doctrine of the 12 links of dependent origination
-
hi,
i have a question about this
in the video* the dalai lama mentions this
the doctrine of the 12 links of dependent origination
and then he says:
"ignorance leading to volition leading to consciousness"
is he saying that it is our ignorance that has us to believing that we have a will of our own?
or is he saying that ignorance led us to will the existence of consciousness itself so that we may experience ourselves as beings?
*the video is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXmdKWVirUA&feature=related
he talks about this about 1 hour and ten minutes into part 1
-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sa%E1%B9%85kh%C4%81ra
Sankhara-khandha:The builder of lives
the second (active) sense, saṅkh�ra (or saṅkh�ra-kkandha) refers to the form-creating faculty of mind, often described as "volitional" or "intentional."[6] States the Buddha:
'And why do you call them 'fabrications'? Because they fabricate fabricated things, thus they are called 'fabrications.' What do they fabricate as a fabricated thing? For the sake of form-ness, they fabricate form as a fabricated thing. For the sake of feeling-ness, they fabricate feeling as a fabricated thing. For the sake of perception-hood... For the sake of fabrication-hood... For the sake of consciousness-hood, they fabricate consciousness as a fabricated thing. Because they fabricate fabricated things, they are called fabrications.'[7]
In the doctrine of conditioned arising or dependent origination (paá¹iccasamuppÄ�da), saá¹…khÄ�ra-khandha is understood to be that which propels human (and other sentient) beings along the process of becoming (bhava) by means of actions of body and speech (kamma).[8] The Buddha stated that all volitional constructs are conditioned by ignorance (avijja) of the reality (sacca) behind appearance.[9] It is this ignorance that ultimately causes human suffering (dukkha). The dissolution of all such fabrications (sabba-saá¹…khÄ�ra-nirodha) is synonymous with Enlightenment (bodhi), the achieving of arahantship.
As ignorance conditions volitional formations, these formations in turn condition consciousness (viññÄ�na). The Buddha elaborated:
'What one intends, what one arranges, and what one obsesses about: This is a support for the stationing of consciousness. There being a support, there is a landing [or: an establishing] of consciousness. When that consciousness lands and grows, there is the production of renewed becoming in the future. When there is the production of renewed becoming in the future, there is future birth, aging & death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, & despair. Such is the origination of this entire mass of suffering & stress.'[10]
Tradition relates that after the Buddha's complete enlightenment he uttered the following words (English and Pali):
'Seeking but not finding the housebuilder,
I have traveled through the round of countless births.
How painful is birth over and over again.
Oh housebuilder! You have now been caught!
You shall not build a house again.
Your rafters have been broken. Your ridgepole demolished.
The unconditioned consciousness has been attained.
And every kind of craving has been destroyed.'
(Dhammap�da, verses 153,154)Aneka j�ti sams�raṃ sandha vissam anibhissam
Gahakaraka gavesanto dukkhaj�ti punappunam
Gahakaraka ditthosi puna geham nakahasi
Sabba te phasuka bagga gahakutam visamkhatam
Visamkh�ragatam cittam tanhanam khayamajjhaga.The 'housebuilder' to which the Buddha refers is just this mental faculty of sankh�ra-khandha whose products, the volitional formations, are conditioned by (created due to) ignorance.
-
thanks for the answer AEN
it's just what i was looking for :)
-
From 'Buddhism Plain and Simple' by Steve Hagen:
Appendix
Dependent Arising
-------------------
The Buddha's teaching on how ignorance and intention are linked to duhkha (suffering) via a twelve-link chain is called Dependent Arising (pratityasamutpada).
He said,
Dependent upon ignorance arises dispositions; dependent upon dispositions arises consciousness; dependent upon consciousness arise mind and body; dependent upon mind and body arise the six senses; dependent upon the six senses arises contact; dependent upon contact arises feeling; dependent upon feeling arises craving; dependent upon craving arises grasping; dependent upon grasping arises being; dependent upon being arises birth; dependent upon birth arises old age and death, grief, lamentation, suffering, dejection, and despair. Thus arises the entire mass of suffering.
However, from the utter fading away and ceasing of ignorance, there is ceasing of dispositions; from the ceasing of dispositions, there is ceasing of consciousness; from the ceasing of consciousness, there is ceasing of mind and body; from the ceasing of mind and body, there is ceasing of six senses; from the ceasing of the six senses, there is ceasing of contact; from the ceasing of contact, there is ceasing of feeling; from the ceasing of feeling, there is ceasing of craving; from the ceasing of craving, there is ceasing of grasping; from the ceasing of grasping, there is ceasing of being; from the ceasing of being, there is ceasing of birth; from the ceasing of birth, there is ceasing of old age and death, grief, lamentation, suffering, dejection, and despair. And thus there is the ceasing of this entire mass of suffering.
