"One of the radical aspects of Buddhist meditation is that it invites us to suspend the habit of reflexively ascribing existence to everything experienced and return to the perceptual simplicity of a phenomenological view. When we attend merely to what appears, as the famous teaching to Bahiya puts it, then “in the seen there will be just the seen, in the heard just the heard, in the felt just the felt, and in the thought, just the thought.” (Udana 1.10) As even a passing encounter with meditation will demonstrate, it does not take long in this mode for the reality of the external world to dissolve into irrelevance amid a swirling sea of changing phenomena. The appearances are so apparently real, insofar as they arise and pass away with such astonishing immediacy, that the question of whether or not they are “really real” becomes a mere conceptual curiosity, more distracting than meaningful."

Appearance And Reality - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review - Fall 2009