This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Start Anywhere Get Everywhere, an Exploration of Dependent Arising with Kim Allen. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Start Anywhere Get Everywhere, an Exploration of Dependent Arising - Kim Allen

The following talk was given by Kim Allen at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on July 29, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Start Anywhere Get Everywhere, an Exploration of Dependent Arising

Introduction

Welcome to everyone here. Everyone who's here is very welcome to come to IMC, whether it is your very first time walking in here or if you've been here for decades. And welcome also to the folks who are online; we're joined by many people around the world.

The Buddha's Quest and Dependent Arising

When the Buddha was setting out on his quest for spiritual awakening, the story says that he was concerned with the large existential questions of being human. We find ourselves in this life, and that just goes toward aging, illness, and death, which are suffering. So, what does that mean? How can we overcome that suffering so that our life is not inseparably bound up with some kind of stress and struggle and difficulty? That was the Buddha's initial question: why does it have to be like this?

After he did awaken, it is said that he sat in meditation under the Bodhi tree for an additional seven days and he contemplated what is called dependent arising. Dependent arising is a series or a set of interrelated conditions that culminate in the experience of aging, illness, and death, or the mass of suffering in general. What he was doing, though, is that he was reflecting under the Bodhi tree that he had actually solved the issue. He was reflecting back to his original question—how do we deal with this human life and the big questions that come with it? Did I solve that problem? And he realized, yes, he had solved that issue and he had completed his quest.

This meant that the Buddha understood very deeply how suffering comes about and how it can not come about by seeing that certain things are dependent on each other. Things depend on each other, they're related to each other. He saw how experiences happen based on supportive conditions and also how they fall apart when the supportive conditions are no longer there. It sounds straightforward enough when said like that, but how do you solve that problem for the specific case of suffering, of Dukkha?¹ Could we figure out what is sustaining it and then not do that?

That was what the Buddha found, and it's not something that the Buddha made up or brought into being. He said very clearly in one of his Dharma talks later, "Whether or not anyone awakens to this conditioned nature of experience, nevertheless this law operates." So it's fundamental. He discovered something fundamental about how things work. And then later, the Buddha was quoted by one of his disciples as saying, "One who sees dependent arising sees the Dhamma, and one who sees the Dhamma sees dependent arising." So it's quite a vision that he had sitting under the Bodhi tree.

I'd like to talk about this vision today in a way that is tangible and practical for us because it's actually something with which we all have experience. It really is.

I want to start by emphasizing this phrase that I used, "dependent on," because it's easy to want to think in terms of causes. Our minds are kind of attuned to that in the West; it's simpler for our brain: A causes B. But we're actually talking about necessary conditions that support something being there or not. If you think about something like rain, rain happens, but it depends on certain necessary conditions being in place in order for it to happen. There have to be clouds with a certain amount of moisture in them, the atmospheric pressure has to be right, the temperature has to be right, various other things. When all those conditions are there, it will rain. And when something shifts enough that we go out of some range, then the rain has to stop. For example, I don't think we're going to have rain today because there aren't any clouds. It's just not in the conditions. They could form later, I'm not saying that couldn't happen, but at this exact instant, we don't have the conditions, so we don't have the rain.

Sometimes the Buddha also used the analogy of an oil lamp. An oil lamp burns in dependence on oil, a wick, and air also. But when the oil runs out or the wick runs out—I guess if the air runs out—then the flame would go out. So these are physical examples that make them, I think, pretty easy to relate to. But in fact, we could relate this same idea to the realm of the mind. Suppose you're having an emotion. Did that come about randomly? No, there are necessary conditions for the appearance of a given mind state, whether it's an emotion or a thought or anything else. And there are also conditions for maintaining that, and conditions when they change, it will fall away when the necessary conditions are no longer there.

This general principle of things coming about dependent on conditions is named by the Pali² word Idappaccayatā.³ You don't have to remember that, but I wanted to say it because the word paccaya, which you can hear in there, means "dependent on." So we could kind of summarize this law a little bit casually as, "This arises dependent on that, and if this doesn't happen, then that doesn't arise."

