A Simple Path Through a Complex Map

When you’re looking for a map or a diagram to give you some guidance on how to deal with a process or a situation, you want one that’s not too complex and not too simple. If it’s too complex, you’re overwhelmed with details and don’t know where to start or what to focus on. If it’s too simple, things that are actually important sometimes just get ignored.

So you can imagine the Buddha making a map of the mind, or the workings of the mind—the challenge he faced because the mind is very complex. When he formulated dependent co-arising, he focused more on the complexity. There are other teachings that are simpler, but when he wanted to give a full picture of the causes of suffering, he laid them out in dependent co-arising. Many people comment on how complex it is. Different factors keep reappearing again and again: Feeling appears at least four times; in some formulations, perception appears twice; sometimes it appears three times.

Feeling appears first in fabrications, which come right after ignorance, as part of mental fabrication, along with perception. It appears again in name and form. There it has different company. It’s accompanied by perception again, but also by intention, attention, contact. It appears again right after contact at the senses, and then again right after becoming, in the suffering of aging, illness, and death.

Perception appears in fabrication and again in name and form. In some formulations, it also comes after the feeling that follows on contact.

Some people have said, “The Buddha didn’t understand causality. He was way too sloppy.” Actually, though, he’s pointing to something very important. If you look at these reappearances as feedback loops, you see the whole system as a nonlinear system, one in which the results of the system come and feed back into the system again. Then you can see how helpful this is as a guide to understanding your mind.

The different appearances of feelings are different feedback loops. A feeling comes, say, after sensory contact. Well, it doesn’t have to go to craving. You can cycle it back through fabrication, where you run it past your breath again. You run it past directed thought and evaluation. In other words, you can reconsider it. You run it through name and form. You learn how to pay attention to it: “What questions are you asking about it?”

That’s a useful way to understand this, because now you can ask new questions. If the original questions were going to lead you to suffering, you can apply appropriate attention, asking questions related to the four noble truths. Then all of a sudden that feeling becomes part of a process leading out away from suffering.

And again, if this sounds too abstract, remember that this is how your mind actually functions. When pain comes in, you can think about it. You can start acting on it. Then you reconsider. You can reconsider again. As the Buddha said, the mind can change directions really quickly.

For many of us, that’s a cause of inconsistency in our lives as we switch back and forth, back and forth. But here he’s saying you can change directions in a skillful direction quickly by taking that feeling that comes, say, from sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, or ideas, and reconsider it in a way that’s helpful.

Now, you don’t have to run it through all the connections in dependent co-arising. The Buddha makes it clear you don’t have to know the whole lineup. All you have to do is to bring knowledge to one connection, say, between name and form and consciousness, or to feeling and craving, or contact and feeling, or any of the combinations. You bring knowledge to these things, and—because the cycle has so many feedback loops—you can get whole the cycle to stop.

What kind of knowledge? Knowledge in terms of the four noble truths. What is knowledge in terms of the four noble truths? Appropriate attention. So as you’re looping things back through name and form, where you can apply appropriate attention to them, that helps get you out of the system leading to suffering.

At the same time, you’re looping it past intention. You can reconsider how you’re going to act on it, what you intend to do with it. So, with that combination of attention and intention, you want appropriate attention and skillful intentions. That’s what you need to apply. That’s how you want to process everything in dependent co-arising, which is why you want to loop things back past those two things.

That’s precisely what the Buddha does in his approach to teaching. He doesn’t start out by describing dependent co-arising to people. In fact, it’s only when they’re fairly advanced along the path that he starts speaking these terms. When you’re starting out, he talks about virtue, concentration, and discernment. In doing so, he’s actually getting you to loop things back through name and form, right past attention and intention. So, without giving you the terms or giving you the whole picture, he’s getting you started on the right approach—how to use these functions in the mind.

With virtue, the focus is on intention. He wants you to look carefully, when you’re doing something, at “Why are you doing it?” One of the first things he taught Rāhula, his son, was, “Before you do anything, ask yourself, ‘What do I expect the results of this action to be?” In other words, “Why am I doing it?’”

The way the precepts are formulated, you can break them only if you act intentionally. So we’re not going to be looking at unintentional actions. We’re going to be looking at intentional ones and getting clearer and clearer about what our intentions are. For a lot of people, that’s a very dark and mysterious region.

The same with concentration: You’re maintaining a single intention. You’re maintaining your intention to stay with the breath. In doing so, you start seeing other intentions that you might have missed before as they come up and bump into the original intention, trying to knock it off course. But you’re trying to maintain that skillful intention.

As you get the mind into concentration, you’re dealing directly with things like the breath, your directed thought and evaluation, your perceptions—the images you have about where the mind is in the body, how the breath is running in the body, how you can keep them together. You’re actually getting more and more direct experience with these factors of dependent co-arising.

Then with discernment, you’re dealing directly, as I said, with appropriate attention—under the factor of name—asking the right questions: “What are you doing that’s causing unnecessary stress and suffering?” “How can you stop?” “Where is the craving?” “Do you want to go for the craving?” Ordinarily, we want to go for all our cravings. Otherwise they wouldn’t be cravings. But the Buddha is having you step back from them.

This is why the second noble truth is a noble truth.

Some people say, “What’s a noble about craving?” Well, the craving itself isn’t noble, but the fact that you see that it’s a cause of suffering: That’s noble. It pulls you back from your impulse to just follow whatever craving follows on a feeling.

So you’re applying appropriate attention to pull yourself away. It’s in this way that you cycle things through the loop that goes past name and form in a skillful way, sometimes without your even thinking about dependent co-arising at all—thinking only in terms of virtue, concentration, and discernment.

That’s the Buddha’s approach. He focuses you on this loop because he sees it as the most useful one for taking things apart.

So even though he sometimes lays out the complexity, it’s not just to impress people. It’s to let people know that this is the way your mind runs. But you can focus on certain factors in it, within that complexity—and that complexity actually allows you the way out. Because the mind isn’t just like a circle.

Some people have actually portrayed dependent co-arising as a circle. You go from ignorance to suffering, and then from suffering back to ignorance again, around and around. But how would you get out? You’re in a cycle. There’d be no end.

The Buddha is saying that you have this nonlinear system. Of course, he doesn’t call it that, but he does say that you’ve got a very complex system, like a tangled bird nest or a tangled skein. One of the features of nonlinear systems is that you can make them fall apart from within. You don’t have to approach them from outside. You use the factors, you use the connections within, and you can take the system apart, make it fall apart.

After all, when you’re cutting through, where are you coming from as you cut through the process? You’re coming from within the process. You’re simply learning how to direct the process in a way that allows it to fall apart—because that falling apart is not something to be afraid of. As the Buddha says, when these processes end, that opens the possibility of the deathless.

So here the Buddha is laying things out in their complexity to show you why his approach works, and then he focuses you on the loop of getting things past appropriate attention and skillful intentions. Whatever comes up, apply virtue, concentration, and discernment to loop it through those two factors, attention and intention, in their skillful forms.

That’s how the end of suffering is found.