This evening's talk is going to be, I thought, on dependent
origination. So I hope this sounds too
ambitious to you, because dependent origination is a very
profound teaching in many ways. And for that reason, it may
sound maybe a bit fear-inducing sometimes.
For those of you who have known Buddhism for a long time, you
may find it quite interesting to hear something about dependent
origination. For those of you who haven't
heard about this teaching, I'm going to try to teach it in such
a way that it becomes meaningful and becomes fairly easily
comprehensible. I'm not going to go into all the
details and all the profundities, but because it is
such an important teaching, an important part of the Buddha's
explanation of the world, of reality, of everything, I think
it's very useful to have some idea what this dependent
origination is all about and how it actually works.
So that's why I want to do this. You read the suttas and you see
what the Buddha said, you see his teachings, and again and
again you come across this teaching of dependent
origination. So obviously it is very
important. It's a very important part of
the way the Buddha explained things.
So first of all, I'm just going to go through very briefly
through these so-called twelve factors of dependent origination
to give you some idea, a kind of overall picture of what this is
all about. And then having gone through the
twelve factors, I'm going to explain just some of the most
important aspects of dependent origination in detail.
I'm not going to explain the whole thing in detail, just
those aspects that seem important to me.
And then I will also try to integrate it into the rest of
the Buddha's teachings and show you why this is so important,
why it matters that we understand this.
In other words, I want to make it practical.
I want to make it something that we might be able to use in our
daily lives. So first of all, I'm just going
to go through the twelve factors of dependent origination fairly
briefly. And then you don't have to
remember these things. I'm just doing it to give you a
framework, a kind of reference point as we go through these
things afterwards. So the first of these factors is
usually known as ignorance. Ignorance means not
understanding reality as it actually is.
It's a kind of distortion. It's a kind of distortion of our
understanding, not seeing things clearly.
And once there is ignorance in a being, whether it's a human
being or any other being, once that is there, there is the
making of kamma. We create kamma through our
actions. And that kamma, of course, leads
to results in the future which are either pleasant or
unpleasant, depending on that kamma.
That's the second factor. And the results that it gives in
the future are very often connected with rebirth, in other
words, where we get born in the future life.
So the third factor of dependent origination is consciousness.
It's consciousness arising in a particular state.
And with consciousness, you always have a body, you always
have the mind. The other factors of the mind
are always there with consciousness.
So because of that, that becomes the fourth factor of dependent
origination. It's mind together with body
being conditioned by consciousness.
The fifth factor. Once you have mind and body, you
have the six senses. The six senses are part and
parcel of this thing we call the human being, mind and body.
And once you have the six senses, you start to experience
the world. The experiencing of the world
happens through these six senses.
That is the sixth factor, known as contact usually.
It's like we are contacting the world.
We are experiencing the world. Now, an important part of that
experience, a very fundamental part of it, is called feeling.
This becomes the seventh factor of dependent origination.
We experience the world usually either as something pleasant or
as something unpleasant. And this can change very rapidly
from moment to moment. One moment we have something
pleasant that we experience, the next moment something
unpleasant, and the moment after that something which is
somewhere in between maybe. Then, because we experience
things as pleasant, unpleasant and unpleasant, we have desires.
We have desires because we want the pleasant states to last.
We want to have those most of all.
And we want the unpleasant things to disappear.
We have a kind of aversion or negativity to the unpleasant
things. So desire is a natural
consequence of feeling. Once you have this desire or
craving, which is the eighth factor, then you have what this
thing called, which is called taking up or grounding.
Grasping or clinging sometimes. And this very often is like we,
once you have desire, it's like you have strategies, you have
ways to make sure that those desires get fulfilled in the
best possible way. And these strategies, these are
called taking up, clinging, grasping at things.
Once we grasp at things, once we decide on the particular way of
living our life, then again we make kamma according to that
grasping, according to that clinging.
And once we make kamma, once we live in that particular way,
this is called existence, factor number nine, factor number ten I
think it is, then we have rebirth or jati as the eleventh
factor. Because we get reborn according
to that kamma that we make. Once we get reborn, then we
experience what everybody else in human life experiences.
We experience aging. We experience death.
And we experience all the sufferings of being a being,
whether it's human, animal or otherwise.
