What this concept is saying
無來無去 (*wú lái wú qù*, “neither coming nor going”) does not deny that trains arrive, people leave, bodies move, or relationships begin and end. At the conventional level, Buddhism speaks perfectly naturally about all these events. The teaching asks a deeper question: when something “comes,” can we find an independently existing thing that first existed elsewhere, then transported its fixed identity here? When something “goes,” can we find a self-contained entity departing from one intrinsic location and arriving intact at another?
The answer offered by the Prajñāpāramitā teachings is no. What we call arrival and departure are intelligible as conventional descriptions of changing conditions, but neither the moving thing nor its coming and going possesses an independent, unchanging essence.
The *Shorter Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra* (《小品般若波羅蜜經》) states the point succinctly: “The Buddhas come from nowhere and go nowhere” (「諸佛無所從來，去無所至」). Its reason is: “The suchness of all dharmas is unmoving; the suchness of all dharmas is precisely the Tathāgata” (「諸法如，不動故。諸法如，即是如來」).
Here, 諸法如 (*zhūfǎ rú*, “the suchness of all phenomena”) means phenomena just as they are when no imagined self-nature is added to them. “Unmoving” does not posit a permanent metaphysical substance hiding beneath change. Suchness is not a cosmic object that remains still while appearances move around it. Rather, when phenomena are seen as dependently arisen and empty of an independent essence, there is no fixed entity whose intrinsic nature can be shown to migrate from one place or state to another.
This is why the sūtra connects “neither coming nor going” with a whole family of expressions: 無生 (*non-arising*), 實際 (*the ultimate limit of reality*), 空 (*emptiness*), 斷 (*cessation*), 離 (*detachment or freedom from appropriation*), 滅 (*quiescence*), and 虛空性 (*the nature of space*). Each is said to be without coming or going, and each is identified with the Tathāgata. These are not several hidden absolutes. The text says that the suchness of phenomena and the suchness of the Tathāgatas are “one suchness, neither two nor different.” Apart from this, no separately existing Tathāgata can be obtained.
This has a direct bearing on how one “sees the Buddha.” A Buddha’s visible body and audible speech appear through conditions. They may be encountered, remembered, represented, and eventually disappear. But attachment to bodily appearance, name, voice, or verbal formula makes us imagine that the Buddha as Buddha is a substantial individual who travels into our presence and later travels out of existence. The sūtra therefore says, “All Buddha-Tathāgatas are the Dharma-body” (「諸佛如來皆是法身」). 法身 (*dharmakāya*, “Dharma-body”) here points to the Buddha understood through the true character of phenomena, not to another subtle body concealed inside the physical one.
The *Diamond Sūtra* (《金剛般若波羅蜜經》) gives the best-known formulation of the same teaching:
“If someone says that the Tathāgata comes, goes, sits, or lies down, that person does not understand the meaning of what I teach. Why? ‘Tathāgata’ means one who comes from nowhere and goes nowhere; therefore he is called the Tathāgata.” 「若有人言如來若來若去若坐若臥，是人不解我所說義。何以故？如來者，無所從來，亦無所去，故名如來。」
The wording is preserved in Kumārajīva’s translation of the [*Diamond Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra*](https://buddhism.lib.ntu.edu.tw/BDLM/sutra/html/T08/T08n0235.htm). It does not claim that Śākyamuni’s body never walked, sat, or lay down. It warns against reducing “Tathāgata” to those bodily postures.
The *Shorter Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra* explains this from two complementary angles.
First, it uses distinct images:
- Water seems to shimmer in a mirage, but no actual body of water has travelled into the desert.
- An illusionist produces the appearance of troops, but no real army has arrived from somewhere or marched away somewhere.
- One may meet a Tathāgata in a dream, yet upon waking no place can be found from which that dream figure came or to which it departed.
These images do not say that nothing appears. The mirage is seen, the conjured soldiers are experienced, and the dream can transform the dreamer. They say that appearance does not establish the independent existence we instinctively project onto it.
Second, the sūtra explains the matter through dependent conditions. The sound of a harp does not come exclusively from its strings, wooden body, plectrum, player’s hand, or any other single component. Nor does it arise without causes. When the relevant conditions meet, sound occurs; when they separate, the sound ceases. It did not wait fully formed inside one component, and after ceasing it does not travel to another region of the universe.
The Buddha’s manifested body is explained in the same way: it “belongs to many conditions” and is accomplished through immeasurable merit. It does not originate in one cause, but neither is it causeless. Conditions converge and there is manifestation; conditions disperse and that manifestation ceases. “No source from which it came” therefore means “no independent source containing an already constituted entity”—not “no causes and consequences.”
