Hacker
characterizes Advaita’s ātman, using a formulation of Scheler’s about the
‘person’: Hacker 1978: 274; cf. ibid.: 275).
When Advaita Vedānta equates the self with consciousness, this is not
supposed to mean that the subject is composed of the many contents of
consciousness. I qua consciousness am not an agglomeration of phenomenal
contents, properly organized, but rather their thereness, their presence (and
that is the one presence of the manifold contents).21

20 Cf., e.g. Upadeśasāhasrı̄ II.2.58 and I.14.50: ‘Ātman, like space, is by nature not composite’; ‘there is
no distinction at any time in the Seeing which is like ether’ (Mayeda 1992: 237 and 140–141).
21 In her very lucid paper on the concept of witness-consciousness, Miri Albahari (2009) rigorously
distinguishes it from the ‘for-me-ness’ or ‘mineness’ (i.e. ‘first-personal givenness’), which Dan Zahavi
posits as the core sense of self. While mineness is a property of experience, witness-consciousness is ‘the
modus operandi of the subject that has them’ (Albahari 2009: 68), i.e. of a ‘separate me’ (ibid.: 73) (whereas
for Zahavi ‘the self … does not exist in separation from the experiences, and is identified by the very first-
personal givenness of the experiences’: Zahavi 2005: 132). I agree that experiences and consciousness
have to be distinguished in a certain sense (this being the very idea of ‘witness-consciousness’), yet I
disagree with breaking them apart as if they were separate existences, as Albahari seems to do. Witness-
consciousness is, according to Albahari, the ‘mode-neutral awareness’ that is supposed to account for the
experiences’ accessibility to reflection, and for the unity of consciousness across manifold experiences
(Albahari 2009: 71–72), thus obviously our pre-reflective awareness of our own experiences. Yet this is
precisely what Zahavi calls ‘mineness’ qua first-personal givenness. To ‘witness’, according to my
understanding of the term, does not literally mean that the subject ‘observes’ the experiences (as Albahari
formulates: ibid.: 68), as if the witness were a separately existing entity that watches experience-objects
existing outside of it. Rather, it should be understood as the experiencing of the experiences in which
they have their very being. It is simply not the case that the being-present (first-personal givenness, for-
me-ness) of the experiences and the witnessing as the modus operandi of the subject are two different
things. And according to the Advaitic (and my) understanding, the ‘me’ of the for-me-ness (i.e. the self )
 ‘I AM OF THE NATURE OF SEEING’ 205

Now the question is: What is the nature of the temporal abiding of
experiential presence through the permanent succession of experiences?
Does a new presence with new contents not take place each moment? Is
there a succession of presences together with the succession of contents
(after all, the presence-of-this now and the presence-of-that then are obvi-
ously different presence-events)? Or is it, rather, not one and the same
consciousness, in which the experiences have their coming and going? In
other words: Can two presence-events at different times be the taking place
of the same presence, that is, is there an irreducible sense in which two such
presence-events can be the taking place of (one and the same) me? Vedānta
insists that what changes when one experience follows the other (presence-
of-this being succeeded by presence-of-that), are actually the contents of
consciousness, not consciousness itself (cf. Sinha 1954: 329). And indeed, as
soon as one distinguishes consciousness from the experiences, the assump-
tion that the diachronic identity of consciousness has to consist in unity
relations between the experiences appears less compelling. And if one takes
a closer look at the nature of the presence of the momentary experience, it
becomes outright implausible: The ‘primary presence’ (the current being-
experienced) of an experience always and essentially is the presence of the
temporal streaming of experience transpiring right now. And that means:
presence is irreducibly presence of the current taking place of temporal
transition. (Otherwise no time-experience, no experience of change and
persistence, would ever arise.)
So the indubitable evidence of my experiences in their very being-
experienced is always their evidence as passing the thereby ‘abiding
dimension of first-personal experiencing’ (Zahavi 2005: 131). And, there-
fore, the absolute evidence of my present existence is the evidence of my
present living through these streaming experiences. The being-experienced