So that in brief is what dependent origination means.
It's a sequence of conditions, the sequence of twelve factors,
each one building on the previous one.
And the important thing here is to understand that there is a
conditional relationship between all of these factors.
And that's why it's called the dependent origination.
The subsequent factor depends on the previous one.
So for example, to experience suffering, experience old age
and death, first of all you have to be born.
Birth is a necessary condition for you to be able to experience
suffering in life. So each one of these conditions,
starting from ignorance at the very beginning, all the way to
suffering at the very end, each one is necessary for the
subsequent one to exist. Subsequent factor depends on the
previous one. That is a very important factor
in this dependent origination. That's the only thing you really
need to keep in mind for this talk, because then the rest of
the things should hopefully fall in place.
Each condition is necessary for the subsequent one to exist.
This is a causal relationship between these twelve links.
So to understand, to grasp, to get a feeling for what dependent
origination is all about, I often, sometimes, tell people
that the best thing to do is to look at the end points of these
twelve links. The end points are first of all,
ignorance at the very beginning or misunderstanding of reality,
if you like. And then suffering at the very
end. These are the two end points.
The first and the twelfth factor of dependent origination.
Because if we understand the end points, everything else becomes
quite clear, because it is a conditioned sequence.
Subsequent factor depends on the previous one.
The final factor depends on the subsequent one. of dependent
origination then is suffering. Now this is obviously very
important because this shows us the purpose of dependent
origination. The purpose is found in the last
factor. So the purpose is to show us
basically why suffering comes about in the world.
This is why we have this teaching of dependent
origination because it shows us the causal arising of suffering.
This is the purpose and that's why this is the last factor of
this thing here. And of course this becomes
straight away very practical. You can see straight away why
this is very practical because if we understand why suffering
arises in the world then we have an opportunity to do something
about it. If we understand the causal
relationship then we can do something with those causes and
we can both alleviate the suffering and lessen the
problems that we have and ultimately overcome, perhaps
even overcome that suffering altogether.
So this is why dependent origination is so interesting
because it shows us how suffering comes to arise in the
world. And the interesting thing here
is that the immediately previous condition before suffering,
independent origination, is rebirth.
It is birth which is the condition for suffering.
So if we don't get born, basically we're not going to
suffer. It is the very fact that we do
get born into the world which gives rise to all these
problems. And of course these two last
factors, birth and then suffering.
Suffering is sometimes also called aging and death because
these are the two most prominent and two most important factors
of suffering. You will see that birth and
death, these are also what is often a shorthand for this thing
we know as samsara. Samsara is the thing that is
most important for us. Samsara is this perpetual
wandering on round and round from one life to another one,
from birth to death, from birth to death.
So the last two factors here of dependent origination
essentially are equivalent to this samsara, this eternal,
perhaps not eternal, but certainly this very long-lasting
wandering on from one life to another one, again and again and
again. So this is another way of
looking at dependent origination, it shows us how
this thing we know as samsara comes to arise in the world, how
there can be such a thing as samsara.
Very briefly, samsara, the best way to look at samsara is not to
look at it as kind of the universe out there, something
different from us. Samsara is essentially how we as
human beings experience the world.
So it is your internal, what goes on inside your head, that
is samsara. How do you experience the world?
So all the war going around, if you could recollect your past
lives, all the being reborn, all the getting old, all the dying,
all the suffering, all the happiness, everything you do,
all your experiences, this is essentially what samsara is all
about. And samsara is of course
ultimately equivalent again to suffering, because all this
wandering around, all this birth, dying, aging, doing this,
doing that, again and again and again, life after life, now
being born here, now being born there, all that is essentially
suffering according to the Buddha's teachings.
So, in other words, what I'm saying is that dependent
origination, it shows us how samsara and how suffering comes
to be. It's extremely useful to know
this, because then we can actually do something about it.
So this is the end point of dependent origination.
It shows us what this is aiming at, what the purpose of this
teaching is all about. But then we have the starting
point of dependent origination. The starting point is usually
translated as ignorance. Now this is very important,
because once we understand the starting point, we understand
how this whole dependent origination comes into being,
how it can actually exist. If we were to remove the
starting point, this whole dependent origination would
unravel. It unravels because each factor
of dependent origination is causally related to the previous
one. So remove the first one, the
whole thing unravels, and we essentially make an end of
samsara. We make an end of suffering if
we can remove this ignorance altogether.
