John Tan on Emptiness, Dependent Arising, Right View, and Non-Meditation
John Tan on Emptiness, Dependent Arising, Right View, and Non-Meditation
A comprehensive synopsis of the 27 June 2026 Zoom meeting
YouTube Videos and Audios by John Tan: Union of Dependent Arising and Emptiness
Editorial and attribution note
This synopsis was reconciled from multiple supplied transcript witnesses. No single machine transcript is treated as controlling. Wording is resolved by convergence across witnesses, contextual and grammatical fit, Buddhist/technical-term coherence, and speaker continuity; the fine-grained diarized version is especially useful for turn boundaries and attribution, but is not assumed to be more accurate word-for-word.
The high-confidence John Tan mapping is: Parts 1–13, Speaker A; Part 14, Speaker B; Part 15, Speaker A; Parts 16–17, Speaker B; Part 18, Speaker A; Part 19, Speaker B; and Part 20, Speaker A. The strongest internal checks include “John Tan’s mosquito” being addressed to Part 15 Speaker A, and Part 16 Speaker A referring to “John” immediately before Speaker B answers in the first person about choosing the five core logics.
This synopsis distinguishes John’s statements from other participants’ remarks, personal interpretations, traditional anecdotes, speculative comparisons, and independently verifiable textual context. At the author’s request, other participants are not named except in the dedicated translation-prompts section.
Where the user directly re-listened to a disputed phrase, that audio check is treated as stronger phonetic evidence than conflicting ASR for that phrase. This applies especially to John’s colloquial “half-boiled-egg / half-egged” wording and to “mine” rather than “mind” in the MMK chapter-18 discussion. Speaker identity itself is established separately through diarization, direct address, autobiographical/topic continuity, and cross-Part handoffs.
A methodological note from John’s new manuscript explains that the larger project is organized in five parts: Part One develops the sustained argument from the collapse of the observer through dependent designation and causality; Part Two, Three Formations, applies the logic contemplatively through the mountain, flower, and space; Part Three, Nothing to Find, Nothing Missing, is a shorter introductory companion; Part Four, Science and the Dharma, places the argument beside modern physics and cognitive science while distinguishing resonance from proof; and an Appendix develops the formal and linguistic scaffolding, including how ordinary grammar can reconstruct substance.
The same note explicitly describes the book as a personal philosophical synthesis developed in continuity with Madhyamaka and Dzogchen—not a translation, commentary, or scholarly exposition of Nāgārjuna, Candrakīrti, Tsongkhapa, Mipham, Dōgen, or Dzogchen as a whole. The local notes below therefore matter: they identify which recurring distinctions are John’s own pedagogical or organizing devices rather than classical categories he is claiming to reproduce verbatim.
The central argument
John is not presenting luminous nonduality or anatta as the endpoint. A practitioner can have radiance, seamlessness, anatta, and total-exertion experiences while the framework used to analyse those experiences still treats objects, space, time, consciousness, or even fluid process in an inherent way.
The later work is to bring experience and right view into alignment while understanding why empty phenomena remain conventionally valid, appearing, and functional. Emptiness is not blank absence: John argues that essence or a core would make arising, interaction, communication, and appearance impossible.
Detailed contents
- The universality of emptiness and genuine non-meditation
- Signs of maturation and the distinction between phases five and six
- The desynchronization between experience and view
- Spiritual bypassing: saying “empty” without understanding why
- What John actually says about Longchenpa and judging masters
- John’s own gap after anatta and total exertion
- Conceptual designation and dependent designation
- The apple as a multidimensional designation
- Designation without naming and labelling
- AI as a research interlocutor, not an authority
- Relation without independently existing relata
- Why phase six is analytical
- Why anatta and noun-to-verb fluidity are not the endpoint
- Why essence would make arising and interaction impossible
- The “half-boiled-egg” / “half-egged” view
- Arising, ceasing, and the analysis of time
- Three criteria for investigating a phenomenon
- Why John insists on the two truths
- Hidden inherent views concerning space and time
- Deconstructing “I” and “mine”: possessive mineness and possession
- How John uses the MMK tetralemma to expose inherent thinking
- The danger of relentless negation and attachment to groundlessness
- Causal efficacy without inherent causal power
- Conventionality becomes crucial when no substrate remains
- Conceptuality, pure perception, and non-meditation
- What continues to drive John’s practice
- His reaction to Soh’s translation prompts
- Refining right view so that experience can open further
- Mipham, Tsongkhapa, translation, and traditional anecdotes
- John’s qualified suggestion for using AI with difficult books
- John’s selection of five core logics
- Infinite regress, scientific “stuff,” and designation upon characteristics
- Niels Bohr and Karen Barad: corrected names, comparison, and conjecture
- The organization of John’s video material and its AI-oriented component
- His reservations about public circulation of the videos
Supplemental source: Full unreleased-book excerpt — “A Note on Method”
Part I · From Nondual Experience to the Need for Emptiness
1. The universality of emptiness and genuine non-meditation
John begins from the universality of emptiness. He says emptiness is not restricted to one domain: all phenomena are empty. When that is seen universally, there is “no entry” and “no exit,” no distance to be crossed, and no special effort by which one moves into a separate meditative state.
John explicitly includes appearances divided as inside and outside and gives the examples of wind and a blower: all are empty and dependently originated.
He explicitly qualifies this as his own perspective: it may not be the perspective of Mahāmudrā, Dzogchen, or other practices. His concern is that, without realizing emptiness, it is very difficult to go beyond construing luminosity as consciousness or luminous clarity.
Seeing every appearance as empty is therefore, in his view, what allows one to speak of genuine non-meditation. Even so, John says he still meditates although he considers himself to be in a state of non-meditation.