is—quite in agreement with Zahavi—not something to be posited in addition to this presence (for-me-
ness), but something that consists in nothing other than the witnessing/experiencing itself. Furthermore,
Albahari holds that this for-me-ness is, as an aspect of experience, something introspectively detectable,
and also in this respect stands in contrast to witness-consciousness which, as ‘built into the very act of
being aware’, can never become an object of awareness (Albahari 2009: 68–69). I have my doubts about
the former claim. ‘Mineness’ is about as much a ‘real predicate’ as is ‘being’ according to Kant. It is in no
way a content towards which one could direct one’s attention, no introspectively examinable quality (no
‘feeling’: Albahari 2009: 70) my experiences have in addition to other qualities (such as the specific
character of my pain) (cf. also Zahavi this volume: p. 59)—it is rather precisely the first-personal thereness-
for-me of my experiences, together with all their qualities.
206 WOLFGANG FASCHING

of the streaming experiences as streaming implies the permanence of the

actuality of experiencing itself, which is the being of my ‘I’.22 Therefore
I, qua consciousness, am not the passing experiences, but rather their
manifestation as passing, which does not pass with them: the abiding
experiencing of the changing experiences (Fasching 2009: 144–145).23
So the question of whether the subject is something that can exist, in an
irreducible sense, as one and the same at different times, must, I believe, be
answered in the affirmative: It only exists as now-transcending from the
start; in contrast to the fleeting experiences it abides as the presence of the
streaming experiences as streaming. Experiences only exist in being experi-
enced, that is, experientially present, and they are essentially present as
streaming, which implies the abidance of this presence itself. This abidance
cannot be constituted by relations between momentary ‘experience-stages’,
because there simply are no experience-stages that would not have their
primary presence as temporally passing. That is: There is no experiential
evidence prior to the evidence of the ‘standing’ of the experiencing ‘I’.
This abidance of the ‘I’ cannot properly be conceived of as the enduring
of an object in time that derives its persistence from unity relations between
its temporal stages. For presence is not so much something that takes place in
the respective present, but rather it is this very present itself—not in the
sense of the objective time-point that is now present and then sinks into the
past, but in the sense of the presentness of the respective present moment:24
What marks a particular moment as being now is no objective feature of this
special point on the timeline (cf. Nagel 1986: 57), rather it is the ‘now’ only
in relation to the experiential presence of the subject (cf. Husserl 2006: 58,
390, 406). Consequently, the abiding of the ‘I’ is not so much the enduring

22 Cf. Śaṅkara in Upadeśasāhasrı̄ II.2.75 (in answering the question of how the perceiver, perceiving
now this, then that, can be said to be changeless): ‘If indeed you were subject to transformation, you
would not perceive the entire movement of the mind…Therefore, you are transcendentally changeless’
(Mayeda 1992: 240). ‘There must be some constant continuous principle to see their [the cognitions’]
origin and destruction…And this continuous consciousness is sāksin’ (Chatterjee 1982: 349).
˙
23 Along comparable lines, Rāmakantha argues against the Buddhists that there is no need to assume
˙˙
that the change of the objects of consciousness implies a change of consciousness itself: For even the
Buddhists cannot deny that many objects are conscious in one single consciousness at one point in time
(and it is of no help for the Buddhist to hold that this is due to a unifying cognition: it is still necessary to
appeal to the possibility of a single cognition having many objects). So, Rāmakantha argues, if the
˙
multiplicity of objects at one time does not affect the singleness of consciousness,˙ why should the
multiplicity of objects over time? It is the contents of consciousness that change, not consciousness itself
(Watson 2006: 335–348).
24 Cf. Husserl 1966: 333: ‘…the now-consciousness is not itself now’.
 ‘I AM OF THE NATURE OF SEEING’ 207

of an inter-temporal object (with its coming and going temporal ‘object-

stages’), but should rather be conceived of in terms of the ‘standing’ of the
present itself, in which the very passing of time (the permanent becoming-
present of ever-new time-points and object-stages) consists:25 that is, of the
phenomenon that it is always now. While the temporal stages of an object one
is conscious of continually sink into the past, consciousness itself does not
elapse: ‘…even though the object of knowledge changes’, says Śaṅkara, ‘the
knower, being in past, future, and present, does not change; for his nature is
eternal presence’ (i.e. the presentness of the present) (Brahmasūtrabhās.ya
II.3.7, Deussen 1920: 389). So the evidence of the abiding of the subject is
not the experience of some object-persistence, but the condition of the
possibility of any experience of persistence.26