The Buddha described this chain in terms of bondage and liberation. Bondage is the taking hold of any link of this chain (and thus the entire chain); liberation is the letting go of the chain. This letting go comes through seeing.
In this teaching, the Buddha points out what our actual experience is -- that all things arise together, or dependently. Nothing appears by itself; everything we experience appears in a context and against a backdrop of other things that are dependent on and conditioned by each other.
A literal translation of the Buddha's words would be, "When this arises, that becomes." In other words, the Buddha never spoke of things as they are, since this is the very delusion we suffer from in the first place. He spoke of things as they have come to be in this moment, dependent on other things. When the sunrises, we have daylight. The Buddha would further remind us that these two things are always found together. Sunrise and daylight are not exactly two, but inextricably linked together.
In everyday life, however, the idea that all things come intimately joined is not at all obvious to us. This ignorance is what keeps us in bondage.
The twelve-link chain the Buddha spoke of is not a progression through time or space, as if link one leads to link two, and so on. Rather, if you pick up any one of these links, you have the whole chain -- not in a temporal sequence, but all at once.
In the chart on page 161 the chain is presented as a straight line going from link one to link twelve. I've presented it this way for the sake of easy reading and comprehension. But a truly accurate picture would array the twelve links in a circle, like the numbers on the face of a clock.
Let's look at this chain in detail. We'll start with ignorance, which is considered the first link. Ignorance is like a black hole that sucks everything into it, even illumination. Thus we can't see it, at least not directly.
One of the characteristics of ignorance, then, is that we're ignorant of our ignorance. This puts a pernicious spin on our predicament.
There are two kinds of ignorance: blindness and self-deception. Blindness is ignorance of the basic realities of existence: impermanence, duhkha, and selflessness. (Buddha called theses the "three marks of existence.") Self-deception is our belief that we can know intellectually what things are. "Oh! That's water," we say. "Hydrogen and oxygen." And then we dismiss the actual experience of this moment. (But if you really want to know what water is, just take a drink, or go for a walk in the rain, or take a swim.)
In short, we're simply confused about this moment. As Huang Po said, in our ignorance we reject actual experience in favor of what we think, thus we posit a self in our thought, and we see permanence where there isn't any.
If instead we would attend to this moment, we would see that nothing actually arises, persists, or dies as a separate entity. This is what we truly can know -- but we ignore it and suffer greatly as a result.
This moment is complete unto itself. There's nothing lacking in this moment. If we would actually see this moment for what it is, we would see all of space and time as nothing other than here and now.
In ignorant this -- our actual experience -- the mind no longer rests quietly in Wholeness, but begins to lean. The Buddha called this "disposition of mind," or intention. This forms the second link on the chain. Any actions that come out of such a mind are willed.*
(*To understand the nature of willed action and how it binds us to duhkha, we must first look at the nature of action, or motion, in general. If I throw a ball, it will continue to move at the same speed and in the same direction I threw it, without stopping or changing course, unless it's acted upon by some other force. This would be obvious if we were in outer space. On earth, of course, the ball would just fall to the ground and roll to a stop. This is because the ball is being acted upon by the force of gravity. This is just simple physics.
When we see the ball bounce and roll to a stop, however, we tend to think the action is over. But only the ball has stopped. The action we took doesn't stop it all. When the ball hit the ground it jostled the soil and the grass and it converted its energy of motion to heat. Even though the ball comes to rest, the energy that once moved it is still here; it's been converted into heat and dispersed. It will continue to disperse, but it won't disappear.
My point is that the energy, or action, doesn't stop at all. Ever. Through innumerable transformations, it just continues on and on and on. This is how things are. Nothing stops. This is the nature of Reality. Indeed, this is the nature of Mind -- pure, unending movement.
Bu there's where it gets critical. We might think that by tossing a ball we initiate an action, but this is merely an arbitrary point in a beginningless line of action. It's important to understand that a line of action, or movement, or energy that momentarily manifests as, for example a ball being thrown, has no discernible beginning. What is discernible is when intention steps into a line of action. To the awakened, this qualitatively changes the picture, and the change is total. It's the difference between freedom and bondage as defined by the Buddha. Simply put, willed action is radically different from unwilled, or natural action.)