Back to top2. Signs of maturation and the distinction between phases five and six
Asked how someone recognizes deepening insight, John says there may be signs, although the practitioner ultimately knows through growing confidence and an opening of insight. One sign he gives is simply that “everything” is seen as “very light.” He does not define that phrase further at that point, so it is best left as his experiential description rather than turned into a more technical criterion.
He then distinguishes phase-five and phase-six insight. Phase five is characterized by radiance, nonduality, direct clarity, and recurring moments of what he calls “mini total exertion.” His example is ordinary: when a door opens or an MRT train moves, the vibration, the train, and “everything” can be experienced as one presentation.
This can be a profound opening, but the experiential taste may be far stronger than the practitioner’s view. Phase six addresses precisely that imbalance by investigating the framework through which experience is understood.
Back to top3. The desynchronization between experience and view
John describes a fundamental desynchronization among direct experience, insight, and the framework used to analyse and articulate that experience. Someone may experience seamlessness and anatta while ordinary analysis continues to treat the computer, phone, and other appearances as isolated external objects. Later in the meeting he exposes additional inherited assumptions concerning space, time, relation, and substrate.
Nondual experience does not automatically remove those assumptions. John’s point is that the analysis itself can continue to operate through the old framework even when the experiential taste of seamlessness or anatta is present. The framework therefore has to be examined and retrained rather than assumed to disappear through experience alone.
He does not dogmatically claim that explicit analysis is the only conceivable route. Vajrayāna and other approaches may operate in ways he does not claim to assess completely. His narrower point is autobiographical and practical: in his own experience, it is extremely difficult to move beyond the residual framework without investigating it directly.
John’s manuscript says that the underlying phenomenon—realization and conceptual view developing at different rates—is recognized in various forms across contemplative traditions, but the specific framing as a “desynchronization of view, experience, and insight” is his own construction.
He uses it as the organizing engine of the book: direct contemplative experience such as anatta or total exertion can be complete while the conceptual framework interpreting it remains, unnoticed, substantialist. He offers this formulation because he finds it clarifying and accurate to how the process unfolds, not because “desynchronization” is a classical technical term.
4. Spiritual bypassing: saying “empty” without understanding why
John repeatedly criticizes spiritual bypassing. Here the problem is claiming to understand because one can repeat that “everything is empty,” while the underlying analysis and framework have never been penetrated. His recurring challenge is concrete: if one says everything or all conditions are empty, can one actually explain why?
His immediate test is simple: if one says that everything is empty, why is it empty? Why are conditions empty? If one cannot investigate that and the analysis, logic, interpretation, and understanding are not integrated, John says the claim may amount to something memorized rather than penetrated.
The recurring practical standard is sincerity: recognize where experience is present but understanding is not, and investigate rather than bypassing the unresolved point.
Back to top5. What John actually says about Longchenpa and judging masters
John first singles Malcolm out as someone who has tried very hard to articulate these matters clearly. He then reports that Malcolm had quoted or interpreted Longchenpa as treating external reality as true. Another participant reacts by saying they would not dare conclude from this that Longchenpa did not understand emptiness. John agrees that it is extremely difficult to comment on masters such as Longchenpa, Tsongkhapa, and Mipham without deep practice and a clear understanding of deconstruction.
John does not resolve the textual dispute or accuse Longchenpa of substantialism. He redirects the discussion to the practitioner’s own understanding: even if one can repeat that Longchenpa or another master said something, does one actually see why phenomena and conditions are empty? Merely citing an authority is not a substitute for integrating experience, reasoning, and view.
Later, John gives his personal assessment that Candrakīrti, Mipham, and Tsongkhapa express Nāgārjuna’s meaning with exceptional clarity. This is his evaluation, not a neutral ranking across Buddhist traditions.
Back to topPart II · Dependent Designation and the Reconstruction of View
6. John’s own gap after anatta and total exertion
John uses his own development as the central example. For several years after anatta, he experienced repeated moments of mini-total-exertion. Later, total exertion itself became very clear. He had the taste and the direct insight, but knew that his view had not caught up.
When he encountered the chariot exchange between Nāgasena and King Milinda, he immediately recognized a connection with total exertion. Yet he could not initially explain the view underlying it. His response was not to pretend that intuitive recognition amounted to understanding. He knew the teaching was pointing toward something correct, that it corresponded to his experience, and that it supplied a missing element—but he also knew he did not yet understand why.
The question that seized him was not merely whether the chariot had a referent. It was more specific: why must the designation be said to depend upon the parts? That question became a doorway into his later investigation.
John says he kept pursuing the discrepancy rather than treating the chariot passage as understood. He recalls asking Andre and others on Facebook why the label is not simply referring to the object itself and why, instead, the label must be said to be designated upon parts.
In the manuscript John says that reading Nāgasena’s chariot as containing the later argument in miniature—no residue, exhaustive conditionality, mutual dependence, full function without essence, and no independent core—is his own way of organizing the material.
He explicitly does not present this as a claim about how the chariot dialogue was originally intended or how it has traditionally been read. It is a reading he has found illuminating and uses to structure the subsequent argument.
7. Conceptual designation and dependent designation
In ordinary life, people do not consciously think that they designate things upon parts and conditions. When someone says “apple,” the ordinary assumption is that a complete apple already exists, the mind sees it, and the word is then attached to that object. The same model is applied to a mouse, controller, train, or body.
John calls the ordinary model conceptual designation: the object is taken to be there as a whole and the label is then “slapped onto” it. What he is trying to understand under dependent designation is different: designation is spoken of in dependence upon bases such as parts, causes and conditions, rather than upon a self-established whole that is already there.
John emphasizes how radical this shift would be. He says that ordinarily “we never think this way”; if one truly saw phenomena in terms of parts, causes, and conditions in the way he is describing, one would already be seeing dependent arising. He rhetorically adds that one would be “already enlightened,” provided one truly understood it.
