[Excerpts from a chapter in “Small Boat, Great Mountain” by Ajahn Amaro. This is about the Buddha’s Dependent Origination cycle, if you’re new to the subject, please take a look at last week’s post and the one before that.]

Exit Points from the Cycle

We don’t need to look very far to see the dependent origination pattern in our everyday lives. We can see how over and over again the cycle is enacted in our being, moment after moment, hour after hour, day after day. We get caught in things we love, things we hate, things we have opinions about, in feelings about ourselves, feelings about others, in liking, disliking, hoping, fearing. It goes on and on. The good news is that there are several different places where we can catch this cycle and ultimately free the heart.

One could do a month-long workshop on dependent origination and not exhaust it. So, I will just give a few of the key points here. Let’s say the worst has happened. Something very painful has taken place. We’ve come to be surrounded by broken glass. We’ve had an argument with someone. We took something that wasn’t ours. We were selfish or greedy. Someone has hurt us. How did we get ourselves into this mess? This is life. We are experiencing the anguish of dukkha. But we don’t need to feel like a victim or fly into a “Why me?” tantrum.

One of the Buddha’s most beautiful teachings is that the experience of suffering can go in two directions. One, it can compound our misery and confusion. Two, it can ripen in search. When everything has gone wrong, we have a choice. Do we just wallow? Or do we say: “Why is it like this? What am I doing to make this a problem?” The search kicks in, to find where we are clinging and why we are looking for happiness where it cannot be found. (A 6.63)

Even at the birth, ageing, sickness, death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair end of the cycle, we can use that pain as the cause to help us wake up. Actually, the Buddha points out in some of his teachings that the very experience of dukkha can cause faith to come into existence. (S 12.23) The pain is saying: “This really hurts. But somehow, I know that this is not the ultimate reality.” We also know that “I can do something about this; it’s up to me.” So, the faith that something is doable arises, and that faith is what launches us on the path of transcendence.

Another place to investigate is at the link between feeling and craving, between vedanā and tanha. Tanha literally means “thirst.” Often it is translated as “desire,” but there are wholesome desires as well as unwholesome ones. That’s why craving is a much better word. It has an intrinsic agitated, frantic, “me, me, me” element to it. Feeling is a world of innocence. We can have an intensely blissful, exciting, pleasant feeling. We can have an extremely painful feeling. We can have a fuzzy, neutral feeling through the body or the mind. Feeling by itself is utterly innocent. There is no intrinsic positive or negative quality to it at all. If there’s sufficient awareness, then all mental and sense phenomena, and the pleasant, painful, or neutral feelings associated with them, can be known, without clinging, as appearances. As soon as ignorance, marigpa, enters the picture, the heart begins to crave: if it’s beautiful, “I want it.” If it’s ugly, “Get it out of here; it stinks.” Somewhere between these two we will generally create an opinion about it. This is a point in meditation where we can clearly cut the cycle, where we can avoid getting reborn, where we can stay with the quality of the wholeness of the Dharma. There is feeling, sight, smell, taste, and touch, and we recognize the emotions that go along with them, but it’s just the world of feeling—pure and innocent.

The last part of the pattern I want to discuss is actually at the beginning of the story, at the very start of the dependent origination cycle: Avijjā paccayā sankhārā, ignorance conditions formations. In other words, ignorance complicates everything. What does this mean? Sankhāra is a broad term that fundamentally means “that which is compounded,” and it gets translated many ways: karmic formations, concoctions, fabrications, volitional formations, subject/object duality—there’s a large constellation of meanings.

What this phrase, “Ignorance complicates everything,” is saying is that as soon as there is avijjā, as soon as rigpa is lost, then instantly the seeds of duality start to form and sprout. There’s an observer and an observed; there is a this and a that; a here and a there; a me and a world. Even at its most subtle, germinal stage, this is what it is talking about. As soon as there is avijjā, sankhāra is caused to be there. Then it becomes a vortex; the tiniest little movement and it starts to grow, to spiral out. Sankhārā paccayā viññanam: sankhāra conditions consciousness. Consciousness conditions mind and body. Mind and body conditions the six senses. The six senses condition feeling, craving, and so on.

