Dependent Co-arising in Fifteen Minutes

Someone once asked me what the most important things were to know with regard to dependent co-arising if you want to get some practical use out of the teaching. The Buddha might have been offended by the question because, after all, all of his teachings are meant to be practical. But there are three things that are especially worth noting about dependent co-arising.

One is the relationship among the different factors. They’re laid out in a line, but as they appear in your mind, they’re not laid out in a line. If you look into the sub-factors and the explanations for each of the factors, you find that there’s a fair amount of back and forth—feedback loops—where one thing gives rise to another, and that other thing comes back and affects the beginning thing. So it’s not just a case of one thing being a cause and not functioning also as an effect. This means that you can look at the relationships among the different factors basically wherever you want. The Buddha points out that you can take this whole process apart at any point in the process, because you have these feedback loops. That’s one good thing to know.

The second good thing to know is that most of the factors that have a big impact on giving rise to suffering come before sensory contact. In other words, your mind and body are primed by the way you pay attention to them—whether in ignorance or with knowledge—either to give rise to more suffering or to put an end to suffering.

These are acts like attention, intention, perception, even the way you talk to yourself. Now, these things of course—because of the nature of the system—also are affected by sensory contact. But it’s important that the Buddha notes that these things come first—particularly with reference to the sub-factor of intention, under name and form, coming before sensory contact—because contact at the senses, the Buddha said, is basically your old karma coming back at you.

But here there’s intention before that. The intention before that is your intention in the present moment, the intention that puts things together in the present moment. So your present-moment intention is something you actually experience prior to the results of past karma. That’s pretty radical. How you approach things comes first before the things themselves.

Which means, of course, that we have to train the mind. You don’t just say, “Okay, this is the way things are, this is the contact that comes in, and then I’m going to think about what I’m going to do about it.” Even before you have the contact, you already have some ideas about what you want, which is why—as everybody notices—different people can look at the same thing and see different things, because they’re coming from different places, not only physically, but also mentally. So we meditate so that we can get more in touch with these factors that come prior to contact, because they provide the foundation for everything else.

Even though craving is said to come after contact, what it is that we crave? Where is that craving located? It’s going to be located in the aggregates. It’s going to be located in the factor of fabrication. You can have craving located in your directed thought and evaluation; you can have craving located in perceptions or acts of attention. So even though craving comes after contact, it’s going to be centered on things that come prior to contact.

And finally, the third important thing to know about dependent co-arising is that it’s not foreign to the practice of concentration. As you get the mind into concentration, you’re actually using these different factors. Under the factor of fabrication, you have the breath: What are we looking at right now? We’re looking at the breath.

You have directed thought and evaluation: That’s verbal fabrication—how you talk to yourself. You focus on a topic and then you make comments on it. Right now, you should be focusing on the breath, commenting on the breath. If you find that you’re focusing on something else, commenting on something else, come back to the breath.

And thirdly, there are perceptions and feelings: There’s the feeling of ease or the feeling of dis-ease that you have around the breath. Then the perceptions you have about what’s happening as the breath comes in: What are you focusing on? Are you focusing on the air? Are you focusing on the contact at the nose? Are you focusing on the movement of energy in the body? Where does that energy begin? Does it begin outside? When it comes into the body, is it fighting to get in or is the body welcoming it in? And if the energy comes from within—where? Where are the beginning points? Can you move those beginning points around?

All of this is perception.

These are the things you need to do in order to get the mind to settle down. It’s not the case that you get the mind quiet and then magically it’ll understand the five aggregates because it’s quiet. It understands the five aggregates because you’ve been using those five aggregates, learning how to look at these things as activities, to get the mind to settle down. If you don’t look at them in the right way, they can easily turn into a state of becoming, where you take on an identity around them. You’re looking for something that you want: You take on the identity—the person who’s going to find it, in the world in which it’s going to be found.

Well, becoming isway down in the list, and it comes after clinging. Once there’s clinging, there’s going to be suffering.

Someone asked, what’s the relationship between dependent co-arising and the four noble truths? Everything up through craving in the list is the second noble truth. Everything starting with clinging, going through becoming and birth, aging, and death, is the first noble truth.

When you bring knowledge to these processes, that’s the path. Once you’ve got the path, that leads to the end of suffering. So it’s all right here. The Buddha’s just parsing it out to give you some ideas of where to look—which activities right now are the ones where your craving is focused.

Ideally, if you can get the mind to settle down in concentration, it should be focused on your intention to stay here or on the act of attention, watching what’s going on.

It is possible to analyze your everyday sensory experience in terms of dependent co-arising, but those things happen really fast, and a lot of them occur all at once, in many, many cycles. But as you get the mind to settle down, things slow down, and everything is gathered around one spot. Where are your intentions? They’re right here. Where’s your act of attention? It’s right here. Your perceptions—everything is right here, gathered together, where you can see it. It’s simply going to be a matter of parsing out which is the area you’re clinging to, why you’re clinging, and what you’re craving.

So it’s all right here. The Buddha is simply notifying you that these are the various ways you can separate it out. There’s a passage in the Canon where he talks about Sāriputta analyzing his concentration, and it goes even into more detail as to what’s going on in this mind that’s gathered together.

Your mind, when it gathers together, is not just dead space. You want to see that it’s quiet, but underneath the quiet there are a lot of little tiny activities are going on. Like the big water jars they have in Thailand, that you use to bathe from: You look at the surface of the water, and the surface of the water is very still, but sometimes there are little mosquito larvae wiggling around, just waiting to come out.

In the same way, your mind is still, but the little larvae of perceptions, attention, clingings, and cravings—all the things that are listed—are ready to fly and turn into mosquitoes, and they can bite you.

So when things get very, very still, don’t assume that nothing is happening. These things are all happening all the time. It’s just a matter of learning to become more sensitive to what you’ve got right here. The Buddha wants you to focus in these ways, because he wants to get you out of your ordinary states of becoming and see things simply as events. Then it’s a lot easier to let go of them.

If you try to destroy a state of becoming, that becomes a craving for non-becoming, and that’s a problem. But if you can simply focus on the events that would lead up to another state of becoming and develop some dispassion for them, that’s the way out.

Which is why the question of whether dependent co-arising is happening in your mind or happening in the world is a question the Buddha would put aside. Your sense of who you are is happening in dependent co-arising. Your sense of the world is happening in dependent co-arising. It’s the standard—and that flips things around.

So get used to getting the mind to settle down. And be confident that whatever effort is needed to get it to settle down is effort well spent.

Some people say, “I don’t have any talent in that direction.” This is not the education system we have in our modern world, where children are tested to see where they’re talented, and then they’re channeled into the talented area, and they allow other people to take care of the things that they’re not talented in. The Buddha says that whether you’re talented or not, this is what you’ve got to do. Then he teaches you how to do it, even if you’re not talented.

After all, the question of putting an end to suffering shouldn’t have to depend on your talent. It’s not a path meant only for some people. It’s the path meant for everybody. Whether it comes easily or not, don’t let that be an obstacle.

And realize that this is serious business. The world of the Buddha is not a world of make-believe. Suffering is serious, and the Buddha is serious about helping you to get freed from it.

So take his teachings to heart. They’re not just meant to show off his ability to come up with new terms. He says that these are important things to look at, and you get to know them by getting your mind still.

So get your mind still. And try to be honest and observant as you do it. Then you’ll find out that this teaching really is of practical use, for the best of all possible purposes.