Christina Feldman

Dependent Origination (paṭicca-samuppāda) is a way of understanding what happens in our world on a moment-to-moment level. It’s about what happens in our heart, what happens in our consciousness, and how the kind of world we experience and live in is actually created every instant. If we understand the way our world is created, we also then become a conscious participant in that creation. It describes a process that is occurring over and over again very rapidly within our consciousness. If we pause here and think for a moment, we have probably all gone throughout countless cycles of dependent origination since we first woke up. Perhaps it was a moment of despair about what you had for breakfast or what happened on the way to where you are right now, a mind-storm about something that happened yesterday, some sort of anticipation about what might happen today—countless moments that you have gone through where you have experienced an inner world arising: I like this; I don’t like this; the world is like this; this is how it happened; I feel this; I think that.

Ignorance (avijjā)

Ignorance is used in Buddhist teachings in a very different way than it is used in our culture. It’s not an insult, or an absence of knowledge—it doesn’t mean we’re dumb. Nonetheless ignorance can be deeply rooted in the consciousness. It may be very invisible to us, and yet it can be exerting its influence in all the ways we think, perceive, and respond. Ignorance is often described as a kind of blindness, of not being conscious in our lives of what is moving us on a moment-to-moment level. Sometimes it is described as perceiving the unsatisfactory to be satisfactory, or as believing the impermanent to be permanent—this is not an unusual experience. Ig­norance is sometimes taking that which is not beautiful to be beautiful, as a cause of attachment. Sometimes it is defined as believing in an idea of self to be an enduring and solid entity in our lives when there is no such thing to be found. Or as not seeing things as they actually are, but seeing life, seeing ourselves, seeing other people through a veil of beliefs, opinions, likes, dislikes, projections, clinging, attachments, et cetera, et cetera. Ignorance flavors what kind of speech, thoughts, or actions we actually engage in.

Formations (sankhāra)

Ignorance is the causal condition or climate which allows for the arising of certain kinds of sankhāras—volitional impulses or karmic formations. In a general sense we’re all formations; we’re all sankhāras. Everything that is born and created out of conditions is a formation. Dependent origination gets a little more specific: it talks about intentional actions as body formations, intentional speech as both body and mind formations, and thoughts or states of mind as mental formations. As such it is describing the organization or shaping of our thinking process in accordance with accumulated habits, preferences, opinions. Sankhāras lend a certain fuel to the spinning of the wheel. Within a given cycle, they interact and form more and more of themselves. There is also a constant interaction of the inner and outer, through which the whole cycle keeps getting perpetuated. Some of the formations arise spontaneously in the moment, and some are ways of seeing or ways of reacting that have been built up throughout our whole life. Due to their repetitive use, these sankhāras become somewhat locked or invested in our personality structures and stay close to the surface as more automatic or habitual ways of response. However, it is important to understand that each sankhāra is actually new in every moment. They arise through contact, through certain kinds of stimulation. We tend to think of them as habitual or ever-present because of how we grasp them as something solid. But in our encounter with them in the present moment they are not presented to us as history or as something that is there forever.

Consciousness (viññāṇa)

Formations condition the arising of consciousness. Consciousness is used in the sense of the awareness of all the sensations that enter through the sense doors. So, there is the consciousness of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching and thinking. At any given time, one or the other of these sense door consciousnesses dominates our experience. Consciousness also describes the basic climate of the mind at any particular moment—the way it is actually shaped or flavored. So, any particular moment might be aversive or dull or greedy, for example, though without interest or intention some of these flavorings of consciousness may not be noticed. Consciousness is also interactive: not only is it shaped by formations and by ignorance, it is also shaping everything going on around us—regardless of whether we pay attention to it or not.

