An important aspect of skilful view is an understanding of dependent origination, also called dependent co-arising, the Buddha’s teaching on how suffering is created and perpetuated - on the flipside we have dependent liberation, which the teaching on how suffering ceases.
Dependent Origination
Also called the 12 Links of Suffering, dependent origination is most-often described as a process of twelve events, you could say, but they do not happen in a linear fashion ~ it is more like they are simultaneously happening, or so I have heard. Despite them not happening in sequence, as such, we can interrupt the process at various points, thereby interrupting the recurring cycle of samsara, suffering. The twelve links are:
- Ignorance (avijja)
- Kamma formations (sankhara)
- Consciousness (viññana)
- Mentality-materiality (namarupa)
- Sixfold sense base (salayatana)
- Contact (phassa)
- Feeling (vedana)
- Craving (tanha)
- Clinging (upadana)
- Existence (bhava)
- Birth (jati)
- Suffering (dukkha)
When I look at this list, I kind of go cross-eyed, and I have tried researching this stuff a bunch of times but it doesn’t seem to stick. There is a process I learnt about recently that is at the heart of learning how to apply Buddhism, and it is a process described by the Pali terms pariyatti, paṭipatti and paṭivedha, meaning “learning”, “practising” and “realising”. By producing a document such as this, I am hoping to integrate some of what I am learning and develop a document I can use for my own practice toward realisation which, paradoxically, is achieved by leveraging the same causal mechanism of suffering, so the dependent origination of suffering becomes dependent liberation from suffering.
Causality & Conditionality
I am not yet sure whether these are essentially synonymous, but I do understand that causality in frameworks like dependent origination and the Noble Eightfold Path are understood to be not-linear, but more like they are happening simultaneously. It may not even be as straightforward as that, and even though I think that questions about the mechanics of karma are one of the things the Buddha declared to be unprofitable, I still think it’s useful to understand just how not-linear and even perhaps how not-understandable these mechanics are.
Then we can focus on where we do have agency instead of focusing on the academics of how are agency is interacting with reality - see the simile of the poisoned arrow. The following delightfully floral description from Bhikkhu Bodhi may be a good place to start:
quite different from the pattern of blind efficient causality which involves the incidental emergence of an effect out of its causal matrix, as for example when a series of geological changes triggers off an earthquake or a number of atoms combine to form some new molecule. The relationship between the path and the goal belongs to a more complex order of causality, one which can perhaps be pictured as a set of prior causes giving rise to an effect but can never be adequately and correctly comprehended in terms of this model. What we have here is not an instance of simple, one-directional causality proceeding forward unmodified in a straight line; we have, rather, a species of teleological causality involving purpose, intelligence, and planned striving simultaneously projected towards and refracted from the aimed at effect in a process of reciprocal determination. In the workings of this relationship not only does the path facilitate the achievement of the goal, but the goal as well, already present from the outset as the envisaged aim of striving, itself bends back to participate in the shaping of the path. Starting from man’s awareness of the painful inadequacies of his existence, and his intuitive groping towards a condition where these are allayed, the formula proceeds to trace back, in terms derivative from and constantly checked against the goal, the series of alterations he must induce in his cognitive and emotive makeup to bring the goal into his reach.
What he seems to be saying here is that the interactivity of the parts comprising frameworks of understanding and behaviour like dependent origination and the Noble Eightfold Path is characterised by a plurality of causes resulting in a plurality of effects that do not necessarily lead from one to the other, but which are nonetheless related in ways that don’t necessarily need to be comprehended for us to find agency, and that agency is found in conducting that series of alterations.
It is like the simile of the poisoned arrow: when we are struck by a poisoned arrow, we don’t need to know who shot it, what the arrow is made from, which angle it came from, etcetera, before we should remove the arrow; when we suffer at all, we don’t need to know the minutiae of the causes and effects ~ we only need to know how to introduce the causes for non-suffering into our experience. The causes for non-suffering are the uprooting of the defilements: ignorance, greed and aversion. One way of achieving this is the dependent liberation described below, and in the Upanisa Sutta.
Dependent Liberation
feat. the central importance of saddhā in liberating ourselves from suffering - using the same conditionality that has already caused so much trouble
Somehow I stumbled across this idea and then forgot it was open in a tab on my phone, which I then found on the toilet while I was looking for something else. Where I found it was in an Access to Insight article by Bhikkhu Bodhi, “Transcendental Dependent Arising”, with the subtitle “A Translation and Exposition of the Upanisa Sutta”. The Upanisa Sutta is the “Discourse on Supporting Conditions” and, whereas dependent origination describes the conditions that support suffering, transcendental dependent origination describes the conditions that support transcension of suffering.