If maybe we are not able to remove ignorance altogether,
instead we can remove it. We can maybe weaken ignorance.
If you weaken ignorance, you weaken suffering.
Because again, that weakening of ignorance makes itself felt all
the way through that chain, all the way up to suffering.
So you suffer less if you weaken ignorance.
So for that reason, it's quite important to try to get a grasp
of what this ignorance actually means.
And ignorance is one way of translating this term, but as I
was mentioning before, it is more about, our distorted
perception of the world. The problem is not so much that
we lack knowledge, which ignorance might suggest.
The problem is that we have a distorted understanding of how
the world actually works. We don't see things as they
actually are, and that is the problem.
So maybe delusion is another way of translating this word, which
is usually rendered ignorance, delusion, or misunderstanding,
or distortion of reality. And this delusion, or
distortion, basically comes back to the distortions that we talk
about in Buddhism, when we tend to see things as happy, when in
fact they are suffering. We tend to see things as
permanent, when in fact they are impermanent.
And we tend to see things as self, when in fact they are
non-self. This is the basic delusion that
we live under. And this is the type of
misunderstanding or ignorance, which is at the root, of this
entire chain of dependent origination.
Now one interesting fact about this ignorance at the beginning
of dependent origination, is that that itself is again
conditioned by other things. Ignorance is not like a
monolithic thing that stands there all by itself.
It is also conditioned by other things in turn.
And when we understand some of these conditions, we will very
quickly understand what sort of practice, and what sort of
practice, we can undertake to undermine ignorance, and
eventually abandon it altogether.
So what is the condition for ignorance?
The condition for ignorance is the five hindrances.
The five hindrances, I am sure most of you would have heard of
them. They are briefly the sensual
desires in the world, any kind of desire that we experience
through the five senses. They are ill will, irritation,
anger. They are the sloth and torpor,
the desire to be happy, the desire to be happy, the desire
to be happy, restlessness and worry and doubt.
These are the five hindrances. And these are the conditions for
ignorance. So the stronger these five
hindrances are in our minds, the more powerful this ignorance is
going to be. How does this work?
And I talked about this here before, but it is actually very,
it is quite a useful way of looking at how the hindrances
distort reality. It is quite simple to
understand. If you are very angry, what
happens in your mind? What happens in your mind if you
are very angry is that you tend sometimes to do things that you
otherwise would not do. You think that you should tell
somebody off, you think that you should do something nasty
because you are angry. And while you are angry, it
seems right. This, I need to do this, this
person deserves this, this will be for the good of that person
if I tell them off. So that is what we often do.
We do stupid things when we get upset.
When we get upset at something. And of course, once the anger is
over, we realize that this was actually a mistake.
We shouldn't have been so harsh on that person.
We should have been more understanding.
We should have understood why this person did this thing in
the first place. It was a mistake.
And then we feel a sense of regret and remorse that we did
such a thing while we were angry.
And this shows you the problem of anger.
The problem is that when you are angry, your perception of the
world is distorted. You don't see things as it
actually is. And that is why we tend to do
things that we later on regret. So you can see here how anger
connects up with this thing we call ignorance.
It distorts our understanding of the world.
And desire is very much the same.
If you think about desire, why do people have extramarital
affairs, for example? Well, sometimes just desire
overpowering the mind. You don't know what you are
doing. And afterwards you regret it for
a long, long time usually to come.
Most people regret it. I've had people coming up to me
and saying, certainly saying that they have regretted these
things a lot afterwards. But again, it is desire in this
case which distorts the perceptions.
You think that you should do something which in reality you
know that you should not be doing when the mind is not
overpowered by these desires. And it is the same if you go out
shopping or you see something in a shop, a shop that you think
you need, and it looks so wonderful right there, this
desire arises. And later on you realize it was
a mistake to buy that item. Because later on you are freed
from that grasp of desire which arose in that moment.
So the point I'm trying to make is simply that these five
hindrances, particularly anger and desire, they distort our
view of the world. So the greater, the more of
these five hindrances we have in the mind, the greater is our
ignorance, the greater is this distortion of reality.