There are actually kind of two different kinds of dependency weaving together. One is more present moment and one is more over time, but I think I'll wait and not go into that in much detail right now. But the Buddha—so that's the very general principle, which I think we can understand in a broad way. But remember, I said the Buddha was particularly concerned about Dukkha. That's the word that we translate as suffering or stress or struggle or unsatisfactoriness. He wasn't that interested in clouds and rain and such, but he was more interested in the practical question: What are the necessary conditions for Dukkha? When what is present will there be Dukkha, and when what is eliminated will Dukkha cease? And then more practically, can we discover how suffering or stress comes about and how it can be released? That is a spiritually fruitful question.

The Buddha framed the answer to this question in a number of different ways in the teachings. We're just going to talk about the most common one today, which is he talked about a series of 12 "links." I put the word "links" in air quotes because it's not quite literally a linear sequence, 1, 2, 3, 4 up to 12. It is 12 sequential conditions, but they have kind of feedback loops within them that add a little bit of complexity, and they also operate on various different time scales that can overlap. So it ends up being a little bit more complex than just 1 through 12.

Basically, there are 12 links of dependent arising, and in this specific form, where we're talking about how Dukkha comes about, then it's called in Pali by the term Paṭiccasamuppāda,⁴ which means "arising together in dependence on."

We're going to go through these 12 just so that you know them, but the talk doesn't focus on dissecting all 12 of them in detail. Let's at least go through them. I'm going to name them in what is classically called the reverse order so that we can start with Dukkha, which is also called in this sequence, "aging and death and the whole mass of suffering."

Remember the Buddha's question was, how does aging and death and the whole mass of suffering come about? He really contemplated this, and he looked in his own experience and he saw that aging and death and the whole mass of suffering arise dependent upon birth. If there isn't birth, there wouldn't be death, would there? That's clear enough. Birth is the necessary condition for aging and death.

And birth arises dependent upon becoming. Becoming is kind of the movement toward creation, that feeling we have where we want to bring something into being. An image given for this step is a pregnant woman, so we get the idea.

But is becoming the very source? No, it isn't. Becoming arises dependent upon clinging. That means that we've grasped onto the idea of what we want to create. We have a vision in mind in some way, or we're just grasping, clinging.

And clinging arises dependent on craving. We want something. Craving, by the way, also includes not wanting something; that has the same effect. It's a movement either toward or away, attraction or repulsion, but it's just called craving because we need to have one word.

But is craving the total source? No. Craving arises dependent upon what's called Vedanā,⁵ or feeling tone: pleasant or unpleasant or neutral. Because experience has this valence to it, where we like it or we don't like it, that's why we want things or not want things, because they're pleasant or unpleasant to us.

Feeling arises dependent on sense contact. Something comes in, that's why we have a certain feeling. It's because we've had an experience. We've seen something, we've heard something, we've touched something that's pleasant or unpleasant.

Sense contact arises dependent on the six senses. Of course, we have to have sense organs. If we didn't have them, we wouldn't have experience. In this teaching, we say that there are six: the five usual ones associated with the body, and then mind is the sixth. So ideas can also be pleasant or unpleasant.

The six senses arise dependent on what's called name and form, or more loosely, we could say mind and body. We have a mind and a body.

And that arises dependent on consciousness. The fact that we feel our body and our mind is because we have awareness. We can detect things, we can know that something is happening.

And that arises—consciousness arises—dependent on a very difficult to translate word called Saṅkhāra,⁶ which is usually translated as volitional formations or mental formations. So there's some movement toward wanting to know, wanting to have experience.

And those Saṅkhāra arise—we've made it to number 12, by the way—Saṅkhāra arise dependent on something called ignorance, not knowing.

We won't go through all of these in detail. Remember that this is the Buddha's grand vision of how suffering operates in the mind, so it's meant to be deep. But nonetheless, we can get the essence of it. I just want to highlight a few key links. Notice, first of all, the foundational link, which I read last, but it's technically called the first link, which is ignorance. So suffering depends eventually on some kind of not knowing or not understanding something. That's already interesting. It's not a cognitive knowing; it's something you have to discover through practice, but there's something we don't know.