John initially recognized dependent designation through total exertion—the entirety of conditions presenting as this particular event—but he knew that this experiential recognition did not yet explain the mechanism completely.
John’s manuscript states this very plainly: classical Madhyamaka does not separate “conceptual designation” and “dependent designation” into two rival categories. Its position is that all designation is dependent designation.
The contrast used throughout John’s book—“thing first, label second” versus a structure in which the thing and its designation arise dependently—is therefore his own pedagogical separation, designed to help a reader approach the insight. He does not claim that Nāgārjuna or Candrakīrti formulated this two-category scheme themselves.
What he regards as continuous with the classical conclusion is the endpoint toward which the distinction is meant to lead: there is no self-established thing to which a label is subsequently attached; designation is dependent.
8. The apple as a multidimensional designation
John develops the distinction through an apple. Ordinary cognition treats the apple as a single whole object standing outside the observer. In his account, however, what is called “apple” presents through multiple experiential dimensions: colour and visual consciousness, bodily sensation, taste, and the other streams of sensory consciousness involved in the encounter.
John says these sensory dimensions form bases of designation. His contrast is with the ordinary way of taking the apple as a complete object that is already there and then attaching the label to that whole object.
The example therefore returns to his central question: why does Madhyamaka speak of designation upon bases, parts, causes, and conditions when ordinary cognition feels as though it simply encounters a whole object and names it? Merely moving the analysis down to atoms would not by itself answer that question.
Back to top9. Designation without naming and labelling
A further trigger came when John was reading Tsongkhapa and encountered Tibetan Buddhist language about conceptuality and freedom from conceptual elaboration in connection with emptiness. He says this came as a shock because he had been understanding designation in the ordinary sense of conceptual labelling. It forced a more basic question: what does “designation” mean in Tibetan Buddhism, and if there is no naming or labelling, is there still designation?
John’s next question was whether designation can operate without verbal naming or deliberate labelling. He imagines a world in which everything is blue. Without contrast, blue is not distinguished as a particular feature. When green appears, the contrast becomes manifest immediately, even before anyone invents or applies the words “blue” and “green.”
The important point for John is simply that difference and structure are already manifest before verbal naming. He calls this “designation without naming and labelling.” In this article the phrase is treated as John’s own analytical formulation in the meeting, not as a standardized technical translation.
Designation therefore cannot simply mean consciously attaching a word. This is why he challenged the idea that removing conceptual labelling by itself would amount to enlightenment.
John treats this as foundational rather than peripheral: “without understanding all these, you cannot understand dependent origination.”
The manuscript distinguishes designation-by-thought from designation-by-relation and proposes that structural, non-conceptual individuation can operate prior to explicit conceptual labelling. John explicitly says that this does not appear as a formal division in classical Madhyamaka sources.
He presents it as a personal synthesis in continuity with the tradition, not as orthodox doctrine. The unreleased manuscript describes this with a blue-and-yellow contrast; in the 27 June meeting summarized above, his spoken example uses blue and green. The difference is retained rather than silently harmonized.
10. AI as a research interlocutor, not an authority
John says he kept these questions largely within his own investigation and contemplation. He says they were not things he could simply find settled in books or go to teachers and ask to have resolved for him; they were part of his personal investigation. Much of the inquiry remained in contemplation and notes without being fully put into words because he found verification difficult.
When more capable AI systems appeared, he began questioning them repeatedly: telling them to search as widely as they could, challenging the answers, and checking again and again what “designation” meant in Tibetan Buddhist usage. He says the distinction gradually became clearer, including the point that designation need not mean verbal naming.
In this part of the meeting AI functions as a tool for searching and checking an inquiry that John had already been contemplating; he does not present the AI’s first answer as authoritative.
Back to top11. Relation without independently existing relata
A further problem then arose: if independently existing things cannot be found, how are dependence and relation possible? The ordinary model assumes that entity A exists, entity B exists, and a relation subsequently connects them. John challenges the assumption that A and B are already fully constituted before the relation.
John’s formulation is that “you,” “I,” “this,” and “that” come about in the meeting or relation itself rather than first standing there as fully established things and only later entering interaction. He compares this with Karen Barad’s language of intra-action, where the relata are not assumed to pre-exist the relation.
He explicitly limits this discussion to the conventional level. He is not proposing relation as a new ultimate ground; at the ultimate level, he says, it is emptiness.
12. Why phase six is analytical
John calls phase six analytical because, after anatta and total exertion, one has to challenge the existing framework of understanding and find out more exactly what dependent arising and emptiness mean.
The surrounding examples that feed this phase-six inquiry include dependent designation, designation without naming and labelling, relation without independently established relata, and later causal efficacy without intrinsic causal power. John’s emphasis is that these are not merely new concepts to collect; they expose something fundamentally wrong in the way the old framework analyses experience.
For him, this is why Madhyamaka goes deeper than the initial anatta insight. The experience may already be nondual, but the framework can still visualize reality inherently unless it too is penetrated.
Back to topPart III · Beyond Anatta, Fluidity, and Hidden Substrates
13. Why anatta and noun-to-verb fluidity are not the endpoint
John illustrates the comparatively direct anatta point with examples such as: there is no wind apart from blowing—the blowing is the wind; there is no lightning apart from flashing—the flashing is the lightning; and there is no separate listener behind sound.
His warning is that even after anatta and total exertion, a practitioner without clear view can still imagine reality as something fluid—like water, or like wind flowing. John says this is still an inherent view.
So the move from noun to verb is not yet enough. The flowing or fluid process must not become the new substrate. John’s “ninety-nine percent” remark is rhetorical emphasis, not a measured statistic.