The less we have of these five hindrances in our mind, the less
is the distortion that we have, and the less is the ignorance.
And it feeds into dependent origination all the way up to
suffering. So the less hindrances we have,
the less suffering we have. The more hindrances we have, the
more suffering we have. It feeds through this whole
chain because it is a causal chain.
It feeds through this whole chain that we are going after.
So the answer then, if you want to reduce ignorance, if you want
to reduce suffering in our lives, one way of looking at it
is to say we have to reduce the defilements of the mind, in
particular the five hindrances. How do we reduce the defilements
of the mind? How do we reduce the hindrances?
It is by practicing the Eightfold Path.
That's really all there is to it.
That is how you reduce these problems.
Practicing the Eightfold Path, starting off with virtue.
Now if you are a virtuous person, there are certain things
you cannot do. And because you can't do them,
you are restraining yourself, you are restraining the
hindrances, you are restraining the defilements.
By practicing meditation practice, loving kindness,
peace, all these beautiful states of mind, again we are
reducing the hindrances because we are going against the
hindrances of the mind. We are taking them away,
abandoning them step by step. So the Eightfold Path is nothing
less than the removal of these hindrances or the removal of the
defilements of the mind. So by this practice we are
reducing ignorance and by this practice we are also then
reducing suffering. So there you can see very
beautifully how the Noble Eightfold Path and how dependent
origination, how it all fits together in a beautiful picture.
And that is one of the wonderful aspects of the Buddha's
teachings, one way of looking at it, is that the Buddha's
teaching is really a unified whole.
It is one realization, one understanding.
But it has all of these different aspects.
And you can understand that one realization, like a big picture,
and then each aspect is like one little piece of a jigsaw puzzle
fitting into that big picture. And the more understanding you
have of the Buddha's teachings, the more you understand how this
jigsaw puzzle fits together. And what I pointed out right now
is how the Noble Eightfold Path, or at least this is one way of
understanding how the Noble Eightfold Path fits together
with dependent origination. The Noble Eightfold Path reduces
our ignorance stage by stage, therefore reduces our suffering
until one day we can eliminate the suffering altogether.
And how is it that reducing the hindrances leads to abandoning
ignorance altogether? Well, by practicing the Noble
Eightfold Path, stage by stage, we reduce these five hindrances
until the day comes, hopefully, for all of us, when those
hindrances are completely abandoned.
They are not there at all in the mind anymore.
And this is what the Buddha promised.
If we practice the Noble Eightfold Path properly, this is
what will happen in the future at some stage.
Now when the five hindrances are completely abandoned, because
they are the cause, the condition for ignorance, it
means that ignorance has lost its conditioning.
It has lost those things which prop it up, so to speak.
Because the five hindrances prop up ignorance.
Because ignorance is no longer propped up by the five
hindrances, it becomes very weak at this particular point.
And that is why after a very powerful and deep state of
meditation, when these five hindrances are completely
abandoned, that is why at this is the point when it is possible
to attain that deep insight and understand the reality that the
Buddha said is out there. The reality that there is
suffering in this world, that there is things are impermanent,
and ultimately that there is no permanent aspect inside the
human beings. There is just non-self.
There is no self in this universe.
And that is what we see, what we can see here, when these five
hindrances are completely abandoned.
And that is why the deep meditations are so powerful.
And that is why they are the last aspect of the Noble
Eightfold Path. Because at that point, we have
the possibility of breaking through to the actual truth that
the Buddha said is there for us to understand.
And at that point, when we break through that ignorance
completely, we see reality as it actually is, in terms of the
Four Noble Truths, if you like, in terms of the three
characteristics, suffering, impermanence, and non-self.
That, when ignorance is completely abandoned, then
suffering is also completely abandoned.
They go hand in hand, because ignorance is the cause for that
suffering. So this is how then to get a
grasp on this dependent origination, to understand it is
all rooted, the root of the problem is ignorance.
That is the problem. The root is delusion, the
misunderstanding of how things are, and it all leads, step by
step, all the way up to suffering.
We suffer because we are ignorant.