4. The Presence of the World and the Subject

in the World
What Advaita Vedānta soteriologically aims at as the realization of the ‘self ’ is
nothing other than becoming aware of experiential presence (consciousness)
as such. So far, we have characterized this consciousness as the presence of the
experiences. Yet this should not be misunderstood as meaning the presence of
merely mental contents, of some subjective interiority in contrast to the outer

25 Cf. UpadeśasāhasrĪ I.5.3: ‘Just as to a man in the boat the trees [appear to] move in a direction
opposite [to his movement], so does Ātman [appear to] transmigrate … ’ (Mayeda 1992: 114; bracketed
additions by Mayeda).
26 In my interpretation of the notion of witness-consciousness, I owe much to Dan Zahavi’s views on
consciousness and the self. However, I am not sure whether we fully agree regarding the nature of the
diachronic identity of the self. Zahavi states ‘that it is the shared mode of givenness that makes two
experiences belong to the same subject, i.e. … it is their exposure in the same field of primary presence
which makes different experiences of one and the same self ’ (Zahavi 1999: 144). I find this formulation
ambiguous. It could mean that a past experience is mine insofar as it is in my present experiencing given in a
first-person mode, ‘as mine’, or it could mean that the experience, when originally experienced, had its
manifestation in the same field or dimension of first-personal givenness. Hence, the question is: Is a past
experience mine insofar as, and because, it is first-personally accessible to me (in the present), or is it first-
personally accessible to me because it was experienced by me? The first reading ultimately amounts to a
reductionist view in Parfit’s sense, and Zahavi appears to tend towards this approach (cf., for example, the
final section of his contribution to this volume). On the other hand, he speaks of an ‘abiding dimension
of experiencing’ (Zahavi 1999: 80), which would allow a view of the ‘sameness’ of the ‘same field of
givenness’ in the second sense (the view I favor). Formulations such as, ‘Not only is the first experience
retained by the last experience, but the different experiences are all characterized by the same funda-
mental first-personal givenness’ (this volume: p. 58) may also be interpreted along these lines.
208 WOLFGANG FASCHING

world. Rather, consciousness exists as the presence of anything we could ever

refer to, be it ‘inner’ or ‘outer’. The presence of the experiences is the
presence of the world.27 The presence of sensuous contents, for example, is
ipso facto the sensuous presence of the respective perceived object; my think-
ing is nothing but the successive presenting-itself of some meaning-constella-
tion (some ‘thought’ in the noematic sense); the moods I live through are
aspects of the way the world is there for me, etc. So experiences are manifesta-
tion-events—they exist as appearing-of-something, and appearance as such has
its existence in its being-present (being-experienced)—namely its existence as
appearance-of. The presence of experience means that appearance-of-some-
thing takes place, and so the presence of experience is ipso facto the presence of
this something.
Therefore my being qua presence means that all sorts of things are present
to me. I can investigate these things given to me in manifold ways, and I can
also reflect on their modes of givenness. Yet what can be said about the
presence itself as such of what is present to me? This presence (conscious-
ness) is notoriously elusive. It has no observable properties of its own, is no
particular and distinguishable content we encounter, and can never stand
before us as an object. Therefore the self in the Advaitic sense is not one of
the ‘seen’ things but the ‘seeing’ itself: ‘I am neither this object, nor that,
I am That which makes all objects manifest’ (Śaṅkara, Vivekacūdāmani verse
˙ ˙
493, Prabhavananda/Isherwood 1978: 115). Presence is not a phenomenon
of its own that I could find in addition to other phenomena, but simply
the taking place of thereness of any phenomena. This is the sense of the
so-called ‘transparency’ of consciousness, that is, the fact that when one tries
to attend to the consciousness of an object, one can hardly help ending up
attending to what it is conscious of.28

