Originally Posted by
Hokin
Hello Guish!
For whatever maymatter my opinion, 'dependent origination' is the Buddha’s way to analyze and explain how the ego-centered identification in the world comes about. It shows how cause and effect is at the root of everything especially in one’s mind. Every second we literally ‘make-up’ our sense of self, our sense of ‘I, me, mine’, and that is being brought to life and dying and been born again and dying the following instant once more, again and again, all the time...forever...until we can see through that whole process thoroughly and realize that it all is but, as I personally like to call it, a ‘convenient construct’. Here we can fathom how the continuous chain of birth and death (samsara) is perpetrated, and once we can really clarify the three seals of existence (dukkha-dissatisfatoriness, anatta-impersonality, anicca-impermanence) that are underlying the whole dependent origination process, we can be free of birth and death (nibbana) by seeing that nothing of that which we call ‘I’ is some real, consitently fundamental essence in any case, but a process, a construct that is born and dies all the time thousands of times per second, and also we can see that it is all marked by the three seals of existence.
Anyways.
The Buddha taught in the suttas that we can’t, as practitioners, work in any really easy, direct way with the first 7 links up to ‘feeling’, because we can’t help but ‘let it be’ for now, because they are factors already, pardon me the oxymoron, temporarily permanent and, psychologically speaking, they are subconscious. They are like the 'built-in apps' in the new cell-phone we just bought, take them away at once and it dies out! Hehehehe…Take the 6th, for instance: feeling. In traditional buddhism, and we see it in chain of dependent origination, feeling is caused by 'contact' which is of 6 kinds: eye-contact, ear-contact, nose-contact, tongue-contact, body-contact and mind-contact). So, all we see, hear, smell, taste, touch and think causes a feeling, which in turn is of 3 kinds: pleasant, unpleasant and neutral. 'Contact' we can't manage really, because most of the time we can't control what we see, hear, smell, etc...Maybe there is something we can do with feeling, and that is to take it all with equanimity, whether it be pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. But the eighth, ‘craving’ (in pali is ‘trishnaa’ which literally means ‘thirst’-for more!), well, with craving we really can work with!
Vimalaramsi and Buddha, long before him in the suttas, teach that craving manifests as some sort of a tension in the practitioner’s body-mind (the two are really one!). So we recognize the tension and we let go that same tension and also we physically and mentally relax that tension so that there can be no attachment or grasping (upadana, literally: ‘fire’) which is the result, the effect of craving. Vimalaramsi teaches that craving is the ‘I-like-it, I-don’t-like-it’ mind we apply on 'feeling' and that attachment or grasping is all the thoughts and opinions that we 'attach' to that very same craving to justify why we like or not something...Thus perpetrating the whole'I'-dentification system.
Then, after 'attachment', comes ‘becoming’ which in reality is simply the habitual reactions we apply at things, persons and situations.
And finally 'becoming' causes 'birth' and this in turn causes aging, sickness, death and all suffering (dukkha).
This whole process takes infinitesimally small fractions of a second and it is not to be simply viewed as, for example, the process of ‘birth and death’ of a whole ‘incarnated’ entity, but as the ‘birth and death’ of the 'sense of self' itself (the thought of identity, the ‘I, me, mine’ thing) which, as I said, happens numberless times in each second.
Actually, I find, the only thing that in reality seems to ever come to birth and subsequently die, is only the thought of 'I, me, mine'.
So...what really matters in this is the practice we can actively do on craving (in general the cause of dukkha) to calm down the whole process and see through these fabrications and attain liberation from that.
I hope this reflection may help elucidate somewhat the whole matter.
Gassho.
Hokin.
SAT&LAH.
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