Sometimes in the world, you hear this saying, this proverb, that
ignorance is bliss. Well, in Buddhism, it isn't like
that. In Buddhism, ignorance is
suffering. And this is then the right way
of looking at it from a Buddhist point of view.
So you have to be careful with some of these worldly proverbs
sometimes. So how is it then?
This is the next thing to maybe consider a bit.
How is it that ignorance translates itself into
suffering? And this is also interesting,
because it shows us maybe the mechanism of dependent
origination. This is what I will call maybe
the core driver of dependent origination, how it actually
functions, what actually drives this thing forward.
Why is it that ignorance leads to suffering?
And to understand this, I'm not going to go through all the
links of the chain, because I don't think that is actually
necessary. What I'm going to do instead is
just go through the last five of these links, because that shows
us plenty enough how this thing actually works.
And the seventh factor of dependent origination, the last
six factors, I should say, the seventh factor of dependent
origination is, as I said before, it's feeling.
Now feeling, I don't mean emotion by feeling, when the
Buddha had used the word feeling, he meant how it is that
we experience the world outside us in terms of either whether
it's pleasant or whether it's unpleasant.
Sometimes he also added neutral feelings, but they are really
irrelevant, and they tend to be experienced as either pleasant
or unpleasant anyway. So really feeling is about
whether we see the world, whether we experience pleasure
or displeasure. And this is part and parcel of
being a human being. Of being an animal, of being any
kind of being, that we have this kind of experience of the world.
Always it is either pleasant or it's unpleasant.
And this is part and parcel of having a mind, of having a body.
The previous links of dependent origination just before feeling
just shows us how it is that feeling arises from having a
body and having a mind. That's why I have skipped them
for this particular purpose. And of course, once it is given,
that we experience the world in times of pleasure or
displeasure, it is also given that we are going to have
desires according to those pleasures and displeasures.
Because we don't want to have displeasure, and we want to have
pleasure. This is just the nature of any
kind of being. This is the way we want things
to be. And because of that, craving is
a natural consequence of feeling.
Desire is a natural consequence of having these feelings.
So craving comes into being because we have feelings.
Now, once we have craving, we want to make sure that this
craving gets satisfied. We don't want to crave and not
satisfy the craving because this craving not satisfying it is
painful. So we want to satisfy this
craving. Now to be able to satisfy this
craving, we start to take things up in the world.
We grasp at things. We go into all these kinds of
strategies, these ways of leading our lives, we do various
kinds of things so as to enable us to satisfy the cravings.
We get into relationships. We buy ourselves a house.
We have a nice job somewhere. We undertake maybe education for
ourselves. We have children.
We have maybe a religion for ourselves.
We become Buddhists. Why do we become Buddhists?
Again, it is a strategy for helping us to try to find some
happiness, to increase the pleasure and decrease the
displeasure of the world. So all of these things are
strategies. They are like views.
Even political viewpoints that we have are strategies for
finding happiness and not suffering.
So all of these views, how we make strategies to enjoy
ourselves, to have a good time, not a bad time, all of this is
part of this eighth, ninth factor of dependent origination.
Which is called taking things up, grasping at things, clinging
to things in life. This is what it is all about.
The strategy is to make sure that we can satisfy the cravings
that we have which are based on feelings in turn.
Now once we take up certain strategies, once we do certain
things in the world, we have relationships, we have a house,
that means we start to live in a certain way.
We live in accordance with those strategies.
Now living in accordance with those strategies is like a type
of existence. We exist in a certain way.
And most people, they live in the world of sensual pleasures.
They have a nice house because it satisfies their sensual
cravings. They can have a nice breakfast
in there, have nice meals with the family, they can have
entertainment, they can feel safe from the world around them
inside their little house. Then they have relationships.
Again, it is to satisfy our desires for companionship and
again also for sensual pleasures.
And they have a job again, it is to satisfy all the things that
we need, that we can purchase through money.
Again, that is why we have a job, at the very least to enable
us to survive. So this is the world for most
people, just to be able to lead a life of as much pleasure,
sensual pleasure as possible. Now if you are a Buddhist, you
have maybe your priorities are a little bit different, so maybe
you meditate. And then your strategy is to use
meditation and a spiritual life to achieve that happiness.
And in this case, again, sensual pleasures may be part of it, but
also in this case, it is also the pleasures of the mind that
we are also seeking to a higher extent, to a greater extent.