27 Cf. Śaṅkara’s Brahmasūtrabhās.ya II.2.28: ‘We are obliged to assume objects apart from cognition,
namely on the ground of cognition itself. For no one cognizes a post or a wall as mere cognition, but as
objects of cognition everyone cognizes the post or the wall’ (Deussen 1920: 359).
28 Consciousness is no object we could find anywhere and is in this sense ‘invisible’. But this does not
mean that it is concealed. The transparency of consciousness does not mean that the cognitive processes
through which we represent objects are not themselves again represented and thereby normally
unknown to us (as Metzinger understands it: Metzinger 2003: 163–177), but rather that there simply
is nothing to represent, because consciousness is nothing but the thereness of whatever it happens to be
consciousness of and nothing beyond that: It is not an object we fail to be conscious of, but no object
at all.
 ‘I AM OF THE NATURE OF SEEING’ 209

So the presence itself of what is present can never be an observable object,

yet at the same time it is the most familiar thing in the world: It is that
wherein everything we experience has its being-experienced, the medium
of all phenomena (the taking place of their phenomenality). And the
soteriological aim of Advaita Vedānta—the realization of ātman—is nothing
but simply becoming explicitly aware of this taking place of presence as
such.
Of course, in a certain sense we are constantly conscious of our being
conscious. After all, we are not living in a permanent state of complete self-
forgetfulness, fully absorbed in the objects: we are not only conscious of the
objects we see but also—at least implicitly—of our seeing them. But
evidently, this is not the form of self-awareness Advaita Vedānta strives
for—rather, it is, in their view, precisely a form of self-forgetfulness, that is, of
obscuration of the fundamental dimension of our own being qua subjectiv-
ity: It is ahamkāra (‘ego-sense’), the awareness of a distinct ‘I’ (aham) as an
˙
inner-worldly subject with particular empirical (psychophysical) properties
(a jı̄va, ‘person’).
To say that I am not only conscious, for example, of this desk I see, but
also of my seeing it actually means that I am aware of myself sitting here and
looking at the desk and of the fact that the desk appears in this particular way
precisely because it is given to me as someone viewing it from this particular
angle, with these particular sense-organs, and so on. So that which I am
aware of here, is my localization in the world, and of my own body to which
I relate the rest of the appearances. When I experience an unchanging object
in changing modes of givenness, I experience this change as being due to the
changing relations between the experiencing subject and the experienced
object: that is, together with the object, experienced in changing modes of
givenness, a ‘subject’ is experienced for whom the manifestations are mani-
festations, a ‘subject’ which is itself something that is objectively located
within the objective world, standing in manifold—physical and psychical—
relations to other things.
And this is essential to object-givenness in general. Objectivity means
appearance-transcendence: We apprehend the subjective appearance as not
being the object itself, but as only being an aspect of this object, that is, this
object as seen from a certain viewpoint, in certain respects. Hence the from-
where of seeing is necessarily co-constituted with the seen object—
co-constituted as a ‘subject’ that is itself part of the objective world (cf.
210 WOLFGANG FASCHING

Husserl 1952: 56, 109–110, 144; Albahari 2006: 8–9, 88). So in a way the
experience of objects is ipso facto also self-experience, in the sense of the self-
localization of the subject within the realm of the objects.
This not only holds for our being conscious of ourselves as a body, but also
with regard to the mental aspects of what we experience as our ‘I’: For
example, the field of givenness is never a mere homogeneous plane, but
features an attentional relief which indicates a mental ‘I’ to which certain
things are attentionally ‘nearer’ than others: I can direct my attention to this
or to that within the field of what is consciously there for me, so that my ‘I’ is
obviously to be distinguished from this field (cf. Husserl 1952: 105–106), an ‘I’
with particular personal interests and the like.
This ‘self-experience’ as a particular psychophysical being means that we
identify a certain special sphere of what is experientially given to us as
‘ourselves’: that is, we constantly distinguish within the realm of phenomenal
contents between what belongs to ‘ourselves’—one’s body, one’s thoughts,
and so on—and what is located ‘outside of ourselves’ (cf. Albahari 2006: 51,
56–60, 7329). This is what is called adhyāsa (‘superimposition’) in Advaita
(see below).
So object-givenness implies the givenness of the subject (an indicated and
experienced from-where of experiencing) as a necessary moment of the
structure of the field of the objectively given. Now the point is that the
experiencing itself—consciousness—is not a structural moment of what is
given, but is the very taking place of givenness itself. The whole inner/outer
(self/not-self) distinction constitutes itself within the realm of experiential
contents—and consequently experiencing itself is not located within some
‘inner sphere’. My consciousness is not to be found on one side of this inner-
outer distinction in which what we experience is necessarily structured, but
is, again, the taking place of experience itself. The viewpoint is part of the
structure of the field of presence and therefore not presupposed, but con-
stituted by it.
Hence consciousness of myself as an ‘inside’ as opposed to an ‘outside’ is
not a way of being aware of consciousness as such, which is not a special
inner realm opposed to the outer objects, but the thereness of these objects,

