An Introductory Talk on Dependent Arising
Often when people come across an explanation of what is meant by Dependent Arising in Buddhist philosophy, they find a description of the 12-link chain of Dependent Arising. Dependent on ignorance there are karmic formations, dependent on karmic formations there’s consciousness, dependent on that there’s what's called mind and body , and on and on. Because it's presented this way, people often think of Dependent Arising as linear. And a lot of Buddhist teaching does tend to go in that direction, that what you’re seeing is a linear process of one thing leading to another, leading to another.
At times in your experience you may find that you’re aware of those kinds of sequences. You’re aware of hearing a sound and having a particular reaction to the sound; or you’re aware of having a thought come up and immediately judging the thought; or you’re aware of a whole sequence of feelings and thoughts, just one after another. Yet to look at these things primarily as a sequence is to miss something important: How they relate to each other.
Because you believe in the idea of a sequence, if you hear a sound that you find irritating you might think that hearing the sound is one thing and your irritation is something separate. But if you stay with your experience, the hearing the sound and the irritation are together. Hearing the sound, the irritation and wanting to do something about the sound or wanting to not hear the sound are also together. These things are arising together and it’s that phenomenon of their being together that in fact makes it an experience. It gives it a fullness, a sense that this is what you’re experiencing. Rather than seeing Dependent Arising as the linear sequence that we often are taught to see, looking at it from the standpoint of things being together and related, changes how you start to see your experience
Along these lines, in much of the Buddhist commentaries and in Goenka's teaching and others', there's an idea that the sequence can be stopped at a certain place. It says that if only you could get to a certain awareness or equanimity, the sequence would stop at one point and not develop further. But this is based on a belief in sequences. With a conceptual model of experience as linear you can think of a place where it can be cut. But when you see experiences as arising together, you’re not trying to see a place to cut it.
Instead you may see how something comes up and it's full blown and how it subsides and vanishes. You can start to see how experience arises along with a whole variety of things that hold it together and sustain it and how it may diminish and vanish. You start to see arising and passing away. That’s seeing Dependent Arising in your own experience .
This is different than trying to find a place where you can enter your experience and stop it. It's a different approach from saying just hear the sound and not hear the irritation, or just have the bodily sensation of a pain in your leg and not have the anger or aversion regarding it. It's a different orientation because if your mind is in that place, in a process of Dependent Arising where habitually you will get angry when you feel pain then you are going to feel anger when you have pain and you’re going to get irritated when you hear certain noises and you’re going to feel frightened when around certain things that come up.
Often an awareness that tries to focus on sequences tends to be one that sharply defines experiences. In various practices there’s a type of trying to put your attention too closely on how one thing follows another. Whereas what I would say is that when you look at things coming together you may find an awareness that’s a bit more diffuse and one that allows things to come up. It's an awareness that’s able to receive, without the need to point out each little thing that’s happening in order. You may start to find that there’s more going on than you realized, that there are more things coming up than you thought before.