And the more, the deeper we get into the practice of meditation,
the more we are enjoying the pleasures of the mind, rather
than the pleasures of the mind. And this is another way of
existing. It is an existence which is
based on the pleasures of the mind rather than the pleasures
of the senses. So whatever we do in life, we
are in a sense existing in a certain way according to the
strategies that we undertake to find pleasure and displeasure in
the world. We all want pleasures in a
certain way, whether we call it peace, contentment, happiness,
excitement, whatever it is, we all prefer pleasure to pleasure.
Pleasure to displeasure. So then, when we exist in this
certain way, when we have a kind of established our consciousness
in a certain way, that means that we are creating kamma
accordingly. Because we live in this way, we
are creating kamma accordingly. Consciousness is established in
a particular field, if you like. If the field here is the kind of
actions that we undertake. And because we make this kamma,
and because consciousness is established in this way, then in
the future life we get reborn in accordance to where that
consciousness is established. We establish the consciousness
in this life, and then when the body falls away, then the
consciousness is straight away established in that particular
state. Because that is what we have
been practicing over our lives. So if we are inclined towards
practicing or just enjoying sensual pleasures, our whole
life, then that consciousness is established in sensual
pleasures. When the body falls away, that
consciousness will still be established in sensual
pleasures. And we get reborn in a sensual
realm according to that establishment.
If you are a good meditator and our mind is quite peaceful, then
after we die, at the moment we die, the consciousness is likely
to be established in that peace. So when the body falls away, the
consciousness will be right there with that peace.
And we will be reborn in that peace.
We will be reborn in a realm in accordance to that peace.
And this is how rebirth happens in accordance with kamma, in
accordance with how the mind has been established in the previous
life. So there you can see here stage
by stage how this leads forward. And then when rebirth happens in
accordance to your kamma, then whatever realm you are in, you
will experience pleasure and suffering in accordance with
that realm. And eventually you will become
older. Eventually you will die in that
realm. And the suffering that comes
with this will also be part of it.
So you can see here how this whole process works forward.
Because we crave, we start having these strategies in the
world. Because we have strategies, we
live in a certain way. Because we live in a certain
way, the consciousness gets established in that way and we
get reborn accordingly. And then we suffer in accordance
and have happiness in accordance with that rebirth.
And it is all because of ignorance.
Why is it because of ignorance? Well, the reason why we crave
for feeling in the first place is because we think that we can
control these feelings. If we didn't think that we can
control them, we wouldn't crave for them.
It is because we think that we can somehow have it the way we
want, that is why we crave for these feelings.
Imagine if you had absolutely no control of the feelings in your
body, in your mind. What is the point of craving?
There is no point of desiring anything anymore because if you
have no control, there is nothing you can do about it.
There is absolutely, all you have to do is sit back and
watch. And this is what happens when
you eventually find out that the world is non-self, that there is
no permanent core inside of you, that things are impermanent,
when you see that, you realize that there is nothing you can do
about the world. Feelings arise according to
causes and conditions. You cannot control, ultimately
there is no control around these things, they just happen by
themselves. And of course at that moment,
when you then abandon the ignorance, you abandon the
delusion of the self, then you stop craving.
Because you know that the world has to be the way it is.
There is nothing you can do about it.
You have seen through this idea that you can control the world.
You can't control these feelings.
When you realize that, you abandon craving.
When you abandon craving, there is no more strategies to try to
satisfy these cravings. When there is no more
strategies, no more taking up of all kinds of strategies to
satisfy the craving, there is no existence anymore according to
those strategies. When consciousness is not
established in anything in accordance with its existence,
then when you die, when you pass away, the body disappears, then
the consciousness is also not established in any particular
realm. Because it isn't established in
any particular realm, any particular, whether it's
sensuality or meditation or whatever it is, there can be no
rebirth. Because there is nowhere for
that consciousness to go. It's not established anywhere.
And then, when there is no rebirth, there is no suffering,
there is no old age, and there is no death anymore.
And that is how the reverse comes out of this dependent
origination. How we start off, and we can see
how this whole thing can come to an end by abandoning suffering.
Because when we abandon, sorry, by abandoning ignorance, when we
abandon ignorance, craving has no longer a basis in our mind.