And then there's also a key sequence in the middle of the ones that I read. Dependent upon having sense organs, we're impacted by contacts, which we feel as pleasant or unpleasant, and then we react to that feeling by wanting or not wanting the experience. So, contact, feeling, craving—that's a hugely important little section of dependent arising. In general, let's remember: contact, feeling tone, craving, all supported by ignorance.

And then after craving, just to name one other part, we go on to create an identity around that wanting and not wanting. That's the clinging, becoming, and birth part. I just want to say that birth doesn't have to mean literal birth; it can also be the creation of a sense of self, just so you're clear on what those steps refer to.

So we have a background misunderstanding, experiences coming in and contacting us, they're pleasant or unpleasant, and so we react by grasping or pushing away. Is this generally plausible for how things go in our life? Anybody agree with that? I see a few nods. You don't have to meditate for very long to notice that that's kind of what's going on.

The Buddha gave this teaching on dependent arising, also called dependent origination (it refers to the same thing), so that we can see how suffering or stress or struggle come about because we're clinging or identifying with or simply misunderstanding something. The idea, the hope here is that by understanding the conditions for suffering, we gain some ability not to do that. If we don't fulfill the necessary conditions, then we wouldn't have the suffering. If we could see these conditions, like the oil and the wick that support the fire of suffering in the mind, we could direct our practice toward eliminating those conditions. No oil, no Dukkha. No wick, no Dukkha. No match lighting the wick, no Dukkha. That would be valuable to know, right? This is pretty empowering, actually, this teaching. It's pretty empowering.

The Tangle of the Mind

Sometimes people ask what time frame this is operating on. That's a good question. It's actually happening on many different time frames. There's a classical teaching in the Buddhist texts that tries to extend this over three lifetimes. We're not going to go that far today; we don't need to go that far, because I think it clearly also happens over normal time scales in a human life. When I just asked you that question about, "Do you see this happening?" people were nodding. It happens over periods of minutes or hours or days or years. We can see these conditions coming into being.

Interestingly, it can also happen quite quickly. We can see it functioning in meditation. When our mindfulness is very sharp, we can see it functioning rapidly in just a few mind moments. We go through a whole cycle. It's like, wow, and you see the mind very quickly going from misunderstanding something to grabbing it to suffering for it.

So we have the case where a bunch of these 12-link cycles are happening on various time scales, and there's also feedback loops within the cycle. You might have noticed as I got closer to the beginning of it, it might have sounded like some of them were a little bit similar or overlapping, and there are actually feedback loops within it. We won't go into those in great detail, but if you imagine you have a bunch of these cycles operating over different time frames and there's feedback loops within it, how would that end up looking in our mind?

I have a suggestion. I brought with me a little demonstration: something like this. So this is a tangled skein of twine that has been sitting in my drawer, and I kind of pull off little pieces of it sometimes, but then I just throw it back in. So, inattention leads to tangles. This is also a Dharma lesson for today. What I'm trying to show is that our mind is a little bit more complicated than an oil lamp, I'm sorry to say. The Buddha suggests that this tangle is a pretty good representation of the mental and emotional patterns that bring stress and suffering into our life.

When we start meditating, we can start to sense that yes, this does resemble the structure of the ordinary, unawakened mind. I mean, there's no perfect metaphor, but this one's pretty good. How many people have some sense of there being a tangle in your mind? Yeah, okay, great. So you're in good company, actually.

Somebody back in the time of the Buddha once asked him a riddle. They said, "A tangle within, a tangle without, this generation is entangled in a tangle. I ask you this, O Gotama,⁷ who can disentangle this tangle?" So it's a little riddle about solving this problem. I'll give you the Buddha's answer to that riddle later, but for now, here we are. We have this tangle in our heart or our mind, and it even affects our body.

There are two pieces of good news. One is that this can be untangled. We can actually get through this. That's the whole premise of the Buddhist teaching, and the teaching on the 12 links of dependent arising helps tremendously because we can start to get a handle on what the components of this tangle are. The second piece of good news, which you might have to take a little bit on faith at this moment, is that we don't have to have the complete vision that the Buddha had, fully comprehending how every little strand of the tangle works. Maybe you need that to be a Buddha, but it turns out to be sufficient for us to just understand one part of the tangle in a deep way.

