Connections
The Buddhist Teaching of Dependent Origination
Buddhism emphasises how everything, and every experience, is dependent on other things and on other experiences. This is the idea of ‘dependent origination’, or the co-origination of all that appears.
We can see this clearly in our sciences. In the natural world there are no absolutes, rather everything is a compound of different elements. We know from physics that nature is made up of increasingly subtle states of matter and energy, from the visible forms that we see around us, to molecules, to atoms comprising what were once thought of as ‘elementary particles’, to sub-atomic particles, and then to a quantum flux in which particles are created, annihilated and recreated.
We can see this in our experience too. One thought leads to another. One encounter with something or someone sparks an emotion. One desire leads to an action, and the action to some result that ignites a further chain of experiences.
The Buddha described this as a chain of inter-connected links, the twelve links in the chain of dependent origination-
1. Ignorance
2. Subject-object
3. Conditioned consciousness
4. Name and form
5. The six senses
6. Contact
7. Sensation/Feeling
8. Desire and craving
9. Clinging
10. Existence and becoming
11. Birth/Life
12. Suffering, old age and death
This teaching is extremely subtle. Many words and many sutras have been devoted to how it can be seen as describing the way human lives are shaped, indeed constrained, by it. The connections between each link in the chain are forged almost, but not quite, instantaneously. Once we experience that we are an ‘I’, a separate subject, we experience consciousness or awareness as conditioned by that ‘I’, so that all experience arises in my consciousness, and is my experience. Then we create names for the objects that appear within the view of this subject. Then we recognise the senses that allow us to make contact with those objects and the sensations to which those objects give rise, and the craving, clinging or aversion that we feel toward them.
At this point we are more than half-way through the twelve links, yet we arrive there, time after time, in the blinking of an eye. So fast that we cannot typically interrupt the process to reflect, ‘How did I get here, entangled in this net of thoughts, desires and habitual responses?’ ‘Do I really want to be here?’ ‘Do I, or did I, have a choice?’
One of the most interesting aspects of this teaching is that it starts with ‘ignorance’. But ignorance of what?
Whatever the nature of this ignorance might be, it gives rise to a sense of subject and object. And once I perceive myself as a subject of experience, that experience and the awareness of it is conditioned by that subjective sense. I appear to be what it is that has those experiences. I have a name, an identity, and a body. This body which is ‘me’ or ‘mine’ has sensual and cognitive experience which connects me with everything which is not me.
I find some of the things that I come into contact with to be ‘good’ and some to be ‘bad’; I am attracted to the former and averse to the latter. I cling and I crave, I fear, I hate and I avoid. I am attached to life. I am afraid of death. And in my craving and in my avoiding, I suffer.
So, it is ignorance that creates the ‘I’. But what is the nature of this ignorance?
In the current age we have an answer to this question which was not available in the Buddha’s time, or at least not quite in the way that it is currently understood. We can perhaps now see that it lies in our evolutionary history. You and I are only here now because our ancestors survived long enough to have children and (most likely) lived long enough to help raise their progeny. This simple fact connects each living human being on the planet to a chain of other human beings, and indeed to our non-human ancestors. Herein lie billions of connections that have led to life on this planet.
One of the key features that our ancestors possessed was a sense of self, accompanied by all the selfish characteristics that nature could assemble and pack into one small body. All of these cravings, emotions, thoughts, fears, and aversions were brought together in a fragile body thereby helping it to survive long enough to raise children who would carry that body’s genes and those characteristics into the next generation. Since life appeared on earth some four billion years ago this has been a chain of cause and effect which has led (amongst many other things) to these words and to you reading them.
Is selfhood then ‘good’, ‘desirable’, to be celebrated?
Certainly, if you are a gene, it is. But if you are a human being? Not so clear. Might you not want to think about it a bit? Who am I really? Am a free to determine my own identity?
Could I say, ‘Thanks to my ancestors and their genes for creating this body, but this body and its evolutionary history is not the sum total of what I am.’
Indeed, this body might not be ‘me’ at all, for the sense of being ‘me’ comes only from you, those genes that have made this body. But am I not more than that body?
I think that what the Buddha is saying is that there is a choice. Let’s accept that each and every human being starts with ignorance, starts with that first link in the chain of dependent origination. OK, so ignorance had a purpose. It fuelled evolution, led to self and self-interest, and made possible my birth. Here I am to prove it. Except, what exactly is this ‘I’ that appears to be ‘here’? Perhaps I and my ancestors, and you and your ancestors, have been the fall guys for an evolutionary process in which the individual was never a hero or heroine, never really the ‘subject’ of the story? Are we then just mugs, unwitting vehicles for the genes?
In this account one thing leads to another, and then another. Ignorance leads to selfhood, and selfhood (at the current moment) has led to almost eight billion competing, voracious, warring, suffering, human beings. But what if something comes before ignorance? What if we only have to retrace our steps in order to find what lies before it arose? What if, when we find it, we can live without ignorance?
What is it that, at least for us human beings, lies before ignorance, self and self-interest? If you look at the twelve links you might see it. There it is, disguised and obscured by its conditioning, waiting to be liberated, waiting to be recognised and celebrated.
Zen Buddhists sometimes describe it as your ‘original face’, the face that you had before you were born, before ignorance took hold. The face that you have always had. It is very close and very intimate. So close and so intimate that you might overlook it.