So, that is in brief what I will call the engine inside the
dependent origination. The thing which drives this
thing forward. The thing which makes sure that
ignorance or delusion always leads to rebirth in the future.
And how lack of that ignorance, lack of that delusion, makes
absolutely sure that there can be no rebirth again in the
future. But the important thing is also
for us to remind ourselves that even if we feel that the goal of
rebirth, of eliminating rebirth altogether is far away, remember
that every time you reduce ignorance a little bit, every
time you reduce the hindrances a little bit, you are also
reducing suffering for yourself, both in this life and in future
lives. Because if you reduce the five
hindrances, then your craving is not so strong anymore.
Because you realize that this is not going to, you tend to become
wiser when these things are taken away.
When the craving is reduced, when the craving is reduced,
again, it goes through the same sequence of conditions all the
way up to suffering. And you have less suffering
because of that. So, those are the two things,
the aspects of dependent origination that I wanted to
talk about. Maybe one last point which I
wanted to mention is that sometimes you can read or you
hear about people, and they argue that, they say first of
all that, well, the Buddha's teachings is about
interdependence, how everything in the world is interdependent.
And I don't disagree with that. I certainly agree that things
are very interdependent in this world.
But then they say that this is shown by the teaching of
dependent origination. Dependent origination shows us
how all things are interdependent.
But I, personally, I cannot see that that is exactly quite to
the point. Because to me it seems that
dependent origination is a very specific teaching about how
ignorance gives rise to suffering in the world.
It's a very specific sequence of conditions.
And it shows us the mechanism by how these things come about.
That is what dependent origination is about.
If you want to find that Buddha's teaching, which teaches
us about interdependence, I would say that is the teaching
of non-self. Because as long as there is a
self, as long as there is something which is outside of
conditioned phenomena, something which is independent of
everything else, then obviously that is not going to be part of
this interdependent world of ours.
It's going to stand outside, because it's not part of
conditioned phenomena. But from the Buddha's point of
view, because there is no such self, because there is nothing
in this universe that is permanent, then everything
becomes interdependent for that particular reason.
So to my mind it is this teaching of non-self which
actually shows the interdependence of things more
than anything else. Anyway, so that is my talk about
dependent origination. Again, to summarize very
briefly, to understand these teachings, think of the first
factor and the last factor. The last factor shows us what
dependent origination is. What dependent origination is
aiming at. It is aiming at showing us how
suffering comes to be. And the first factor shows us
the most basic reason, the most basic cause, why this suffering
comes about. The most basic cause is our
distorted understanding of how the world works.
This is maybe the most important thing, I think, to understand
about dependent origination. If you understand that, then I
think you have a reasonable grasp of what this teaching is
all about. Okay, that is all I have to say
for this evening. Okay, so any questions or any
complaints maybe? It is a complex teaching, so you
are allowed to ask anything. You can ask questions which are
very foolish because you might not have understood what this
was about. That is perfectly okay.
So anybody have a question? Yes?
Well, this is the thing. In Buddhism there is no fixed
number of rebirths. It is not as if the universe is
predetermined and there has to be a certain number of rebirths.
It doesn't work like that. It all depends on your own
practice. So the more powerful you
practice the spiritual life and the Buddhist path, the fewer
rebirths there will be in the future.
It all depends on your practice. If you don't practice at all the
spiritual life, then potentially it could get reborn forever into
the future. There is no clear limit.
The Buddha was once asked, will all the people of the world
eventually attain liberation? Or is it only half the people in
the world that will attain liberation?
Or is it some other quantity? The Buddha didn't answer that
question because I don't think there is an answer to that
particular question. So potentially we could go on in
samsara, suffering, falling into the abyss of the world.
Suffering for a very, very, very long time if we don't practice
the path fully, properly. Does that make sense?
Anybody else want to ask any questions?
I have a question. How does the human justice and
the world, how do you, how do you quite, when you suffer, when
you suffer, when you are in the justice, perform the time?
Right. For example, in Thailand, or in
other cities in the situation? Sure.