Back to top14. Why essence would make arising and interaction impossible
John says the practitioner has to become clear that if there were essence or a core, it would be impossible for something to arise, interact, communicate, or even appear.
His argument is deliberately functional: an independently fixed essence would be incompatible with the dependent arising and interaction that are actually being discussed. He repeatedly asks how anything could arise at all if it had such a core.
This is why he treats the absence of essence not as the destruction of functioning, but as inseparable from the possibility of dependent arising and interaction. He wants this to become a clear conviction rather than a slogan.
Later, John restates the issue in terms of appearance itself. He says it is “very difficult to understand the nature of what appears”: when sound appears, its nature is a lack of essence, yet this is difficult to see as long as the inherent framework and its logic continue to govern the analysis.
John’s later manuscript goes beyond the specific argument made in this Zoom section. It argues that Dzogchen’s spontaneous presence (lhun grub) and Madhyamaka’s dependent arising are the same nature under two descriptions, and that Dzogchen direct introduction can be understood as the experiential actualization of what Madhyamaka analysis points toward.
Crucially, John himself labels this a confident personal synthesis rather than settled cross-tradition doctrine. He notes that other lineages and commentators regard Dzogchen as its own resultant vehicle and do not reduce it to, or regard it as guaranteed by, Madhyamaka analysis alone.
15. The “half-boiled-egg” / “half-egged” view
John uses a colloquial metaphor for a mixed, only partly worked-out view. After the user’s direct re-listening of the recording, the preferred reading is “half-boiled-egg view,” also shortened in John’s speech to “half-egged.” The automatic transcripts disagree sharply, producing forms such as “half boy,” “half-egot,” and the earlier editorial normalization “half-void, half-ego.”
John immediately explains what he means: partly we take things as inherent, and partly as non-inherent. The metaphor therefore describes a view that is only half-formed or “half-cooked”: the practitioner has some insight into emptiness while the old inherent framework continues operating.
His point is not a contrast between “void” and “ego.” It is the inconsistency of simultaneously relying on inherent assumptions and non-inherent insight. Until ultimate analysis is applied clearly, he says, we do not really understand how reality differs from the way we habitually imagine it.
16. Arising, ceasing, and the analysis of time
John uses the question: “A moment ceases as it arises. Does it arise, or does it cease?” The question exposes the instability of ordinary categories. He connects it with Nāgārjuna’s examination of time: the past is gone, the future has not arrived, and the present appears to remain.
But if the present has duration, it can be divided into earlier and later portions. If it has no duration, in what sense can a present moment be established? Likewise, if a moment ceases in the very act of arising, should it be classified as arising or as ceasing?
John explicitly says Nāgārjuna is not saying that nothing exists. His point is that there is a fundamental problem with the way ordinary language and analysis frame time and phenomena. He then moves directly from this problem into the three criteria for understanding a phenomenon in the next section.
John also gives this question an autobiographical history: he says he had posed it to a participant roughly twenty years earlier and had asked it repeatedly over the years. He uses the long-running exchange to emphasize his practical point that hearing a Madhyamaka question is not the same as actually investigating it.
Back to top17. Three criteria for investigating a phenomenon
John offers three connected criteria for penetrating a phenomenon:
- Do not begin by demanding “What is it?” John says that in a completely substrateless world, the very demand for a final “what” is already conditioned by the framework.
- It is unfindable. His wording here is that it cannot be found in conception or perception; nevertheless, there is appearance.
- It does not originate without conditions. Whatever appears is not independent of conditions.
John says these three points must be penetrated together; from there, one can understand the phenomenon through the two truths.
John then gives a revealing example of how a question can already carry the framework it is supposed to investigate: when one asks “Who am I?”, the question is already conditioned by the assumption of a “who.” He uses this to illustrate his broader point that analysis is often shaped in advance by the framework through which the question is asked.
Back to top18. Why John insists on the two truths
John says that penetrating those three criteria leads into the two truths, and he states that he is “very against one truth.” His own emphasis is functional: ultimately phenomena are empty, while conventionally they appear, are valid, and function.
For John, emptiness therefore cannot be separated from dependent arising. If everything is empty, one must also see how conventional appearances arise and function rather than stopping at negation.
19. Hidden inherent views concerning space and time
John insists that people do think inherently even when they say they do not. His concrete examples are space and time: we imagine space as an absolute container holding objects, and time as a large stream in which we are situated and which flows in one direction.
Because these assumptions feel obvious, simply denying that we hold inherent views prevents learning. John says they have to be exposed and worked through.
John then groups several of his own formulations together—“relation without relata,” “designation without naming,” and “causal efficacy without causal power”—and explicitly calls them important understandings of dependent arising. They are his explanatory formulations rather than standard translations of fixed classical expressions.
John also returns to hearer and sound. He says there is hearer and sound and that they “dependently originate”; one cannot have sound without hearer. He notes that the MMK analysis and the language of anatta may initially sound different, but says they are pointing to the same thing or the same experience. He then adds that the initial experience of anatta is not yet total.
The unreleased manuscript reinforces the caution already used in this synopsis: expressions such as “designation without naming,” “designation by relation,” and the wider architecture connecting these analyses are John’s own explanatory constructions. Their purpose is to articulate dependent arising without smuggling an independently existing entity back into the relation; they should not be mistaken for standardized classical category labels.
20. Deconstructing “I” and “mine”: possessive mineness and possession
John recalls an earlier exchange in which his intended statement was: “I don’t have an ‘I,’ but I have ‘mine.’” Some automatic transcripts render the last word as mind, but the surrounding discussion repeatedly returns to “I and mine” and “the possession.” The coherent reading—and the user’s audio correction—is mine, not mind.
The issue is therefore possessive mineness or possession, not a residual entity called mind. John then connects this with MMK chapter 18, where he understands freedom or deconstruction of “I” and “mine” as connected with freedom from grasping and conceptual elaboration.
