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DEPENDENT ORIGINATION
BHIKKHU BRAHMALI
As you read the word of the Buddha and get a feel for what he taught, again and again you come across the teaching of dependent origination (paṭicca samuppāda). It soon becomes quite obvious that this teaching is a very important part of the way the Buddha explained things. At the same time dependent origination is a difficult teaching to understand. This essay, then, is an attempt to draw out the most important aspects of dependent origination in such a way as to make it more easily comprehensible…(see complete text for twelve factors of dependent origination).
…To be able to reduce and eventually eliminate ignorance, first of all you need to be clear about what it refers to. The Pāli term usually translated as ignorance is avijjā, which might be better translated as delusion. The problem is not so much that we lack knowledge, as the word ignorance might suggest, but that we have a distorted understanding of how things work. Because of our fundamentally deluded or distorted outlook, we don’t see things as they actually are. This distorted outlook is nothing other than our inability to see the three characteristics of existence: our tendency to see things as permanent when in fact they are impermanent, to see happiness where in fact there is suffering, and to see things as self when in fact they are non-self. This is the basic delusion that we live under and this misperception is at the root of this entire chain of dependent origination.
The good news is that ignorance/delusion is itself conditioned by other factors; it is not a monolithic entity that exists independently of everything else. It is by understanding the conditionality of delusion that we can weaken it. When we understand the conditions that support delusion we also understand what sort of practice we need to undertake to reduce it and eventually abandon it altogether. So what are the conditions that prop up and perpetuate delusion? They are nothing other than the five hindrances: desire for sense objects, ill will, dullness and lethargy, restlessness and worry, and doubt. This means that the stronger these five hindrances are, the more powerful our delusion is going to be.
Why is this so? Because the hindrances themselves distort how we see things. Consider what happens if you are angry: you tend to do things that you otherwise would not. Under the influence of anger you think that you should tell somebody off or do something nasty to them. While you’re angry, it seems the right thing to do: we think that this person deserves this, that that person needs to be told off or treated rudely. Thus we sometimes end up doing something stupid. But once the anger is over we realize that we made a mistake: we shouldn’t have been so harsh to that person, we should have been more understanding, we should have tried to understand their motivation. We feel regret and remorse. The point is that our anger distorts our outlook so that we do things which we otherwise would not. You can then see how anger connects up with delusion by distorting our understanding of the world...
Excerpt in gratitude from: Dependent Origination by Bhikkhu Brahmali. Published in 2013.. No rights reserved. The following essay is an edited transcript of a talk given at the Buddhist Society of Western Australia on 17th April 2009. https://www.samita.be/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/do.pdf
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