Once we understand, say, one link of that chain of 12, we have significantly loosened it. And sometimes we can even kind of collapse the whole structure because it's all dependent. All these things are dependent on each other, right? And if we could see through just one section really clearly and remove that necessary condition, the whole structure loses the ability to hold together. This is also really good news. I like to sum this whole thing we've built up so far as: start anywhere, get everywhere. You can start anywhere on the set of 12, and you're working toward the unbinding of the whole structure.

How to Untangle the Mind

Let's get practical. I want to give a scenario that helps us see how this works in an everyday situation. I'll say it first and then we'll go through it again, pointing out some of the steps, because what we have is the tangle, right? And the question is, how do I find the 12 links in here? How do I really see what's going on?

Here's a scenario. Suppose you're going to a meeting at your supervisor's office where you're supposed to present the results of a project that you just did. You also have a chance to ask about getting more resources for the next phase of the project. As you round the corner in the hallway to your boss's office, you see a coworker just arriving at the boss's office. The coworker is someone that you've often disagreed with, and you didn't know that that person would be at the meeting.

Your heart sinks. You didn't want this person to be there. While you describe your results—because some of your results are a little bit touchy, they have some touchy points that you trust your boss would understand, but you don't trust this coworker to really understand. And also, you wonder if you and he are going to be competing for the next resources to go forward with the next phase.

All kinds of scenarios start turning in your head as you're approaching the office. You're worrying that it will go badly, and so you try to figure out whether you should take a tough, straightforward approach, which might come across as kind of aggressive, or whether you should be more accommodating and cooperative, even though you don't really want to cooperate. You feel stressed as you open the door.

Then when you do actually go through the meeting, you again feel pushed and pulled as the events unfold. You make some kind of choice eventually about how to present yourself, either beforehand as a resolve—"I'm going to do it this way"—or on the fly, in the moment, you decide to be a certain way. You go ahead and do the meeting. But then later, no matter how it went, you worry about whether the way you presented yourself is going to be the best thing for the future. You know, did the way that I came across in that meeting, is that going to work out? We've created in our mind one of these: a tangle based on this very simple scenario.

Let's go back through it and name some of the qualities here. You're going to this meeting with your boss, you come around the corner and you see the coworker also entering. We have ignorance present in your mind; you're not very mindful at this moment. So we have contact. Then you have your heart sinks, I said. You have this deflated feeling—unpleasant feeling tone is coming in. You didn't want this person to be there because you have these touchy results you want to explain to your boss without this competing person there. There's craving. You wanted it to be a certain way and you don't want it to be the way that it looks like it's going to be.

Then all these scenarios start going through your mind. You're worrying that it's going to go badly, so you're clinging to the idea that it needs to go a certain way. Then you try to figure out how you should present yourself. "Should I be tough and straightforward? Should I be accommodating and cooperative?" We have becoming happening in the mind. I'm moving toward choosing an identity. You feel stressed as you go into the office. Dukkha has already happened.

And then when you actually do go through the meeting, you make some kind of choice. That's actually Saṅkhāra, the second step. You have a mental volition toward being something, and then you present yourself in a certain way. You create an identity, you step into it through birth, you enact it. And then no matter what happens later, you worry about whether that was the right thing. Even if the meeting went well, is that going to serve you in the future? So we have death of that identity and the associated Dukkha of that. There you go. You just did them right there in that 15 minutes of however long that meeting took.

We have some complexity in these scenarios, and I'm sure you could think of a similar scenario in your own life that has a lot of these links in it, probably interconnected the way they were in that scenario. But we also have the simplicity of knowing that if we could just remove the necessary conditions for this structure, it would have to collapse. If we could completely remove one of the necessary conditions, it would no longer work. Just like there are a bunch of necessary conditions for these lights being on. If I remove any one of them, the light will go off. If I turn off the light switch, it'll go off. If I blow up the power plant, it'll go off. There are multiple ways to turn off the light.

So maybe we can find a weak spot in the 12 links, something that we could see well enough to change the situation. Probably to fully end the mind's underlying tendency to get entangled is going to take a lot of work. But in any given scenario, like this one scenario with our boss, I think we should be able to make that collapse pretty easily.