Than says, “the teaching of dependent co-arising gives a detailed treatment of the first three noble truths, listing the sequence of conditions that lead to suffering”. He says that “suffering ends when ignorance, the first member of the sequence, ends”, but this is essentially enlightenment and other writers are saying that ignorance is not the first, only, or best, place we can engage with this cycle to interrupt suffering. Faith is an access point, and a good starting place, as a lever we can pull to transform dependent origination into according to the |Upanisa Sutta.
the central importance of saddhā in liberating ourselves from suffering
The more I research and contemplate saddhā (‘faith’ in Buddhism), the more I understand that an exposition on faith is also, functionally and fundamentally, an introduction to Buddhism, which necessarily starts as an introduction to the Buddha himself, and also his dhamma and the sangha he founded 2600 years ago. So I am seeing that this essay is, or needs to be, a guide to becoming a disciple of the Buddha. I hadn’t really considered this to be possible until I migrated to the Theravada tradition, and now it is no longer optional, but rather, optimal compared with remaining dependent on dhamma teachers, ordained or otherwise. Because faith in Buddhism starts with saddhā in the Triple Gem, in the Buddha, the dhamma, and the sangha. I’ll unpack that a bit more later.
Meanwhile it is important to appreciate, as most (reasonable and confident) people do, that faith in Buddhism doesn’t start with faith in gurus, and it doesn’t start with faith in God, or in anything supernatural. It does, however, tend to start with the end of faith in other things we once held dear: hedonism, the government, metaphysical materialism, literalism, science, technology. People, especially Westerners, come to Buddhism because we are suffering and nothing in our culture seems to have an authentic solution to that problem. We try seeking pleasure because we think it is the opposite of suffering, and therefore a pathway to happiness. Fail. When that doesn’t work, we blame the government ~ we try to keep them accountable on behalf of the people, but fail. When that doesn’t work, we start to wonder if there might be something broken in the fabric: the human-condition is a curse and we’re all going to hell in a hand basket. If one doesn’t murder themselves at this point, it is because they are fortunate enough have the kamma and the conditions for it to ripen in the form of beginning to suspect there is something more to life, something we are missing and if we can just find it, the magic, the joy, the peace, the wonder, and the awe.
Until then it all just feels like a massive drag, at least for many of us ~ I did meet one Australian monk recently who said he had a pretty chill kind of life, no major suffering, just a deep sense that there was something else to do here. The call to ordain dropped on him suddenly, and he cried tears of relief.
That feeling of relief is the voice of saddhā, of a deeply felt1 conviction that there is a way to be genuinely happy in this world, in this life ~ and maybe, just maybe, if we can drop our attachment to the conditioning we have been steeped in for the last 400 years or so … since, roughly, Descartes, perhaps, although I don’t know why I always feel the tendency to blame him, specifically. There is a whole massive branch to be explored on the subject of where in history the West started to go so horridly astray, and I’ll get to that, don’t you worry. Meanwhile, here we are in the twenty-first century wondering, If science and rationalism and medicine and technology and ‘representative democracy’ are so great, why are there so many and various epidemics, so much disparity, so much insanity, so few authentic solutions to what is now being called the polycrisis? The future we were promised has not been delivered ~ must have got stuck in the mail ~ and instead someone left the head of a dead horse on the doorstep.
In the midst of the despair that ensues in anyone who is only half-asleep, one eye perceiving the world as a quagmire of heinous bullshit most of the time, and the other clogged with conjunctivitis because even pollen is toxic now2, it really does come as a massive relief to come across the dhamma. Finally, a community of people, thousands of years old and totalling ~5 billion, who have been wondering the same thing only wait … that means this is not a modern problem after all. That right there alone is the sort of perspective that can pull a person out of the funk.
This, I suppose, is why Buddha taught how suffering can be leveraged for the end of suffering ~ a paradox, I know, but paradoxes are just so damn cool, like a battle axe to the head of literalism and dualism and that devil of epistemology: certainty. He taught this in a discourse called the Upanisa Sutta, and Bhikkhu Bodhi wrote a brilliant essay about it called ‘Transcendental Dependent Arising: A Translation and Exposition of the Upanisa Sutta’. Dependent arising (or dependent origination) is a chain of causality the Buddha discovered that explains why we suffer ~ transcendental dependent arising then (or dependent liberation) is a set of instructions for how to transcend suffering.
This is the sutta that first really brought me over to the idea that I had better get my faith on, and for that reason it gets a seat at the Essential Suttas table.
I first read this sutta and Bodhi’s exposition when I was living as an anagarika in a Western Thai Forest monastery ~ I don’t remember how I came across it, but I remember getting stuck, again, on that sodding word, ‘faith’, and also on how to cultivate it.
Footnotes
-
I’ve said ‘felt’ in this context at least twice now, and it is a deeply embodied experience, I would say ~ which is problematic because so many of us live, as many body workers and trauma specialists say, from the neck up in our culture. ↩
-
Hyperbole alert: remember, don’t believe what I think ~ wouldn’t be surprised though, if there’s a paper out about this: the bees are dying, after all. ↩