Well, the thing is that you have to be very careful here because
to be able to understand how this works, you have to remember
that the Buddha's teachings and dependent origination is about
individuals and about how individuals experience the
world. So on an individual level, if,
let's say that you are fully enlightened, you don't have any
craving, what you do then is that you don't actually arouse
any desire to end this particular thing.
You don't have any strong craving, any strong urge to end
this thing. If you can help, if the
situation is there, you might help, but you don't have any
thirst or craving inside of you to end these riots.
So on a personal level, you are equanimous because you realize
ultimately the world is the way it is.
Sometimes there's going to be riots, sometimes there's going
to be earthquakes. Sometimes there might be atomic
bombs. Sometimes there are going to be
all kinds of disasters in the world.
You can never solve all of those things.
It's impossible. Ultimately, you're going to have
to accept that this is the way the world is.
If you can do something, fine, do something.
But if you can't, you're going to have to look on economously
if you want to have some peace in your life.
Otherwise, you're going to be always agitated, trying to solve
an endless, and it is literally endless, series of problems.
So have compassion. But don't allow it to make it
too much suffering for yourself because then it becomes
pointless to have that compassion in the first place.
So the point here is that the suffering here, you have to
bring it back to an individual level.
And it's at that individual level where you can understand
the suffering, not at a societal level.
At the individual level, it depends simply on whether you
have ignorance or distortions in the world, but in the mind.
If you haven't got those, you're not going to suffer no matter
what. If you have those, you are going
to suffer no matter what. Does that answer your question?
I'm just wondering if the impact of some of these things that
actually happened could be lessened with more dialogue,
when things are arising from the dialogue that's going on in the
world. It could be sort of like
management of how all countries are doing that.
And Buddhist leaders have done that.
There's a lot of stories about it.
There's a lot of wisdom in Buddhism.
Sometimes I think that the leaders aren't really aware of
it. And if there's some dialogue, it
manages the government. It would be a less problem.
Yeah, I think maybe you're right.
I think it's certainly, if more of the Buddhist practice and
principles were used by governments around the world, it
might actually be very helpful. I have no doubt about that.
But the interesting thing is that you go to Buddhist...
Thailand is a Buddhist country here.
And many of the leaders in Thailand are Buddhists.
I think 95% of the Thai population is Buddhist.
Most of the leaders are Buddhist.
And still you have these problems.
Go to Sri Lanka. You have a civil war going on
there. Now the man who is the president
of Sri Lanka right now, he's a Buddhist.
Right? Some of those generals who fight
in the army are Buddhists. So the problem is that even
though people are Buddhist and are supposed to enact some of
these principles, very often human nature is such that it
sort of overrules the principles of Buddhism.
And it takes, you know, it sort of gets in the way for applying
those principles. I think that is often the
difficulty. The difficulty is that the world
is so complicated. And when you get in a position
of government, the pressures on you are so high from all kinds
of directions. I think sometimes we need to
have a bit more compassion on our leaders.
I mean, if you look at the newspapers, we always criticize
our leaders so enormously, no matter where they are and how
they are. But sometimes we have to think,
I think it's a very difficult position to be in the leadership
of a country. How easy is it to always be
fair, always do the right thing? It is incredibly difficult
because the forces on you are so strong.
But ultimately, I agree with you.
I think that maybe in Thailand if they had a dialogue, it might
be better. But maybe the circumstances are
such that there is so much animosity that maybe a dialogue
is difficult at this point. I don't know.
I mean, in principle, I agree with you.
But I think the reality is often very, very complex and very
difficult. I think the best thing you can
do very often is that, at least for myself as a monk, I feel if
I can give teachings which are useful for people, and
hopefully, you know, those will sort of spread out in society
and be used out there. And for other people, by all
means, help out. Have compassion.
Do something good. But be careful.
Always be very careful that wanting to do something in the
world doesn't destroy your own peace of mind.
Make sure it doesn't make you angry or upset at the world.
Make sure you practice enough to have understanding and
compassion, even for the leaders, even for the
perpetrators of the crime, because ultimately they're all
suffering. And they're all doing, if they
do stupid things, it's because of delusion and because of
misunderstanding. Not because they want to be bad
people. Nobody, I think it's fair to
say, wants to be bad. So remember that, because it's
very easy to become very self-righteous and then become
angry and things. It's not going to help anybody,
I think. Yeah. . . .
.