Clarifying What I said about Interdependent Origination

 When I spoke about interdependent origination in our everyday lives, I was trying to use very familiar situations to introduce the concept of one action leading to an inevitable reaction and so on. As it happens, the Buddha's 12 interconnected links of how things happen are somewhat more profound and unseen. Here are the 12 nidanas, or chain of happening, as explained by someone else and me adding to it.

1. Ignorance  Fundamental ignorance of the absolute truth that everything is constantly changing except for our awareness of that, and the delusion of mistakenly perceiving that what's happening to you constitutes a verifiable solid self.
2. Formation: As long as there is ignorance, see above,  there will be formation of karma: positive, negative and neutral. This leads to rebirth in the various realms.In other words, act out of ignorance, create karma and go from there.
3. Consciousness: Formation cause the consciousness of the next existence to arise. The consciousness which propels one towards the next existence is called the impelling consciousness. And the consciousness that is led to that particular state, once the conditions have come together, is known as the consciousness of the impelled result. These two aspects of consciousness are counted as a single link since together they establish the link between two lives. (we are talking here about morphing energy.)
4. Name-and-form:  The power of consciousness causes  the energy to seek a womb, and there a body develops. Thus energy takes form and that form inevitably develops sensation, perception, formation and consciousness (awareness of what's happening).
5. Sense Faculties: The six sense faculties then come into play to feed consciousness. These are the way we know: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching,  and in Buddhism the sixth sense is the mind which processes all this input into thoughts.
6. Contact: The coming together of objects, sense faculty and consciousness is contact.
7. Sensation: From contact arises sensation: pleasurable, painful and neutral.
8. Craving: Contact leads straight to the desire to not be separated from pleasurable sensations or to get rid of painful sensations.
9. Grasping: As that craving to have or avoid increases, it becomes grasping, i.e. intense striving never to be separated from what is pleasurable and to avoid what is painful.
   
10. Becoming: This grasping takes the form of action by the body, speech and/or mind, and that action creates karma, an action imprint on the underlying energy. That karma then determines the energy's next morph, a new existence.
11. Rebirth: Through the impelling power of karma, something becomes. When the conditions necessary for this energy pattern are assembled, one is reborn in a particular birthplace.
12. Old age and death: Once born or reborn, one's form is subjected inevitably to the continual process of aging as all the parts change and develop. Eventually there is death. And if it is in ignorance of how this actually works, the same cycle starts again.

So the goal of Dharma, the goal of meditation, the pinnacle of awareness/consciousness/mind/spirit is to break this chain and be freed of all the suffering ignorance creates. And that brings us back to the discussion about adjectives like good and bad.

Thank you.


~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/
Technorati Tags: Yours In The Dharma, Sandy Garson, Dharma, Buddhist, Buddhism, Spirituality, Religion This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Click here to request Sandy Garson for reprint permission.
Yours In The Dharma 2001-2010, Sandy Garson Copyright 2001-2010 Sandy Garson All rights Reserved