So if we can get even a little understanding of it, that will be useful. In talking about this, the Buddha said whoever sees dependent origination, sees the Dharma whoever sees the Dharma sees dependent origination, and whoever sees the Dharma sees the Buddha. They were said to be pivotal teachings of liberation because they speak not only about how suffering arises but about bringing the wheel to stillness. Paṭicca-samuppāda and the teaching of anattā were the two central teachings that truly distinguished the Buddha in his time, that made him so radical. The Buddha often talks about this as being the heart of all of his teaching. What you need is simply a body and mind and therefore human experience. You do not need to be a scholar to understand paṭicca-samuppāda. But on another level, we can get a feel for how this is actually working in our own experience, it reveals a remarkable simplicity alongside its profundity. It can seem incredibly complex and profound to understand it can clearly be the work of a lifetime. Paṭicca-samuppāda explains the core statement of the Buddha, that the causes of sorrow and the causes of joy lie within our own hearts and minds, and within our own understanding or its absence. We can really understand the profundity and the breadth of what actually is going on in our consciousness moment to moment. We see both the problem and the solution within the same map. So paṭicca-samuppāda describes not only the way in which our personal world forms and changes and fades away it also describes the ways in which suffering, struggle and confusion are created and constructed.īecause it traces the arising of suffering, the clues to liberation are also held within this map, so it is also a model of awakening. According to the Buddha, human experience is patterned in a way that is clearly discernible to us when we investigate this law. What paṭicca-samuppāda is describing is the way in which our personal world is constructed and created, moment to moment. Some of you will have seen this in another form, in one of the mandalas of a Wheel of Life. It is considered by the Buddha to be a universal law governing human consciousness, perception and action. I will use paṭicca-samuppāda here rather than any of the translations. Paṭicca-samuppāda is translated as dependent origination, or codependent arising, or causal interdependence. It is through not understanding, not penetrating this doctrine that this generation has become like a tangled ball of string, covered as with a blight, tangled like coarse grass, unable to pass beyond states of woe, the ill destiny, ruin and the round of birth-and-death.” “This dependent origination is profound and appears profound. Once he understood how experience is constructed, he saw the way to the end of suffering. It is something that is in process all the time.īy some accounts, the four noble truths are another way of teaching the same understanding of our experience that the Buddha first understood in the form of paṭicca-samuppāda. Some day I would like to get someone to build me an illustration of the wheel that is actually spinning. One of the most important aspects of this insight, called paṭicca-samuppāda or dependent origination, is that dynamic nature. Its dynamic nature-its seeming strength-was also the gate to freedom. One could stop the spinning cycle forever. Because he saw so clearly, he also saw how to end the suffering: nibbāna. As the morning star rose and the Buddha achieved his great insight, tradition tells us, he saw all at once the matrix of causes and conditions that result in human experience: a swirl of interdependent physical and mental events repeating over and over, creating dukkha (suffering).
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