The *Mahāprajñāpāramitāśāstra* (《大智度論》) subjects motion itself to an even more exact analysis.
Suppose we say that “going” exists intrinsically. In what time is it found?
- In what has already gone, the act of going is finished.
- In what has not yet gone, going has not begun.
- A present “time of going” cannot be established independently of the act called going; yet the act cannot be established without identifying a time and a goer.
Thus the treatise says: “In what has gone there is no going; in what has not gone there is also no going; apart from what has gone and has not gone, in the time of going there is likewise no going” (「已去中無去，未去中亦無去；離已去未去，去時亦無去」).
This does not prove that one cannot walk across a room. It shows that “goer,” “going,” and “time of going” are mutually dependent designations. If one tries to isolate an intrinsic act of going, the analysis generates duplication: one “going” would be required to constitute the present time as a time of going, and another to be the action occurring within that time. Conversely, without a going person there is no act of going, while apart from the act there is no person who is intrinsically a “goer.” The same reasoning applies to coming and remaining.
The treatise then examines the Buddha through the 五眾 (*five aggregates*, another translation of 五蘊). Buddha cannot be found as something apart from form, feeling, recognition, formations, and consciousness; yet neither can Buddha be identified as one aggregate, their mere sum, or an independent owner possessing them. This is not the nihilistic declaration “there is no Buddha.” The treatise explicitly says that it is breaking attachment to the idea of Buddha, not replacing it with attachment to the idea that there is no Buddha.
That is the Middle Way. “The Buddha exists as a self-established being” is one extreme; “there is utterly no Buddha, awakening, teaching, or compassionate activity” is the other. The first reifies; the second annihilates. Dependent appearance and emptiness belong together. Because something is dependently arisen, it can function; because it is dependently arisen, it is empty of self-nature. Because it is empty, its identity is not frozen and transformation is possible.
This is where “neither coming nor going” stands on the path of liberation. It is not chiefly a theory about locomotion. It loosens the basic structure of appropriation: “I am a fixed subject; this event has come to me; this pleasure must remain with me; that person has left me; this injury has entered and permanently defined my life.” Wisdom does not erase the event. It sees that the suffering event, the injured person, the memory, and the sense of an enduring owner all arise through conditions and cannot be found as fixed essences. That insight makes non-clinging possible without making compassion disappear.
A walk-through in everyday life
Imagine that you are commuting home after an exhausting day. Your phone vibrates. A message from someone close to you reads: “I don’t think this relationship is working.” Almost instantly, the thought appears: “They are leaving me.”
Let us walk through the event without skipping any of its conventional reality.
First, there are conditions. A phone, electrical power, a network, software, language conventions, earlier conversations, each person’s history, present fatigue, expectations, and a decision to type all converge. The message does not come from the phone alone, the sender’s fingers alone, the algorithm alone, or a single isolated intention. It is like the harp sound: it occurs through a configuration of conditions.
This does not mean the sender had no intention or responsibility. Dependent origination includes intention and consequences; it does not dissolve them. It means that intention itself has conditions and is not an unconditioned little sovereign residing outside the causal world.
Second, an appearance becomes an apparently solid event. Pixels form letters. Consciousness reads them. Recognition identifies the sentence. Feeling registers a painful tone. Volitional formations begin constructing responses: “I must persuade them,” “I should attack first,” or “No one ever stays.” These processes happen rapidly, and together they produce the impression that a fully formed catastrophe has arrived from outside and entered an equally solid “me.”
The easy mistake is to map “neither coming nor going” onto the physical phone and conclude, absurdly, “No message was sent.” Conventionally, a message was sent and received. The contemplative question is different: where is the supposedly self-contained thing called “rejection”?
Is it identical with the pixels? The same pixels could be quoted in therapy, shown to a friend, or reread years later with a different meaning. Is it entirely inside the sender? You do not have unmediated access to the sender’s mind, and their intention may itself be conflicted. Is it inside you? Your response changes with fatigue, history, interpretation, and what happens next. Is it the relationship’s objective essence? The relationship consists of innumerable interactions and cannot be compressed without remainder into one sentence.
“Rejection” is not unreal in the sense of being inconsequential. It is empty in the precise sense that it cannot be located as an independent entity existing by its own power. It arises dependently as an event with emotional and ethical force.
Third, look for the “leaving.” Some aspects of the shared relationship have already passed; their passing is not presently occurring. Some imagined future separations have not happened. The present consists of shifting bodily sensations, thoughts, intentions, messages, and circumstances. There is no additional, self-existing entity called “leaving” hovering behind these processes. “They are leaving” is a useful conventional summary, but suffering intensifies when the summary is treated as a solid essence.