What struck John was precisely that further connection. He says, “That part I still don’t quite understand,” and takes the discrepancy as evidence that his own taste and insight of anatta were not complete. The point should therefore not be reduced to a claim that one specific remaining possession had simply been identified and solved; the unresolved relation between “I/mine,” grasping, and conceptual elaboration is what drove the inquiry.
Part IV · Reading Nāgārjuna Without Falling into Negation
21. How John uses the MMK tetralemma to expose inherent thinking
John says the MMK is difficult and that its logic has to be understood as a challenge to inherent thinking. In this part of the meeting, another participant supplies the specific comparison with being accustomed to textbooks; John’s own contribution is the explanation of what the fourfold analysis is doing.
John says that if inherent production is pushed to its logical extreme, the possibilities are exhausted by a fourfold analysis. In his own audible list he mentions production from self, from other, neither self nor other, and random/uncaused production; elsewhere in the exchange another participant gives the familiar self/other/both/neither formulation. John’s key example is self-production: if something were produced from itself, production would be unnecessary.
He stresses that Nāgārjuna is not negating causal efficacy. The analysis is meant to show that something is wrong with the way inherent thinking understands production. If none of the four inherent alternatives works, John says one has to question how functioning actually occurs rather than simply invent another hidden kind of 'stuff'.
John later summarizes the scope of the MMK challenge in his own words: it challenges “self, element, condition, noble truth, all sorts of things… identity.” His point is that the inherent framework is not being questioned only in one philosophical corner; the same style of analysis is applied across many kinds of phenomena.
John separately says that studying the MMK is not easy and depends on each person’s affinity (各自的缘分). He says this understanding can take many years because it is gradual rather than like an insight that suddenly lands all at once; once one has gone through it, however, many things become clearer and smoother.
Back to top22. The danger of relentless negation and attachment to groundlessness
John explicitly calls this a problem with modern non-implicative negation. It is easy, he says, to see that relation is empty, self is empty, entities are empty, and objects are empty; then whenever something is formulated, one simply says not to attach to it because that too is empty.
He calls treating relentless negation as the way “incurable,” linking the warning to what he calls the emptiness of emptiness.
Repeated this way, one can wrongly treat groundlessness as emptiness. John says people can turn emptiness into an “ultimate solvent” for dissolving every attachment. After another participant asks whether this is nihilistic, John answers that it is nihilistic and “very, very dangerous.” For him, this is only half the story: attachment to mere negation means one is not seeing dependent arising.
The difficult part, he says, is seeing the formation itself and knowing that the formation is empty—not merely negating each thing that appears.
Back to top23. Causal efficacy without inherent causal power
John connects causal efficacy with the objection in MMK chapter 24 that emptiness would make the Noble Truths and functioning impossible. His response is the reverse: because things are empty, they can function and interact.
He illustrates this with two phantom-like figures fighting, where one phantom can apparently hurt the other even though both phenomena lack essence. This is what he means by causal efficacy without an intrinsic causal power.
24. Conventionality becomes crucial when no substrate remains
John asks what becomes most important if there is no ultimate reality, substrate, thing, or essence. His answer is conventionality, and he immediately links this with the importance of the two truths.
He explicitly rejects the dismissive response, “Oh, it is just conventional.” Because everything is empty, he says, conventionality becomes very important; in that discussion he also uses the phrase “of equal status.” The point is that conventional validity is not a disposable remainder after emptiness has been established.
He describes conventions as valid, appearing, and functioning. The shift in view is from taking something as concretely true to seeing something that appears and is unfindable: empty ultimately, while valid, functional, and appearing conventionally.
John describes the work as emptying conventional appearance—whether perception or conception—of inherence. Ignorance, in his formulation, projects onto the conventional something that is not there: inherentness.
Because there is no ultimate reality, he says, “the basis of the conventional reality is still conventionality” and “there’s no ending to it.” He says Tsongkhapa puts this emphasis on conventionality very clearly, while also stressing the depth of both Tsongkhapa and Mipham.
Back to top25. Conceptuality, pure perception, and non-meditation
John says that once conventionality is understood this way, one is no longer worried about either conceptual conventionalities or pure perception—the luminous clarity free from conceptual or symbolic layering. His wording is that “it doesn’t matter anymore.”
He connects this directly with non-meditation: once conceptual conventionalities and pure perception no longer pose this problem, he says one can be in a state of non-meditation.
Back to topPart V · Practice, Study, AI, and Publication Responsibility
26. What continues to drive John’s practice
Asked what he is trying to better or maintain, John answers directly: “I’m not trying to better or maintain anything.” He says his phases of insight are driven by what he does not understand.
He says a practitioner must be sincere, avoid spiritual bypassing, and open oneself. Asked what “open up” means, he answers: open the body-mind, thoughts, and attachments. He calls opening oneself “the toughest thing in the world” and “the greatest art.”
Going deeply into what remains unresolved leads him to say that “there’s no ending” and “life has no ending.” He contrasts this with a modern tendency to treat some practice or realization in this life as though everything were finished. As his view became clearer and his experience opened, he says he practised even harder.
The same deepening produces greater respect rather than greater license to pronounce on Buddhism. John says his confidence in the Buddha, Nāgārjuna, Tsongkhapa, Mipham, and other masters becomes very high because he is struck by how deeply they saw and how they were able to express it. He warns against speaking arrogantly or irresponsibly about what Buddhism is.
Back to top27. His reaction to Soh’s translation prompts
Near the end, John says that he likes Soh’s translation prompt and thinks it must have been developed over years.