When we are just enacting out some stressful scenario without any awareness, then we are living in the foundational condition of ignorance, which supports the Dukkha. Suffering actually depends on us not knowing that we are enacting it. But when we see this process operating, that changes things. We've inserted a little bit of knowledge and we've weakened ignorance. The very act of seeing dependent arising, the very act of understanding that there are these 12 conditioned things, these 12 links, is the beginning of untangling the skein that we've created in our mind.

But probably that top-level knowing, just knowing that there are these 12 links, that's probably not deep enough to collapse everything. So we're going to do better if we practice with some of those middle links, the ones I mentioned before about contact, feeling tone, and craving. That little spot is one place where we can often be successful in removing the necessary conditions such that the stress or the Dukkha does not come about.

The Buddha in his teachings actually gives lots and lots of practices in the discourses that we have, those big books of the Pali Canon. He gives practices that are related to contact, that are related to feeling tone, related to craving. Actually, for any of the 12 links, there are suttas and teachings and practices that help us work with that link. I think it's not a stretch to say that for any of the 12 links, there are practices associated with them, and probably all of those practices are designed to be deep enough that they would be able to cut the chain at that point if we did them completely. Remember, when one sees the Dharma, one sees dependent arising, and when one sees dependent arising, one sees the Dharma.

But we're just going to focus on these few in the middle because they're both easy to understand and very powerful. One of the most basic instructions that you will hear here at IMC is to be mindful of your experience in a non-reactive way. Has anybody heard that instruction? We're talking about contact at our sense doors: sounds that we hear, body sensations that we feel. If we feel a pain in our back, that's an unpleasant sensation, right? An unpleasant feeling tone. And the aim of the practice is that we're supposed to be able to be with those sensations and not get caught up in the aversion, not move on from feeling tone to craving, from "it hurts" to "I don't want it." Not getting angry, not catastrophizing about needing back surgery, not fantasizing about how if I just bought a better cushion, that would probably help.

A little bit more subtle is also to work with the sixth sense door. If we have thoughts or emotions coming into the mind, contacts that are happening at the sixth sense door, how do we be with those in a non-reactive way? Can we be with fear without getting into a long story about it? Can we be with the judgment of another person? Can we be with envy, things that arise internally?

I'll read you a quote from the suttas about this practice: "There is the case where a practitioner, on seeing a pleasant sight with the eye, does not long for it or become excited by it or generate lust for it. Their body is steady and their mind is steady, inwardly well-composed and liberated. And on seeing an unpleasant form with the eye, they are not dismayed by it, not daunted, not dejected, and without ill will. Their body is steady and their mind is steady, inwardly well-composed and liberated."

It goes on to say the same thing for the ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind—all the six senses. The instruction says if you see something pleasant or you see something unpleasant at any of those six sense doors, we would aim to be well-composed and liberated, not rushing off into wanting it or not wanting it. Contact, feeling tone... let's not go from feeling tone to craving. That's what the instruction is saying. We don't go from pleasant and unpleasant to grasping and pushing away.

The shape of the tangle is affected by our mindful presence. If it doesn't have all the pieces it needs to hang together, then it can't cohere. You know from experience that if you are actually able to just be with the pain in the back and not go into all the scenarios, it does reduce the suffering, doesn't it? There isn't as much Dukkha. It still hurts, I get it, but there isn't the same amount of Dukkha. We've somewhat loosened the tangle.

Some of you may have had the experience of managing to do it all the way. We really are mindful of the pain to such a degree that we suddenly realize five minutes later, it's not there anymore. It's gone. Wow. The whole structure collapsed. Sometimes that happens. This is all straightforward mindfulness practice, straightforward Satipaṭṭhāna⁸ practice that we teach even in introduction to meditation courses. And of course, it can be done on deeper and deeper levels as mindfulness gets more and more developed in us.