29 Albahari 2006: 57: The identification of the subject with certain aspects of the body or mind
involves ‘the subject—the witnessing as it presents from a psycho-physical perspective—identifying with
those very khandhās [= skandhas] (objects of awareness) that contribute … to the impression of a
hemmed-in perspective from which the world is witnessed’.
 ‘I AM OF THE NATURE OF SEEING’ 211

the appearing of what appears (be it ‘inside’ or ‘outside’). This ‘pre-interior’

consciousness is what Advaita Vedānta means by ‘self ’: ‘[T]he self which is
of the nature of consciousness … [is] the witness of both the seer and the
seen’ (Śaṅkara, Ātmajñopadeśavidhi III.7, quoted in Gupta 1998: 38), there-
fore it is ‘the pure “subject” that underlies all subject/object distinctions’
(Deutsch 1969: 49), ‘the “field” of consciousness/being within which the
knower/knowing/known distinctions arise’ (Fort 1984: 278).

5. The Process of De-Superimposition

In order to become aware of the self in this sense it is necessary to stop
identifying oneself with what presents itself as ‘I’ and ‘mine’: the ‘annihila-
tion of the ego-sense’ (Ramana in Osborne 1997: 19). Normally we are not
explicitly aware of consciousness as such, since we are totally lost in the
objects of consciousness and can also understand ourselves only as one of the
objects. This erroneous self-understanding as one of the objects is what is
called adhyāsa in Advaita Vedānta, the ‘superimposition’ of self and not-self:
Certain experienced contents are appropriated as belonging to one’s own
self, as an ‘inner’ opposed to what is located ‘outside’ the self (cf. Fort 1984:
278) as it articulates itself in our ‘saying, for example, “that am I”, “that is
mine” ’ (Śaṅkara, Brahmasūtrabhās.ya, Introd., Deussen 1920: 3).
Accordingly, the way of becoming aware of one’s true nature consists in
a ‘process of desuperimposition’ (Indich 1980: 16, 10), that is, a process of
de-identification from anything one objectively encounters as one’s pur-
ported self (cf. Fasching 2008). One stops identifying oneself with the
inner-objective ‘subject’, the psychophysical entity (jı̄va) one normally
takes oneself to be. Instead of identifying certain configurations of experi-
enced contents as being ‘oneself ’, one begins to experience oneself as the
abiding experiencing itself (the taking place of presence) of any contents.
De-superimposition means radically distinguishing oneself from all objects
by no longer delimiting oneself (as an ‘inside’) as opposed to the objects
‘out there’. One stops considering anything as being ‘oneself ’ or ‘one’s
own’: ‘He to whom both “I” … and “my” … have become meaningless,
becomes a knower of Ātman’, as Śaṅkara puts it (Upadeśasāhasrı̄ I.14.29,
Mayeda 1992: 138).
212 WOLFGANG FASCHING