Across the exchange, John variously describes the prompt as ten or twenty pages, “like a whole book,” more than or almost one hundred pages, and says he has never seen a prompt of that length. He also speculates about or asks whether it is auto-self-generating, rather than asserting that point as a settled fact. See the translation-prompt page.
John’s substantive assessment is positive toward the translation work: he says the blog should focus on translation, notes that the developed prompt can do good translations, and contrasts this with publicly circulating his unfinished video material.
Other participants supply most of the jokes about whether an AI can tolerate such an instruction, being treated like a feelingless robot, and the water and energy consumed by extensive AI use. The final encouragement to meditate and rest is also spoken by another participant after John says that he has to leave; it should not be attributed to John.
Back to top28. Refining right view so that experience can open further
In the later discussion, John tells a participant to refine the view and let the view open. He says that once one is able to see more clearly, experience itself changes.
He explains why he considers this important: the ordinary view is dualistic and inherent, and because that view is harboured, experience appears through it and is easily misinterpreted. As understanding and confidence in right view grow, the mind opens and one sees more clearly.
John therefore warns against jumping prematurely to “no view”: first understand right view and develop confidence in it. He tells the participant that experiences and dreams of clarity are already present, but the view is weak; refining and opening the view is what he says will allow the experience to go further.
He recommends beginning with Mipham, while emphasizing that Mipham is not easy to understand and that the Madhyamaka polemics themselves had given him many insights.
Back to top29. Mipham, Tsongkhapa, translation, and traditional anecdotes
John recommends serious engagement with Mipham and says that Mipham’s writings and the Madhyamaka polemics gave him many insights. During the exchange, the participants identify Karma Phuntsho’s Mipham’s Dialectics and the Debates on Emptiness and Mipham’s Beacon of Certainty; the full book title is supplied by another participant while John recognizes and discusses the works.
John describes his own engagement with these polemics as long-running rather than casual: he says he underlined the passages and kept thinking through what the disputants were talking about over many years, roughly the past decade, because the texts are very difficult to understand without discussion.
John warns against casually calling Mipham a substantialist and says that how a passage sounds can depend heavily on the translator. He says Mipham knows the MMK “inside out.” Later he contrasts the Nyingma emphasis, which integrates luminous clarity, with Tsongkhapa’s presentation, while stressing the profundity of both.
The extraordinary anecdotes are jointly produced and must not be assigned wholesale to John. Another participant makes the strong claim that Mipham could fly and leave footprints in stone. John explicitly qualifies this—“I don’t know whether he can fly or not”—and then relates a traditional story about Mipham’s master travelling to another realm and returning with an unfamiliar flower. John also recalls Mipham producing or translating many important works in remarkably short periods, speaking of days or weeks. The Natural History Museum joke and most of the ensuing Tsongkhapa retreat narrative come from the other participant.
Because these are conversational recollections without documentary support in the meeting, they should be presented as traditional anecdotes, not as verified historical findings.
30. John’s qualified suggestion for using AI with difficult books
John—not another participant—suggests using Gemini or ChatGPT with a difficult book: upload the whole work and ask for a summary of a chapter or its main points. When asked whether the AI will do it properly, he immediately qualifies the suggestion: it cannot do the work very well, but it may provide enough initial understanding for the reader to proceed slowly into the text.
Another participant immediately raises the concern that an AI might downplay something important and says it is better to read the text directly. John’s own suggestion is therefore best understood as a preliminary aid, not a replacement for the book.
The surrounding jokes about ADHD, medication, dating, and reading one chapter a day are divided between John and another participant. They should not be converted into a single polished instructional method or attributed entirely to either speaker.
Back to top31. John’s selection of five core logics
John explains that his “five core logics” are a pedagogical selection from patterns running through the twenty-seven chapters of the MMK. He refers to a common grouping involving chapters 1, 2, 15, 18, and 24, then says he changed two selections in order to emphasize identity and infinite regress.
He clearly mentions chapter 10 and says the other changed selection concerns infinite regress, but that second chapter number is not recoverable with confidence from the meeting transcripts. A later garbled line mentions “chapter five” in connection with svabhāva, but the audio is not available here to resolve that machine reading.
John’s pedagogical reason is clearer than the exact list. Earlier phases of his framework already address presence and anatta, including the issues associated with chapter 18. He therefore wants the later analytical material to bring out additional problems of inherent identity and infinite regress rather than merely repeat the earlier emphasis.
32. Infinite regress, scientific “stuff,” and designation upon characteristics
Before developing the regress example, John criticizes what he sees as a continuing “stuff” framework in modern scientific explanation: even when the proposed fundamental level becomes subtler, one still imagines some fundamental stuff—sometimes spoken of as having consciousness-like as well as matter-like characteristics. His objection is to the assumption that explanation ultimately requires such stuff.
John says infinite regress is a problem for substantialists, not for a non-substantialist view that is already groundless. He explains the regress through the movement from atoms to electrons, protons and neutrons, then to quarks and further levels: if the explanation is always pushed one level down, it has not actually explained anything.
He then asks what these particle names are actually talking about and answers: different behaviours and characteristics. The name can designate those characteristics; one does not need a separate thing that 'houses' them.
In the exchange, measurement is also emphasized: what is encountered are characteristics through interaction with the measuring device and observer. John treats those characteristics as dependently arisen and uses the example to illustrate why another underlying 'stuff' is unnecessary. This remains a philosophical illustration, not a complete technical theory of physics.
Back to top33. Niels Bohr and Karen Barad: corrected names, comparison, and conjecture
John speculates that Niels Bohr may have studied emptiness because he associates Bohr’s account of indeterminacy with the denial of intrinsic characteristics. Nothing in the transcript witnesses or the sources reviewed establishes that historical claim, so it must remain explicitly John’s conjecture.