Fourth, look for the fixed person who leaves and the fixed person who is abandoned. Neither person is reducible to a body, a feeling, a memory, a role, or an account of the relationship. Neither can be found independently of all such conditions. This does not make either person disposable. On the contrary, seeing people as conditioned and changing permits a more intelligent compassion: the other person is more than the villain created by this moment, and you are more than “the one who is always left.”
Fifth, practice 不分別 (*non-discrimination* or “not fabricating conceptual divisions”). In this context it does not mean becoming unable to distinguish kindness from cruelty, truth from manipulation, or reconciliation from danger. It means not converting the practical distinction “this relationship may be ending” into metaphysical stories such as “a permanent failure has entered my being,” “this feeling will never leave,” or “the person I knew has vanished into absolute nonexistence.”
You may still reply, ask for clarity, grieve, establish a boundary, or end the relationship. Wisdom determines neither a passive nor a predetermined response. It changes the quality from which one responds: less possession, less panic, less compulsion to freeze oneself and the other into permanent identities.
Finally, notice cessation. The notification sound has already ceased, but it did not travel somewhere else. A wave of panic rises, changes, and subsides; it does not depart to a hidden warehouse. The relationship’s present form may dissolve, but it does not become a thing that journeys into “the past.” Effects remain—memories, habits, responsibilities, grief, gratitude—because conditions have consequences. Yet no fixed relationship-entity can be found migrating from existence into nonexistence.
This is the dream and mirage teaching applied with care. It does not say, “Your heartbreak is imaginary, so get over it.” It says: the experience is vivid, but the permanence, independence, and totalizing meaning that the mind adds to it are not found in the experience itself. Seeing this creates a small but decisive opening. Pain can be present without becoming a permanent self.
The same examination works while scrolling through a feed. A recommended video appears to have simply “come to you,” but it depends on creators, servers, past clicks, ranking systems, advertisers, social trends, and your current attention. No single component contains the complete recommendation. The algorithmic analogy can illuminate conditionality, but it is only an analogy: an engineered recommendation system is not the same thing as dependent origination, and computational descriptions do not establish the Buddhist account of emptiness.
Why contemporary people need it
Contemporary life continually presents appearances without presenting their conditions. A product arrives on a screen detached from its supply chain. A headline arrives detached from editorial selection. An emotional reaction arrives before we can see the memory, fatigue, fear, and expectation that shaped it. An online identity appears as though it were a self-existing person rather than a curated intersection of body, history, platform, audience, and intention.
“Neither coming nor going” retrains attention to see events as conditional formations rather than mysterious invasions by solid things.
This matters first because much suffering is an attempt to make coming permanent and going impossible. We want praise to arrive and become ours. We want youth, health, status, certainty, and affection to stay. When they change, the mind tells a story of theft: “Something that truly belonged to me has been taken away.” The teaching does not ask us to stop loving. It asks whether love must be converted into ownership before it can feel secure.
Second, it weakens fatalistic identity. A person says, “Anxiety came into my life,” and soon “I am an anxious person” becomes an essence. But anxiety depends on bodily states, memories, interpretations, social conditions, habits of attention, and many factors not yet understood. Because it is conditioned, it is neither trivial nor immutable. One can seek therapy, medical care, community, contemplative training, rest, or changes in circumstance without treating anxiety as a permanent owner of the mind.
Brain science may describe correlations among perception, memory, emotion, and bodily regulation, but those findings remain methodologically and philosophically contested in important respects. They neither prove emptiness nor replace contemplative insight. At most, they can help contemporary readers resist the crude picture of a single, unchanging controller inside the head.
Third, the teaching supports ethical responsibility more subtly than the language of isolated agents does. If harmful conduct depended only on an evil essence inside one person, punishment or exclusion might seem sufficient. If conduct arises through intentions, habits, institutions, incentives, trauma, and opportunity, then responsibility includes restraining harm, addressing conditions, cultivating different habits, and protecting those at risk. Emptiness does not remove agency; it shows agency to be relational and trainable.
Fourth, “neither coming nor going” changes our relation to death. It does not offer the easy reassurance that a permanent self simply travels intact to another place. Nor does it reduce death to the annihilation of an independently existing person. The teaching refuses both extremes. A life is a dependently arisen continuity: deeds have effects, conditions transmit consequences, yet no permanent owner can be isolated within the stream. Different Buddhist traditions articulate continuity and rebirth in different analytical vocabularies, but none requires an eternal, independently existing self migrating unchanged between lives.
