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Chapter 1: Two Stories

In his first sermon, the Buddha begins his definition of the cause of stress and suffering with the phrase, “the craving that leads to renewed bhava.” He ends his description of the fruits of his Awakening with the realization, “There is now no renewed bhava.” These two statements show clearly that the concept of bhava is central to an understanding of suffering, its cause, and its cessation. And as we will see, it also plays a crucial role in the path to the cessation of stress and suffering. This means that it is central to all four of the four noble truths—truths lying at the heart of the Buddha’s teaching as a whole. Yet the Buddha never gives an essential definition of what the word bhava means, so an understanding has to be pieced together from the way he uses it in his teachings.

Any Pāli dictionary will show that bhava is related to the verb bhavati, which means to ”be” or to ”become.” This is why bhava is often translated as “being” or “becoming.” But to see what kind of being or becoming is meant by the word, we have to look at it in context.

Bhava is included in a variety of lists describing mental states that an arahant—a fully awakened person—has overcome. Thus it is one of the three āsavas, or effluents; one of the four oghas, or floods; one of the four yogas, or burdens; and one of the seven anusayas, or obsessions. Although it does not occur in the standard list of ten saṅyojanas, or fetters, a standard formula describing the arahant states that he/she has “destroyed the fetter of becoming.” Although these lists clearly indicate that bhava is regarded as something negative that has to be overcome for the sake of Awakening, they give no idea of what the term actually means.

For that, we have to look at a passage describing bhava in action. And the primary teaching supplying this context is dependent co-arising, the Buddha’s most complete description of the factors leading to suffering and stress (see Appendix I). There, bhava is conditioned by craving and clinging; it acts as a condition for birth, which is followed by aging, illness, and death.

Two points stand out here. First, bhava is not “Being” in the sense of a primary metaphysical absolute. Instead, it is part of an on-going, dynamic process, something produced repeatedly in a complex network of cause and effect—what Sn 3:12 calls the “stream” of bhava. It’s a type of being that follows on doing, a doing in anticipation of what will become. For this reason, in choosing an English equivalent for bhava, “becoming” seems more appropriate than “being,” in that it better captures bhava’s conditioned, purposeful, dynamic nature.

Second, becoming acts as a transition point between two contexts in the stream of conditions leading to suffering. It is conditioned by such purely psychological factors as craving and clinging, and yet it provides the locus for processes that occur both on the psychological and cosmological level: birth, aging, illness, and death. In fact, one of the distinctive features of the Buddha’s use of the notion of becoming is the ease with which he shifts the context of the term from the cosmological to the psychological and back. The reasons for this dual context are illustrated by two incidents from his accounts of how the cosmos evolves.

Although the Buddha famously said (SN 22:86) that all he taught was suffering and the end of suffering, the Pāli discourses occasionally portray him as using cosmological accounts to illustrate the underlying psychology of how suffering comes about and how it can be brought to an end. The accounts differ in their details, but the differences can be explained by the fact that the Buddha nowhere gives a master narrative on the origin of the cosmos. He always depicts the cosmos as a work in progress, showing how it develops not from the decisions of a single creator, but from the independent decisions of all the beings inhabiting it. Thus, he is free to choose from many diverse—sometimes simultaneous—story lines to teach different lessons. Still, his accounts share a common framework: The cosmos goes through repeated cycles of evolution or expansion, and devolution or contraction. The dual nature of becoming, both psychological and cosmological, appears clearly in two accounts that focus on how, after a period of contraction, the cosmos begins to evolve again.

The first account, told to explain how the idea of a creator god was first conceived, illustrates the change in becoming that occurs when a being leaves one level of the cosmos and reappears in another.

Here a change in becoming happens because of the exhaustion of old kamma, in this case the meritorious kamma that kept these beings in the company of the Radiant. However, present kamma also plays a role in the shift from one lifetime to the next, in that one must cling to craving to make the shift.

In addition, a change in becoming also occurs after the new lifetime has begun. The mistaken perception that the Great Brahmā is a creator god, even though it does not change the physical details of the cosmos, does change the way he and the other beings experience the nature of the cosmos and their relationship to one another. This change in relationship will apparently continue as long as the eon lasts. In this way, even though the change in becoming is more psychological than physical, its impact is no less lasting and strong.

The second cosmological account, however, describes how a change in becoming within the context of a single lifetime can actually alter the physical universe. This account, which carries allegorical overtones, was told to refute the racial pride of the brahmans, showing how racial pride, rather than any supposed racial inferiority in others, was what brought about the degeneration of the world.

In this account, present kamma plays a predominant role in the change of becoming. As craving acquires a focus—this seems to be the meaning of “craving alights”—beings act on it. In acting on it, they themselves immediately change; and as they change, their experience of the world around them changes as well.

There is a familiar psychological truth here. People who have recovered from an addiction will recognize how their sense of themselves changed when the addiction began, how their perception of the world was also distorted while the addiction lasted, and how both they and the world around them changed when the addiction was finally overcome. If the addiction was for alcohol, they found themselves defined by the desire for alcohol, and the world around them defined by—and limited to—its ability or inability to provide them with the alcohol needed to satisfy that desire. Only when the addiction was overcome were they freed from those limitations. They are now different people, and the world a different place.

This connection between one’s personal state and one’s experience of the world—and the way in which both depend on the focal point of one’s cravings—goes a long way toward explaining the combination of psychology and cosmology in the Buddha’s concept of becoming. And although the cosmological passages depicting this connection are marked by a sly humor, the basic outlines of the picture they provide are confirmed by other discourses that treat the topic of becoming in more detail and earnestness. As that outline shows, becoming constitutes a sense of self-identity located in a particular world. The contours of that self and that world are determined by a combination of old kamma and new; their location is determined by an act of craving and desire.

Passages discussing the issue of becoming in more detail—to be discussed in the following chapter—will show why this particular combination of elements necessarily leads to suffering. They will also show how these elements open a path to the end of suffering, and yet require that that path take several paradoxical turns.