Name and Form (nāma-rūpa)

Consciousness gives rise to nāma-rūpa, which is sometimes translated as mind and body, but that’s a little too simplistic. Rūpa, or body, describes not only our own body but all other bodies and all forms of materiality. Nāma, or mind, describes the feelings, the perceptions, the intentions, the contact, and the kind of attention we give to what appears in the field of our awareness. So nāma describes the whole movement of mind in all its components in relationship to materiality. This is how it works: there’s an arising of rūpa, and then nāma creates concepts or attitudes about it. The kind of relationship we have with any material form, including our own body, is shaped by what’s going on in the mind, whether we are consciously aware of it or not. So, the shape of the mind and our body, this nāma-rūpa, is always changing, always moving, never staying the same. Consciousness, body, and mind are always interdependent, with consciousness leading the body and the mind to function in a certain way. If a consciousness has arisen flavored by anger or by greed, by depression, by anxiety—or whatever—it provides the conditions for the body and mind to organize itself in a particular way.

All of the events that have taken place so far in these links of ignorance, karma formations, consciousness, and mind/body—these are actually the most important steps in the generation of karma. These volitional impulses—what is happening in the body and the mind—are actually the generation of karma.

Six-Senses (saḷ-āyatana)

We go on from body and mind to the six sense doors or the six sense spheres, for it is the psychophysical organism that provides us the capacity to see, hear, smell, taste, touch and think. One of the deeper understandings we can have, is to acknowledge that the mind is one of the sense-spheres. The thoughts, images and perceptions that arise and pass away in the mind are not so essentially different from the sounds or bodily sensations that come and go in the realm of the senses. We may sometimes have the impression that mind is constant or always “on duty,” but a little bit of a deeper exploration of what happens within the mind actually shatters that perception.

Contact (phassa)

When the sense doors are functioning, contact arises. Contact is this meeting between the sense door and the sense information—I ring the bell, hearing arises. You smell something cooking in the kitchen, the smell arises through the nose sense door. The arising always involves the coming together of the sense door, the sense object and consciousness—the three elements together constitute contact. The Buddha once said that with contact the world arises, and with the cessation of contact there is the cessation of the world. This statement acknowledges the extent to which we create our world of experience by selectively highlighting the data of the senses. Each moment of contact involves isolating an impression out of the vast stream of impressions that are present for us in every moment as we sit here. Contact is what happens when something jumps out of that background and becomes the foreground. When we pay attention to it, there’s a meeting of the sense object and consciousness and the sense door. That is contact.

Feeling (vedanā)

Contact is the foundation or the condition for the arising of feeling. In speaking about feeling here we are not speaking about the more complex emotions such as anger or jealousy or fear or anxiety, but the very fundamental level of feeling impact that is the basis not only of all emotions but of all mind states and responses. We are speaking about the pleasant feeling that arises in connection with what is coming through any of the sense doors; or the unpleasant feeling, or those feelings that are neither pleasant nor unpleasant. This doesn’t mean they are “neutral,” in the sense of a kind of nothingness. Some feelings are certainly there, but they don’t really make a strong enough impression to evoke a pleasant or painful feeling response in us. Actually, the impressions and sensations and experiences that are neither pleasant nor unpleasant are some of the more interesting data received by our system.

It is important to acknowledge that the links of contact, of sense doors and feeling that we have been talking about are neither wholesome nor unwholesome in and of themselves; but they become the catalyst of what happens next. The sense doors, the feelings and the contact are the forerunners of how we actually react or respond and how we begin to weave a personal story out of events or impressions that all of us experience at all times. Therefore contact, feeling and sense doors are pretty important places to pay attention.

Craving (taṇhā)

Where does craving come from? From our relationship to feeling; feeling is the condition for craving. This craving is sometimes translated as “unquenchable thirst,” or a kind of appetite that can never be satisfied. Craving begins to be that movement of desire to seek out and sustain the pleasurable contacts with sense objects and to avoid the unpleasant or to make them end. It’s the craving of having and getting, the craving to be or to become someone or some­thing, and the craving to get rid of or to make something end.

Pleasant feelings or impressions are hijacked by the underlying tendency for craving; and unpleasant feelings are hijacked by aversion. And when a feeling is felt as neither pleasant nor unpleasant, it is also hijacked, in this case by the deluded tendency to dismiss it from our consciousness and say it doesn’t matter. Our sense of self finds it very hard to have an identity with any impression or sensation which is neither pleasant nor unpleasant.