He then connects the discussion with Karen Barad. The automatic transcripts garble the names, but the surrounding references to Einstein, the Copenhagen interpretation, agential realism, and intra-action make Niels Bohr and Karen Barad the strongest contextual resolutions.
Barad’s concept is a useful comparison because intra-action rejects the assumption that fully constituted relata must exist before their relation. The analogy should not be expanded into an assertion that agential realism and Madhyamaka are identical, or that Barad supplies the full meaning of Nāgārjuna.
34. The organization of John’s video material and its AI-oriented component
When asked whether he had recently read or learned anything especially insightful, John says, “I stopped reading already.” A participant then says “Soto”; John replies “Zen. The Korean, is it? Ah, Dōgen. I actually picked up…” before the exchange fragments into several participants showing or discussing books. Because the remainder is incomplete and speaker-shared, the synopsis does not infer a substantive teaching point from it.
John then says the videos are being reclassified into five main parts. The recording clearly mentions “decoding of view” and “understanding of dependent origination,” then describes axioms and mathematics as material aimed more at AI and standardization across LLMs. The meeting does not give five cleanly recoverable titles, so the synopsis does not invent them.
John imagines loading an axiomatic representation of his framework into an LLM as a persona or analytical system. When he asks a question, the system would check it against those axioms and tell him whether it is right or wrong. He then asks, in a phrase whose intended technical meaning is unclear, “Is that reverse? Does it contradict?”, and says the system could report that something does not contradict. The synopsis therefore preserves “reverse” as spoken without inventing a separate formal operation for it. He presents this as an AI-oriented standardization/checking project rather than as part of the meditative realization itself.
35. His reservations about public circulation of the videos
John is firm that his experimental videos should not be treated as finished public Buddhist teaching. He first says he had expected about twenty people; later in the same discussion he restates the intended audience as roughly ten to twenty close people. When the count rose to about 220 and then 228, he became concerned and considered making the material private or otherwise restricting access.
He describes the material as personal opinion, a personal journey, storage for ideas that may later become chapters, and experiments with AI-assisted presentation. He says some AI-produced material may be inaccurate, and that his non-orthodox phrases—such as “relation without relata” and “designation without naming and labelling”—require substantial explanation and can mislead when detached from context.
John explicitly says that he is not a teacher. A little later he becomes even more direct: “don’t talk about teaching,” adding that this is very serious because “in Buddhism, we cannot anyhow teach.” He ties that caution to his preference that people study the texts and to his concern that the videos can mislead without the extensive explanation their non-orthodox formulations require.
He says his videos might be used only “probably 10%, 5, 10%,” describes them as personal opinion and a personal journey, and says close friends may take them as reference. The phrase “five or ten percent of someone’s study” is therefore a synopsis of those adjacent remarks, not a verbatim quotation.
He would rather keep the material within a small circle or restricted sharing context. He emphasizes that it is his work and that the decision about wider release is his. John says he had already left Facebook and then created YouTube mainly as a place to save his material and to test some AI. Some of that AI-produced material, he adds, was not fully correct because he had not yet mastered the tools. Wider reposting therefore conflicted with the private/reference purpose for which he was keeping the channel.
Supplemental source — full excerpt from John Tan’s new, as-yet-unreleased book manuscript
The following is reproduced verbatim from the manuscript excerpt supplied for this article. It is later authorial material, not part of the 27 June 2026 Zoom meeting. The wording is intentionally preserved exactly as supplied, including “Three terms and distinctions,” even though five methodological items are subsequently discussed.
A Note on Method
This work is divided into five parts. Part One, this volume, is the main text: the sustained argument running from the collapse of the observer through dependent designation, causality, and the resonances and open questions gathered near its close. Part Two, Three Formations, carries that same logic through three coherent contemplative exercises — the mountain, the flower, and space — applying it directly rather than continuing to argue for it. Part Three, Nothing to Find, Nothing Missing, is a shorter, more accessible companion, walking a newer reader through the central argument from the beginning. Part Four, Science and the Dharma, sets this argument alongside developments in modern physics and cognitive science, carefully distinguishing resonance from proof throughout. The Appendix lays out the formal and linguistic scaffolding underlying the whole project — why ordinary grammar keeps reconstructing substance, and one proposed notation for avoiding it.
This book draws extensively on Nāgārjuna, Candrakīrti, Tsongkhapa, Mipham, Dōgen, and the Dzogchen tradition. It is not a translation, a commentary, or a scholarly exposition of any one of them. It is a personal philosophical synthesis, developed in continuity with Madhyamaka and Dzogchen, offered for its own coherence and usefulness rather than as a claim to represent orthodox doctrine.
Three terms and distinctions used throughout this book are my own, not classical divisions found in the source texts, and it matters that this is stated plainly rather than left for the reader to assume otherwise: Conceptual designation versus dependent designation. Classical Madhyamaka does not separate these into two distinct categories. Madhyamaka's own position is that all designation is dependent designation — there is no legitimate "conceptual designation" standing apart from it as a rival account of how labels attach to things. The distinction drawn throughout this book, between a "thing first, label second" sequence and a "thing and label arising together" structure, is a pedagogical separation of my own, built to make the core insight easier to approach for a reader encountering it for the first time. It is not a division Nāgārjuna or Candrakīrti would recognize as their own, even though the conclusion it leads toward — that all designation is dependent — is entirely theirs.
Designation by relation. The distinction between designation-by-thought and designation-by-relation, and the claim that structural, non-conceptual individuation (illustrated by the blue-and-yellow contrast) operates even prior to explicit conceptual labeling, does not appear as a formal division in classical Madhyamaka sources. It is a personal synthesis in continuity with the tradition, not orthodox doctrine.
