To this philosophy of phenomena (or things as they appear to us), the Mādhyamikas add a philosophy of noumenon (or reality in itself). Buddha's teachings regarding dependent origination, impermanence, etc., apply, they hold, only to the phenomenal world, to things commonly obsereved by us in ordinary expericence. But when nirvāṇa is attained and the conditions of sense-experience and the appearance of phenomena are controlled, what would be the nature of the resultant experience? To this we cannot apply the conditional characters true of phenomena. The Mādhyamikas, therefore, hold that there
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