Most importantly, this insight serves the union of wisdom and compassion. If beings were fixed essences, liberation would be impossible: what is intrinsically deluded could never awaken. Because beings and afflictions are dependently arisen and empty, habits can be transformed. At the same time, emptiness prevents the practitioner from making awakening into a possession—“I have travelled from ordinary person to spiritually superior person.”
The *Shorter Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra* therefore connects understanding the non-coming, non-going, non-arising, and non-ceasing of Buddhas and all phenomena with the path to unsurpassed complete awakening. The point is not that mastering a paradox earns a reward. To see phenomena in this way is already to undermine ignorance, grasping, and the rigid subject-object structure by which suffering perpetuates itself.
Common misunderstandings and clarifications
“Nothing moves.”
Conventionally, bodies move and events occur. “Neither coming nor going” is not a rival theory of physics. It shows that movement cannot be established as the intrinsic property of an independent mover. Conventional motion remains valid for catching a train, treating an injury, or keeping someone from danger.
“Nothing exists, so nothing matters.”
This confuses emptiness with nonexistence. The harp sound is conditioned and empty, yet it can be beautiful, frightening, loud, or soft. Words are empty of independent nature, yet they can reconcile people or incite violence. Because actions participate in causal networks, their consequences matter profoundly.
“Things arise from nowhere.”
The teaching says the opposite of causelessness. “No place from which it comes” means that no single cause contains a completed thing that later emerges. The sūtra repeatedly insists upon the convergence and dispersal of conditions. Karma, intention, effort, and circumstances remain operative.
“There is an eternal, motionless Reality behind the moving world.”
The language “true character constantly abides and does not move” can easily be read in this way, but that would turn suchness into a permanent substance. In the Prajñāpāramitā context, suchness is itself empty. The *Mahāprajñāpāramitāśāstra* says that the suchness of material phenomena and the suchness of the Buddhas are empty by nature; therefore they neither come nor go. “Unmoving” denies intrinsic arising, departing, and alteration—it does not install an eternal entity behind them.
“The Buddha never physically entered parinirvāṇa.”
At the conventional level, the Buddha was born, taught, aged, and passed into parinirvāṇa. The teaching concerns what a Buddha ultimately is and whether a self-existent Tathāgata can be found within or apart from the five aggregates. The Dharma-body is not reducible to a historical body, but neither should it be imagined as a permanent supernatural personality occupying another location.
“There is no Buddha.”
The *Mahāprajñāpāramitāśāstra* anticipates this conclusion and rejects it. Its analysis is meant to break attachment to a reified Buddha, “not to grasp the idea of no Buddha” (「破著佛想，不言取無佛想」). Buddha is conventionally spoken of and awakening is efficacious; what cannot be found is a Buddha existing by independent essence.
“Non-discrimination means having no judgments or boundaries.”
Prajñāpāramitā’s 不分別 does not require cognitive blankness. A practitioner still recognizes suffering, danger, deception, skillful conduct, and harmful conduct. What ceases is the compulsive fabrication of intrinsic divisions: an absolutely pure self against an absolutely corrupt other, an independently existing gain entering “me,” or a permanent loss departing from “me.” Wisdom can make distinctions without turning them into essences.
“Dreamlike” means merely imaginary.
A dream is used because it vividly appears while lacking the mode of existence attributed to it. The analogy concerns how something exists, not whether it is experienced or has effects. A nightmare can accelerate the heartbeat; an empty phenomenon can shape a life. The lesson is not indifference but freedom from misapprehending appearance as independent reality.
“Coming and going are exactly the same.”
Conventionally they are different and have different consequences. The teaching does not flatten distinctions. It says that neither side possesses independent nature. Likewise, arising and ceasing, presence and absence, Buddha and ordinary being remain usable designations without becoming metaphysical absolutes.
“Understanding the argument is the same as liberation.”
Logical analysis can expose contradiction, but the teaching becomes liberating only when applied to grasping in lived experience. When praise comes, can it be known without building a self from it? When pain goes, can its departure be allowed without demanding that it never return? When someone dies, can grief be fully honored without inventing either an eternal possessor or sheer annihilation? When insight appears, can it remain unowned?
To “know the Tathāgata through the character of Dharma” (「以法相知如來」) is ultimately to learn how to see every experience in this way: dependently manifest, effective, ungraspable, and without a self-established traveller passing from source to destination. Then 無來無去 is no longer an abstract riddle. It becomes a way of meeting change without being deceived by solidity—allowing compassion to act fully while wisdom finds nothing it must possess.