6 : Food for Rebirth

What does it mean to “comprehend” birth as an instance of suffering? And what is accomplished by viewing it in that way?

The Buddha often compared all suffering to the acts of clinging and feeding: acts inherently stressful not only for those clung to and fed upon, but also for those who, through the disease of hunger (Dhp 203), keep needing to cling and feed.

In fact, for the Buddha, feeding and clinging are virtually one and the same. The Pāli word for clinging—upādāna—also means fuel or sustenance and the act of taking sustenance from fuel. In his explanation of how a fire burns, for instance, the fire feeds itself by clinging to its fuel—an image he also used to illustrate how rebirth happens through the process of clinging to craving:

By introducing a “being” into this passage, the Buddha might be suspected of introducing a “what” into his discussion of birth. And this is not the only place where he talks about a being-to-be-born in this context.

However, on the level of dependent co-arising, the Buddha did not treat the concept of a being as a “what.” His definition of a “being” shows that he recommended that it, too, be regarded as a process:

So the Buddha advocated viewing a “being” simply as a process of attachment to desire, passion, delight, and craving. A being in this sense can take birth, die, and be reborn many times in the course of a day—as attachment develops for one desire, ends, and then develops for another one—to say nothing of how often it occurs during the lifetime of a physical body. This is why the processes leading to rebirth can be observed and redirected in the present moment, for—as we have already noted—the mental processes that move from moment to moment on the micro level are identical with the mental processes that move from body to body on the macro level.

Once born on either the micro or the macro level, the being-process is maintained by the four nutriments of consciousness: physical food, sensory contact, sensory consciousness, and the intentions of the mind.

There is a complex relationship between craving and nutriment in sustaining this process. On the one hand, as the above passage shows, craving has to be actively present before consciousness will land on any of the forms of nutriment. On the other hand, had there been no past craving, none of these forms of nutriment would even exist:

This means that craving produces the food that it then feeds on—a fact that allows for the processes leading to birth to lead to repeated rebirth. The role of craving here is closely connected with that of consciousness, which—like craving—produces the food on which it feeds.

Because these processes are self-sustaining, any attempt to map them has to be complex. One of the primary complaints about dependent co-arising is that it is overwhelmingly complicated. This, however, is like complaining about the complexity of a city map that shows all the streets. You put up with the complexity so that you can find precisely the street you want. In the same way, once you accept the fact that the processes leading to suffering are complex, you appreciate the usefulness of the maps provided by dependent co-arising: They point out precisely where in the processes you can make a difference, so that causal patterns can be directed away from suffering and toward its end.

We can see this clearly in the way the two prime models of dependent co-arising depict the self-sustaining pattern by which consciousness produces the food on which consciousness can then continue to feed. This pattern is most obvious in the model that traces the causes of birth back to a mutual causality between consciousness on the one hand, and name-&-form—the mental and physical dimensions of experience—on the other.

In playing a part in the process of birth and growth, consciousness also depends on the phenomena it sustains:

In this way, consciousness directly feeds the factors that it, in turn, feeds upon. So this model for mapping dependent co-arising focuses on one place to break the sequence: the mutual dependence between consciousness and name-&-form.

The more standard model for dependent co-arising gives a more precise picture of what it means to “pull away” consciousness and name-&-form. This model—whose factors we listed in the preceding chapter—traces the causes of suffering back to ignorance, and in so doing provides a more complex picture of the way in which consciousness produces its own food.

At first glance, the pattern of a self-sustaining consciousness-process is less obvious in this model because consciousness appears as a factor only once. However, it functions as a sub-factor at two other points in the process, where it feeds off the factors it sustains. Because the picture here is more complex, it’s more explicit in showing where to focus your attempts to deprive the process of food.

Consciousness first appears in the process as the factor of consciousness itself. This factor follows on ignorance and fabrication, and acts as the condition for name-&-form. The fact that consciousness occurs immediately after fabrication emphasizes that it is driven by intention. As SN 22:79 notes, the element of intention is what turns the potential for sensory consciousness into an actual experience of sensory consciousness.

Thus every act of sensory consciousness is purposeful. As long as ignorance drives fabrication, there is no such thing as a totally passive or pure state of consciousness. Every act of consciousness is colored by the intentional element that shapes it.

The fact that the factor of consciousness appears before name-&-form emphasizes the fact that consciousness has to be present for all the remaining factors—including “intention” under “name”—to occur. And because both consciousness and name-&-form depend on fabrication, which in turn depends on ignorance of the stressful nature of fabrication, this model shows that one way to deprive the consciousness-process of food is to develop right view about the intentional element of fabrication underlying that process.

The second point where consciousness appears in the process of dependent co-arising is as a component of the factor of contact at the six senses. Its role here carries over from its dependence on fabrication, emphasizing the fact that sensory contact is never purely passive. Even the barest contact already contains an element of intentional fabrication that colors it with ignorance.

What this shows is that, to starve the consciousness-process of food, you have to focus less on how you react to sensory contact and more on what you bring to sensory contact—the habits of ignorant fabrication that shape what you sense.

At the third point in the series, consciousness together with its nutriment plays the role of feeding and clinging: building on craving, and leading to becoming—a sense of one’s identity in a particular world of experience—which is the prerequisite for birth. (Think of the way in which, when you fall asleep, a dream world appears in the mind, and you then enter into that world.) In this case, the Buddha said, consciousness plays the role of a seed that—when watered by craving and delight—blooms into becoming on the level of sensuality, form, or formlessness.

To view consciousness and its nutriment here as a seed watered by craving, delight, and passion helps focus attention on the role played by these three latter mind-states in producing food for endlessly repeated suffering and birth. These are the mind-states that sustain the consciousness-process as it moves from one standing-point to another. Perhaps the Buddha switched from the feeding analogy to the seed analogy here because the implications of the food analogy at this point would have been too harsh to state explicitly in polite company: We keep feeding off the by-products of our earlier feeding. The seed analogy, however, makes this point more indirectly. Just as seeds, when watered, grow into plants that both produce seeds and, when they die, add fertilizer to the soil that feeds those seeds, in the same way, consciousness nourished with karma and craving keeps producing more standing-points—the aggregates of form, feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness—for future acts of consciousness to feed on:

In other words, as long as delight and passion—this phrase is a synonym for clinging—nourishes the consciousness-process, consciousness in turn keeps creating the food to keep the process going indefinitely, even after the form of this body is cast aside. This is why repeated birth-as-process will not end until it’s deprived of the water of craving and clinging. And the only way to deprive the process of its water and food is to develop dispassion for activities that sustain it.

This is where this model for dependent co-arising shows its pragmatic value. It demonstrates not only that the food and water for rebirth can be directly experienced, but also that these processes are the direct consequence of choices made in the mind: the intentional activity of fabrication based on ignorance. In this way, it points to the possibility that the suffering of repeated rebirth can be ended by choice: choosing to develop appropriate attention—right view concerning the four noble truths—which puts an end to craving and ignorance. That way, instead of getting entangled in trying to destroy the conditions of birth—which would lead to taking on a destroyer-identity, which would merely continue the process of becoming—you choose simply to starve the process of its sustenance, allowing it to end on its own.

That choice is where the path, the fourth noble truth, begins.