no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body and no mind.
– from the Heart Sutra
Why is there no eye and so on?
The simple answer is that as capacity for our experience of all phenomena, we are none of those things.
Here, I also notice that the true nature of all phenomena – including eyes, ears and so on – is the same as my own true nature. To me, the true nature of an eye is not being an eye, it’s awake no-thing that’s capacity for what we call an eye.
There are also other ways to understand it.
Eye, ear, and so on are labels and not what they refer to. If we think we understand something through a label, we miss out.
In my direct experience, I find I don’t taste with the tongue, see with the eyes, and so on. Those are learned assumptions. Instead, there is taste, sight, sounds, and so on. They happen within and as what I am and live their own life.
And when I look more closely, I find that my experience of the world – including of eyes, ears, thoughts, and so on – are created by a combination of the sense fields, including thought. I cannot find these things outside how my mind combines sense fields to create the appearance of these.