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principles or invariances
Any attempt to understand mere being must lead to a distinction between appearance and essence Thus arose the Buddhist concepts of Dharma or phenomenon, Dharmata or invariant order and Dharmalaksana and dharmasvabhāva ie phenomenal manifestation and phenomenal ground 5 The doctrine of the momentariness of all phenomena governed by the ultimate principle of Pratītyasamutpāda or contingent origination became the cardinal principle of Buddhist thought From this it follows that perceptual experience and common sense are ab initio involved in an illusion Except in introspection, we never perceive the constant flux in which all things are constantly appearing and disappearing As Bertrand Russel once remarked in a truly Buddhistic vein, change is the law of nature while identity is a mere construct If we could peep into the inner constitution of things we would discover not substance but process, a ceaseless procession of microevents where only certain invariances of functional relationships may be discovered Thus the hard solid world of common experience is nothing but a natural illusion conjured by our senses Reality then becomes invisible and only indirectly accessible, a rational construct rather than the content of plain perception This should be sufficient to shake our belief in the reality of objects merely on the ground that they are so perceived Indeed, we must reflect over the fact that while they last, illusions, hallucinations and dreams exercise the same convincing force as common experience So suspect is common experience, in fact, that whenever we come across anything unusual or out of the way, we seek confirmation in terms of repeatability and an intelligible law of occurrence It is obvious thus that fugitive or unrepeated experience (anabhyāsadaśāpanna pratyaksa) is but a poor warrant for belief in the reality of its object It needs a further validation
Apart from the psychologically illusive characteristics of perceptual experience and its need of rational validation, there is an insuperable epistemological difficulty in believing the content of perception to be a direct reference to reality The process of perception involving sensory as well as psychic functioning must