By the time we get down to the six senses, there is the body here and there’s the world out there, and we experience them as apparently solid realities.

If it’s only just started to head down the line, it’s a matter of quickly catching it. We can step back and see where an observer and an observed have already been created. As it is said, “Sankhāra sticks its head out” like a tortoise—meaning some form is trying to poke its head into rigpa. But if 80 percent of the rigpa, the knowing, is there, we can still catch it and come back to rest in that open awareness.

We are talking about the subtle area of movement where, as soon as there is a slippage of mindfulness or the faintest coloration or distortion of that awareness, duality kicks in. And that’s the seed of the whole thing. If it’s seen at that point and not followed, then that seed, that primal movement, will not grow further, it will cease right there. If it’s not seen, the vortex will build and build until there is “me in here, the world out there.” And then: “I want it, I can’t stand it, I’ve got to have it. How marvellous, how wonderful, I am going places”—sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair.

Endless Hunger

What happens at that latter end of the cycle, when the dukkha hasn’t ripened in the search for truth and we’ve let our misery get compounded? We feel incomplete. There’s “me” feeling unhappy, miserable, insecure, incomplete, alienated. Then as soon as there’s an idea or a feeling or an emotion or a sense object that might possibly make us feel complete again, we jump on it. “Well, that looks interesting. Perhaps this will do the trick.” There is a feeling of hunger, a lack, or a longing that comes from the experience of suffering. If we are not awake to what’s going on, we think that what we lack is some ‘thing’—the new job, the new car, the new partner. Or we lack perfect health. We lack a decent meditation practice. We shouldn’t be hanging out with the Tibetan lamas; we should join the Theravādins at Abhayagiri. We should rejoin the Christians. We should move to Hawaii. It goes on and on. We go after any kind of external object or internal program to find the missing piece.

This is the cycle of addiction, and it is a very common experience. I am sure everyone has had such experiences. In spite of our best intentions, we find ourselves back in trouble again. We see that we have pursued some kind of desire—for a job, a partner, a meditation technique, a teacher, a car, something to satisfy us. Then we get it and believe, “Ah, this is great.” But is it really?

That something is going to make us happy and make things so completely better. And to a certain extent it does, no question about it. There is gratification for a while. That feeling is definitely there and it is real. The mind contracts around it and at that moment of “Yes!” we are absolutely gratified. The universe has shrunk to that one minuscule zone: “Me happy. Got nice thing.” The trouble is that the universe is not actually that small. We can only hold it together while the thrill lasts. We taste delicious food, we have an inspiring retreat, we see an exciting movie, we enjoy the smell of a new car, and then it’s gone. These objects don’t satisfy us anymore. The place where the piece was missing opens up again and there is dukkha once more. If we don’t realize what is happening, we seek another object to fill that gap, and the cycle of rebirth goes around and around, again and again. It happens thousands of times a day.

Map the process out for yourself. Take notes. You’ll see that it happens very quickly. Ajahn Chah used to say that following dependent origination is like dropping out of a tree and trying to count the branches on the way down. It’s that quick. The whole process can play out from beginning to end in a second and a half. Pow. We can hardly track what’s happening but—thump! —we know it hurts when we hit the ground. We can see the urge to cling in any moment. When we see this clearly, when we have made it deeply familiar to us, we can stop the process and let go of the cycle of birth and death.

To encourage this familiarisation and relinquishment it’s important to experience and acknowledge the disadvantages of cyclic existence. Above all, it hurts. Just as the thrill is real, so is the pain. We don’t get the thrill without the pain. That would be   nice, wouldn’t it? When the pain comes, we see that it is empty. When the thrill comes, we experience it as absolutely real. You’ve got to be really quick on your feet to pull that one off. There are a lot of people trying it, that’s for sure. As the pleasure is rising, we feel “real, real, happy, happy, happy, happy.” As the pleasant feelings diminish, we try to see that the pain and disappointment is “empty, empty, empty, empty.” As we say in California, “Dream on.” Life is not that way.

Header image by Dan Meyers: This is a lava tunnel created by a volcano near Bend, Oregon.It gets very dark and cold and goes for a mile.