In the ‘de-identified’ mode of experiencing that is strived for, one

completely lets go of ‘oneself ’ and becomes nothing but ‘seeing’, without
any distinct ‘seer’ standing apart from the ‘seen’. This amounts to a pro-
found transformation of one’s self-experience and of the way of being in the
world. To experience oneself as the ‘witnessing’ leads to a sense of detach-
ment, a loosening of one’s involvement in the concerns, desires, and fears of
the ego.30 One experiences oneself as an inner stillness in the midst of all
motion, and as non-acting even when engaged in action.31 Instead of simply
identifying oneself with a particular configuration of experiential contents,
standing in permanently changing relations of activity and passivity to other
experienced contents, one simultaneously experiences oneself as the abiding
experiencing itself, as the motionless and non-acting dimension of manifes-
tation of all movements and activities, of any ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ and all
relations between them. One no longer apprehends oneself as a subject-pole
in opposition to an object-pole, being affected by it, reacting to it, dealing
with it, but as the event of presence of any subject and object. ‘I (= Ātman)
am of the nature of Seeing, non-object … , unconnected [with anything],
changeless, motionless … [Touch] does not produce for me any change of
gain and loss … , since I am devoid of touch, just as a blow with the fist and
the like [does not produce any change] in the sky’ (Upadeśasāhasrı̄ III.3.115,
Mayeda 1992: 252; bracketed additions by Mayeda).
With the dropping of the notions of ‘I’ and ‘mine’, in a way nothing
remains for oneself, and in this sense it could be seen as a dissolution of the
self. Yet for Advaita Vedānta this ‘nothing’ actually just means no-thing, that
is, non-objectivity. The modern Advaitic author Arvind Sharma answers
the question of whether ‘the sense “I am” [is] real or unreal’ with the words:
‘Both. It is unreal when we say: “I am this, I am that”. It is real when we
mean “I am not this, nor that” ’ (Sharma 1993: 96–97).32 One becomes
aware of oneself precisely when one ceases to find oneself anywhere.

30 Cf. e.g. Śaṅkara’s descriptions in Vivekacūdāmani verses 428–442, Prabhavananda/Isherwood 1978:

˙ ˙
104–106; Osborne 1997: 31.
31 ‘… he who, though acting, is actionless—he is the knower of Ātman’ (Upadeśasāhasrı̄ I.10.13,
Mayeda 1992: 124); cf. also Osborne 1997: 32.
32 Cf. Upadeśasāhasrı̄ I.6.6: ‘The learned should abandon the “this”-portion in what is called “I”,
understanding that it is not Ātman’ (Mayeda 1992: 116). (Formulations like this seem to contradict the
claim, such as Ram-Prasad (this volume) makes, that in Advaita Vedānta the term ‘I’ does not at all refer
to the ātman.)
 ‘I AM OF THE NATURE OF SEEING’ 213

6. Conclusion
In opposition to Buddhism, Advaita Vedānta insists on the existence of an
abiding self, a self which consists in nothing but consciousness (‘seeing’ or
‘witnessing’) and as such is the non-object kat’ exochen, since seeing is not
itself something visible. I have argued that this view does indeed capture
something essential about the nature of experience.
Buddhism and Advaita Vedānta agree that it is necessary to inhibit the
identification with the ‘I’ and the clinging to what is ‘mine’ to achieve
liberation. The theoretical interpretation of this process is where they
disagree. Now it is my opinion that the notion of witness-consciousness
allows for a more faithful description of what actually happens in this process
than the idea of no-self (at least in its reductionist interpretation).
Buddhism invites us to reflect on our own being and holds that what we
will find are all kinds of transient phenomena (the five skandhas), but nothing
like a stable ‘self ’. With regard to each of the skandhas one should understand:
‘this is not mine; this am not I; this is not the Self of me’ (Samyutta Nikāya
˙
XXII.59). This insight leads us to the liberation from the illusion of self. Yet
the question is: If there is nothing but these transient phenomena that
constitute our being (in other words: if this simply is what we are)—who is
it then that is not identical to all this? Who is it who can say of her body, her
thoughts, etc. ‘this am not I’? This ‘who’ is, I wish to suggest, nothing but the
experiencing consciousness in which all the passing phenomena have their
manifestation and which Advaita Vedānta regards as our ‘self ’.33

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33 This article was conceived and written in the framework of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF)
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and the editors for their comments and suggestions.
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