The logic of the single stroke. The framing of Nāgasena's chariot as containing every subsequent insight of this book in miniature — no residue, exhaustive conditionality, no hierarchy or sequence, mutual dependence, full function without essence — is my own organizing device. It is a way of reading the chariot dialogue that I have found genuinely illuminating, not a claim about how the dialogue was originally intended or has traditionally been read.
Spontaneous presence equals dependent arising. This book argues, in its later chapters, that Dzogchen's spontaneous presence (lhun grub) and Madhyamaka's dependent arising are the same nature under two descriptions, and that Dzogchen's direct introduction can be understood as the experiential actualization of what Madhyamaka's analysis was always pointing toward. This reading has real support within the tradition — Longchenpa's insistence that the ground is empty, not a subtle existent thing, points in the same direction — but it is not a settled cross-tradition consensus. Other lineages and commentators hold that Dzogchen constitutes its own resultant vehicle, not reducible to or guaranteed by Madhyamaka analysis alone. The equivalence of nature is a position I hold with real confidence, built carefully across this book. That it follows Madhyamaka analysis in a way that makes the two traditions simply two descriptions of one path is my own synthesis of a live and unresolved question, not a report of settled doctrine.
The desynchronization of view, experience, and insight. A central organizing claim of this book is that direct contemplative experience — the taste of anatta, of total exertion — can arrive complete while the conceptual view used to understand it remains, unnoticed, substantialist, and that this mismatch, rather than any deficiency in the experience itself, is what keeps a mind from opening fully. The underlying phenomenon this points to — that realization and view can run at different paces — is recognized in various forms across contemplative traditions. The specific framing of it as a "desynchronization," and the use of that framing as the engine organizing this entire book from the collapse of the observer through to the final chapters, is my own construction. It is offered because I have found it clarifying and, I believe, accurate to how this process actually unfolds — not because it is a term or a diagnostic framework drawn from any classical source.
None of this diminishes what the book is trying to do. It simply means the book should be read as what it is: one practitioner's attempt to synchronize direct contemplative experience with a rigorously non-substantialist view, built using the tools Madhyamaka and Dzogchen provide, and organized with distinctions of my own devising where the tradition itself does not supply one ready-made. Where a claim is demonstrated by the classical arguments themselves, I have tried to say so. Where a claim is my own extension, reading, or synthesis, I have tried to say that too, both here and at each point in the text where it becomes relevant again.
Source status: unpublished manuscript excerpt supplied by the user. It is included here as later authorial clarification and is not used to rewrite the meeting transcript itself.
Integrated account of John’s position
Direct realization of anatta can bring vivid nondual experience and total exertion, but John’s central warning is that the practitioner’s framework may still remain inherent. Experience and view can be out of sync.
That residual framework may still treat consciousness, fluid process, space, time, conditions, or other explanatory bases as inherently established. Madhyamaka analysis is used to see why phenomena with essence could not arise, interact, communicate, or appear dependently.
Dependent designation, relation without relata, and causal efficacy without causal power are John’s ways of pressing the same point from different angles: function does not require an independently existing substrate.
Yet emptiness does not eliminate appearance. Phenomena remain conventionally valid and functional. The absence of ultimate foundation makes conventionality more important, not less. Ultimately phenomena are empty and unfindable; conventionally they appear, function, and arise dependently.
Mere negation, however, is only half the story. John repeatedly insists that the difficult part is seeing formation and seeing that formation as empty. When conventionality is understood in this way, he says one is no longer worried about conceptual conventionalities or pure perception, and connects that directly with non-meditation.
His practical standard is sincerity: allow what is not understood to drive further investigation rather than bypassing it. He describes this as opening the body-mind, thoughts, and attachments, and says that deeper understanding leads him to practise more seriously and to respect the great Buddhist masters more deeply.
Sources and verification scope
The later methodological clarifications marked above come from a new, as-yet-unreleased John Tan book manuscript excerpt supplied for this article. Because the manuscript is not publicly available, these passages are used only as later authorial clarification of how John himself classifies his terminology, pedagogical distinctions, and cross-tradition synthesis. They are not used as independent verification of what was said in the 27 June meeting, and they are kept visually and verbally distinct from the meeting synopsis.
The meeting transcript witnesses control the spoken content, while speaker attribution is reconstructed from diarization, direct address, continuity, and cross-Part identification. Where the user directly re-listened to a disputed word or phrase, that check controls the phonetic reading actually checked; it is not treated as a blanket source for speaker identity. Public sources are used only to verify names, titles, textual references, or the limits of historical/comparative claims. They do not certify John Tan’s interpretations, realization claims, traditional anecdotes, or unresolved audio.
- YouTube Videos and Audios by John Tan: Union of Dependent Arising and Emptiness — companion media collection.
- Milindapañha 3.1.1 — the chariot simile.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Nāgārjuna.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: The Theory of Two Truths in India.
- “Not Even Absent: Dependent Origination, Emptiness, and the Two Truths in the Thought of Nāgārjuna”.
- A scholarly explanation of Karen Barad’s “intra-action”.
- Yoshiaki Niisaku, “Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, Chapter 18, Verse 2 and the Prasannapadā’s Commentary Thereon”.
- Karma Phuntsho, Mipham’s Dialectics and the Debates on Emptiness
- Mipham’s Beacon of Certainty — official publisher page
- A scholarly account of relata and intra-action in agential realism
- Possible textual comparison: Jan Westerhoff, The Dispeller of Disputes (Oxford University Press)
Watch and listen: John Tan on dependent arising and emptiness
The companion collection gathers John Tan’s videos and audios on right view, phase six, dependent designation, relations without relata, causal efficacy, the five MMK deconstruction logics, and why mere negation is inadequate.
YouTube Videos and Audios by John Tan: Union of Dependent Arising and Emptiness
Prepared from the supplied 27 June 2026 Zoom transcript witnesses. This is a comprehensive synopsis, not a verbatim transcript.
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