It is at the point where craving arises in response to pleasant or unpleasant feeling that our responses become very complex, and we run into a world of struggle. When we crave for something, we in a way delegate authority to an object or to an experience or to a person, and at the same time we are depriving ourselves of that authority. As a result, our sense of well-being, our sense of contentment or freedom, comes to be dependent upon what we get or don’t get. You all know that kind of restlessness of appetite—there’s never enough; just one more thing is needed; one more experience, one more mind state, one more object, one more emotion, and then I’ll be happy.

What we don’t always see through when we are in the midst of ignorance is that the way such promise is projected, externalized, or objectified is actually something which always leaves us with a sense of frustration. We are dealing here with a very basic hunger, and we allow our world to be organized according to this hunger by projecting the power to please or threaten onto other things. But the im­portant thing to remember is that craving is also a kind of moment-to-moment experience; it arises and it passes.

Clinging (upādāna)

Craving and clinging (also called grasping), are very close together. Craving has a certain momentum, a certain one-way direction, and when it becomes intense, it becomes clinging. Now, one way that craving becomes clinging is that very fixed positions are taken; things become good or bad; they become worthy or unworthy; they become valuable or valueless. And the world is organized into friends and enemies, into opponents and allies according to what we are attached to or what we grasp or get hold of. That sense of becoming fixed reinforces and solidifies the values we project onto experience or objects. But it also reinforces belief systems and opinions, and the faculty of grasping holds on to of images of self. “I am like this.” “I need this.” “I need to get rid of this,” and so on. And, often, many things in this world are evaluated according to their perceived potential to satisfy our desires. What all this does is actually make us very busy. Think about the situations when you really want something, how much activity starts to be generated in terms of thinking and plotting and planning and strategizing: you know, the fastest route to get there from here, the most direct route to make this happen.

Traditionally, clinging is often broken down into four different ways in which we can make ourselves suffer. There is the clinging to sensuality or sense objects. The other side of clinging to sense objects is clinging to views, theories, opinions, beliefs, philosophies—they become part of ourselves. Another form that grasping takes is clinging to certain rules—the belief that if I do this, I get this. Or one says, “This is my path. This is going to take me from here to there.” The last of the forms of clinging Buddha talked about was clinging to the notion of “I am”— the craving to be someone, and the craving not to be someone, dependent on clinging to an idea and an ideal of self. This notion of self is perhaps the most delusionary force in our lives.

Becoming (bhava)

Clinging is followed by becoming or arising—the entire process of fixing or positioning the sense of self in a particular state of experience. Any time we think in self-referential terms, “I am,” “I am angry,” “I am loving,” “I am greedy,” ” I know,” “I’m this kind of person” and so on, an entire complex of behavior is generated to serve craving and clinging. I see something over there that I’ve projected as “This is going to make me really happy if I get this,” and I organize my behavior, my actions, my attention in order to find union with that. This is the pro­cess of becoming—becoming someone or something other than what is.

Birth (jāti)

Birth, the next link in the chain of dependent origination, is the moment of arrival. We think “I think I got it!” “I found it (the union with this image or role or identity or sensation or object),” “I am now this”—the emergence of an identity, a sense of self that rests upon identifying with a state of experience or mode of conduct, the doer, the thinker, the seer, the knower, the experience, the sufferer—this is what birth is. And there is a resulting sense of that birth, of one who enjoys, one who suffers, one who occupies, one who has all the responsi­bility of that birth.

Aging and Death (jarā-maraṇa)

Birth is followed by death in which there is the sense of loss, change, the passing away of that state of experience. “I used to be happy.” “I used to be successful.” “I was content in the last moment.” And so on. The passing away of that state of experience, the feeling of being deprived or separated from the identity, “I used to be…” is the moment of death. In that moment of death, we sense a loss of good meditation experience, the good emotional experience. We say it’s gone. And as­sociated with that sense is the pain and the grief, the despair of our loss.

These different factors interact to create certain kinds of experiences in our lives. What is important to remember is that none of this is predetermined. Just like the climate for snow, the presence of certain of these links is going to allow other experiences to happen. Not that they must happen, or definitely will happen, but they allow for certain experiences to happen. This may sound like bad news in the beginning, but we get to the good news later.

Continued next week, 27 June 2024

About Christina Feldman

https://www.buddhistinquiry.org/author/cfeldman/