We routinely act out of intent, out of a leaning mind. Nature, acting out of the Whole, does not. We commonly see things "out there" and go after them. Our mind is thus characterized by division and separation.
But the Whole functions differently. There's nothing "out there" for Mind to lean toward or away from. Thus the actions produced by Mind -- the Whole, or nature -- are radically different in essence (though not always in appearance) from acts of human will.
Nature acts out of the Whole, without any effort or intent. Through innumerable transformations, the Whole continues as beginningless and endless action and reaction. Intention steps into the natural flow of action and attempts to control it. This is the source of duhkha.
When in ignorance a mind images "that, out there," it leans towards it or away from it. This disposition of mind involves discrimination, the next link of the chain. This third link is also known as consciousness.
Consciousness divides Reality. It conceptualizes it, packages it, and explains it to itself. Then in our ignorance, we think it's taking readings on things "out there."
In Buddhism, consciousness is sometimes depicted as a monkey in a tree full of flowers. "Oh! I'll take that one, and that one, and that one." With consciousness, there's this, that and the next thing. The world is continuously being divided up in various ways.
In our everyday view, we think that the world is out there -- separate and persistent, and we think of consciousness as a sort of unifying action, a linking of pieces or parts. From such a view, your consciousness is taking in this book -- visually, tactilely, and even audibly as you turn the pages.
To awakened people, however, the picture is reversed. What is actually experienced is always a seamless Whole. Consciousness divides it. And, of course, the most basic division is "me" and "everything else," self and other.
Consciousness not only divides the world spatially, it also divides it temporally. We thus imagine past, present, and future, and the persistence of separate objects.
Conscious experience is very much like a movie. It's just one moment -- one still -- after another. But because these seem to occur in rapid succession, we adopt the contradictory belief that there are particular, persistent things out there that nevertheless change. For this reason, the Buddha called this link "rebirth consciousness," a sense that objects persist, being reborn moment after moment.
Link four, mind and body, and link five, the senses, comprise the delusion that we ourselves are particular, persistent things. Each of us conceives of a particular body, then imagines that this body supports a particular consciousness. Along with these come the senses and the organs associated with them. According to Buddhist teachings, there are six senses: the five we already familiar with and the mind. Each sense is paired with a sense organ: eyes with sight, ears with hearing, nose with smell, tongue with taste, body with touch, and mind with thought.
Once we conceive of objects as "out there," a persistent body and mind as "in here," and a set of sense organs to bridge the gap between the two, we have the illusion of contact or connection. This is link six. From our common, deluded standpoint, we think we're connected to a world "out there."
The great Zen master Pai-chang said, "If you realize there is no connection between your senses and the external world, you will be enlightened on the spot." There can be no connection because there are no separate things to be connected.
It's possible to experience directly what Pai-chang describes here. To see in this way is utterly liberating.
In our delusion -- our sense of connection with things out there -- we react emotionally. This is the seventh link, feeling.
Dependent upon feeling arises links eight and nine, craving or desire, and grasping. Craving is the need to grab certain objects "out there" and bring them closer, and to keep others at a distance or push them away. With desire comes grasping, the ninth link of the chain. We want to hold onto what we love, and to grab hold of what we dislike and hurl it away from us. This link has also been called "the hardening of craving," or "attachment."
These are two forms of grasping. Firs there is grasping at sense objects. You see the object of your desire out there and you take hold of it.
The second kind of grasping is holding tight to belief. The Buddha identified three common types of belief. The first is belief in something "out there" that will set everything right and make everything perfect -- a heaven or paradise. But even the nihilistic view that "After I die, that's it" is still a form of grasping on such a belief. Grasping at any thoughts or opinions fits this category, since grasping is an attempt to make sense of our existence.
A second kind of belief is belief that ritual or ceremony can somehow save us from pain, confusion, and ignorance. It's only in learning to see this very moment, as it has come to be, that liberation occurs -- not in wearing robes or performing ritual acts.
The third belief we grasp at is the belief in a self, a permanent existence. This is the belief that's most deeply rooted in us, and that causes us the most pain.
And now we have the tenth link, being: persistence or existence. This in turn will link to ignorance, since, in Reality, nothing persists. But with being comes birth, the eleventh link, and with birth comes death, the twelfth link. Thus birth and death, the great problem we all face, we linked to the grasping of a self. This is duhkha in its most gripping and pervasive form.
But duhkha need not grip us. To see this moment as it comes to be -- to see that all is fluidity, that nothing separate is born, and that nothing dies -- is to break the chain of bondage.