So that's good news. You actually already know how to do this. Why am I giving this talk? You already know the fundamental instruction. But remember that there are multiple instances of these 12 links going on at any given time in our life, and they're happening on different, somewhat overlapping time scales. So that if we just see one instance of back pain and we're not reacting to it, that's probably not going to collapse all of our Dukkha. Probably true. But nonetheless, that particular instance of it could cease. And in doing that through Dharma practice, we are slowly moving toward a larger scale collapse of the 12 links that might actually untangle a noticeable portion of our tangled heart and mind. Each instance of mindfulness practice, every moment that we do where we're mindful—because you can't do it any other moment than this one—each moment where we do this practice is helping to untangle that tangle. The specific practices that you've already learned are targeting certain very vulnerable places on this chain.

This is great. I've used an example from practice that you probably already know, and what we're doing here is putting it in this larger context of dependent arising. I'm showing how this one practice fits into the bigger picture of the reduction and eventually the end of Dukkha, which is what the Buddha was doing. Even if we're only partway there along this untangling, we can start to understand that that's pretty much what it's about. It's about entanglement and non-entanglement, or about Dukkha and the end of Dukkha. Sometimes the Buddha said, "I teach only Dukkha and the end of Dukkha." That's what I teach. So he was referring to that very top level.

Start anywhere, get everywhere.

Maybe just to put in one other little connection, if it makes sense, that's great, and if it doesn't, that's okay. In the Four Noble Truths, that's also a very fundamental teaching of the Buddha. It's a compact teaching on how suffering comes about and how it ceases. You might remember that the Second Noble Truth says that the origin of suffering is craving. That's a key factor, one of those links right in the middle we just talked about. The 12 links are a little bit more expanded version, but when the Buddha gave the compact version in the Four Noble Truths, he just zeroed in on craving. He said if you could just eliminate the craving, that's the end of the Dukkha. That step from feeling tone to craving is a good place where we can intervene and be able to see deeply enough that the Dukkha doesn't happen. But there are these other 11 choices. If we just focus on craving, that would be pretty good, and that's right in line with the Four Noble Truths.

So we practice for a while, slowly untangling more and more sections of our knot, and the knot thins out over time. It gets thinner, it gets lighter, and eventually, we get down to the point where things are getting pretty thin, and then we discover something very interesting. That's the other thing in my box. I brought another ball. You see this? It's not wrapped around anything. Here, this is wrapped around a piece of cardboard. But as we thin out these tangled threads, it turns out that we are also thinning out the cardboard part. And eventually we find that when we get down maybe to this last one, we can see that there's nothing in the middle. And when this one goes, if I could pull this all the way out, this would vanish, wouldn't it?

Teachings on conditionality are closely connected to teachings on emptiness. When everything is dependent on certain necessary conditions, then it has to be that those things don't have an unchanging essence to them, a stable core that doesn't change. There is no stable core to this. It's actually more like this. So things are empty of an unchanging essence. That is very freeing.

The great thing is that your heart or mind can do this. We don't have to be smart enough to do it all on our own by our will or by our cognitive intelligence. It's like the way a wound can heal itself, kind of by itself. There is a lawful process underneath the healing of a wound, and all we have to do is supply some supportive conditions for it. But we don't have to direct that with our mind and make that all happen, right? I hope not, that would be hard.

But there are things that we have to do. In the case of untangling this tangle, we have to look. You have to be mindful. You have to be aware. Awareness is the foundation. And we have to look in a skillful way. We have to look at this as a process, and we have to look at it in the way that the Buddha gives instructions for how to practice. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be good enough to see the next thing that we need to see, the next thread to pull on that will make it looser. And that's always possible.

The Buddha's Riddle

I said I would tell you the Buddha's response to that riddle that the person asked about the tangle. So here's the original question and also his response:

"A tangle within, a tangle without, this generation is entangled in a tangle. I ask you this, O Gotama, who can disentangle this tangle?"

"A person established on virtue, wise, developing the mind and wisdom. A practitioner, ardent and discreet—they can disentangle this tangle."

So that's us. We have our foundation of ethical conduct, of being virtuous in our life. We're developing our practice, we're doing it in line with wisdom as best we can at our level of understanding, as much wisdom as we have. And we just continue on, and we know that the tangle is untangling. So I hope you will be inspired to just keep on and let the tangle untangle.

Thank you.