Body & Mind from Within

The Buddha taught a principle called dependent co-arising, which explains how things are dependent on one another: to come into being, to persist, to pass away.

It’s important to note two things about this teaching.

One, the Buddha didn’t celebrate dependent co-arising or the fact that everything is interdependent. When things are interdependent, they’re unstable. Any happiness that relies on interdependent conditions is going to be unstable, too. So if you want to find true happiness, you have to find something that’s not dependent on other things. One.

Two: He focused not on interdependence outside—our relationships with one another, our relationships with the world—but on the relationship of events inside our experience. He said that dependent co-arising was based on a principle of causality that he called idappaccayatā, which we translate as this/that conditionality. More literally, it’d be just “this conditionality,” the conditionality of things that you can point to immediately in your experience: “This causes that. This conditions that.” “From the arising of this comes the arising of that. From the cessation of this comes the cessation of that”—things you can point to immediately. You can’t point to things outside of your experience.

The basic message is that the way you’re suffering, through dependent co-arising, comes from things you can experience immediately, right here, right now. So the problem is right here, right now.

But the solution is right here, right now, as well. This is why, when we meditate, we’re focusing right here, right now on our breath, the body as you experience it from within, the mind as you experience it from within—that part of your experience that’s totally yours. Nobody else can peer in to see what you’re thinking. Even people who can read your mind don’t see how you see your thoughts from your perspective. They can’t feel your breath the way you feel your breath.

Yet this is where the Buddha wants you to focus. This is your area. This is where the suffering is happening. This is where the cessation of suffering can happen as well. This is where you can build the path out of things you’re immediately experiencing.

Like right now, you’re focused on the breath. The Buddha calls the in-and-out bodily fabrication. You’re also talking to yourself about the breath. That’s verbal fabrication. What you’re saying to yourself is something you directly experience in the same way you directly experience your breath.

Then there are mental fabrications: perceptions and feelings. Feelings are feeling tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. Perceptions are the labels you put on things, images or words that you use to identify things: what they are, what they mean, how important they are.

All these activities come together as you focus on the breath. You’re talking to yourself about the breath. You have feelings that come from the way you breathe. You have perceptions about how the breath moves in the body. You have perceptions about where you are in your body right now. Are you in your head? Are you in your chest? Are you inhabiting the whole body?

These are activities that the Buddha says are usually done in ignorance. When you look inside, that’s the big factor in dependent co-arising: the ignorance. Everything else is colored by that. What we’re trying to do is bring knowledge to this area. The problem is that when we act with ignorance, it’s not that we don’t know what we’re doing. We have some idea of what we’re doing, but our ideas are mostly mistaken. It’s not that we’re totally devoid of ideas. We’ve got lots of ideas, lots of instincts, lots of intuitions. For the most part, they’re wrong.

This is why we have to borrow the Buddha’s wisdom, what he calls appropriate attention: looking at things in terms of the four noble truths and their duties, because ignorance is defined as ignorance of the four noble truths.

It’s important to note that the word for ignorance, avijjā, doesn’t mean just not knowing. It’s the opposite of vijjā, which means knowledge, but* vijjā* also means skill, so avijjā means lack of skill. We have a lack of skill in what we’re doing here.

So when the Buddha talks about suffering in the four noble truths, suffering is not something we’re simply on the receiving end of. We’re actually doing it. He identifies it as clinging-aggregates: the act of clinging to the aggregates.

The aggregates are the form of the body as you feel it from within, your feelings, your perceptions, your thought fabrications, and your consciousness. We engage in these things usually without knowing what we’re doing, because we focus on clinging in four other ways:

• We cling to sensuality: our fascination with sensual fantasies about what we’d like to smell, what we’d like to see, to hear, to touch, and to taste. We cling to ideas about what kind of sensual pleasures are worthwhile.
• We cling to our views about the world.
• We cling to our ideas about how things should be done. This is called clinging to habits and practices.
• And finally, we cling to ideas about ourselves, about who and what we are.

Those four kinds of clinging are activities you’re usually aware of. You may disagree with the Buddha’s analysis that clinging like this is suffering. In fact, your ideas about the world, your ideas about yourself, seem to have a lot more reality than almost anything else.

But the Buddha is saying: What are these things composed of? Just these aggregates of form, feeling, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness: things that are very ephemeral when you look at them carefully. But we don’t look at them carefully. We just go by our ideas of what we think is right and real, what we think is intuitive.

The Buddha is saying, “This is suffering.”

This is especially counterintuitive when you think about the word for “clinging” in Pali. It also means to feed, to take sustenance. We think we’re getting pleasure out of feeding. That’s the most basic pleasure in life. Yet the Buddha is saying, “No.”

Of course, he’s referring not only to physical feeding, but also to mental feeding. He’s saying that this is actually suffering, you’re doing it, and you don’t know what you’re doing.

Then there’s the cause of suffering, the second noble truth, which is three kinds of craving: craving for sensuality, craving for becoming, craving for non-becoming.

Becoming is when you see something you desire, you think of the world in which that desired object is found, and then you think of taking on an identity within that world to get it. All of that—the desired object, the world, your sense of yourself in that world—is a becoming. It’s a way of thinking that we engage in countless times throughout the day.

Then there’s non-becoming, when you’ve got a state of becoming and you want to see it destroyed or obliterated. But that desire, too, leads to more becoming, because you take on the identity of the destroyer or of the person who wants to see that becoming destroyed. That’s your new identity in a new world. These are things we do all the time, too.

And again, we think we’re getting what we want, what we desire. Whatever we desire, whatever we want, we think that getting what we want is going to make us happy. Yet the Buddha is saying, “No. The act of desire in itself is causing suffering.”

However, there are desires that can lead you away from those cravings. Those desires are part of the path, which is the fourth noble truth. First, though, the Buddha establishes the fact of the third noble truth: that it is possible to put an end to suffering through putting an end to the craving. And you do that by following the path composed of virtue, concentration, and discernment.

Part of concentration is right effort, when you make up your mind that if something unskillful comes up in the mind, you’re going to get rid of it. You’re going to make sure it doesn’t come back. You’re going to replace it with skillful attitudes, and then try to develop them until they’re really strong. Those desires, the Buddha said, are useful. Hold on to them.

He’s basically saying you have to be selective in your desires. Don’t think that everything you want is going to make you happy. A lot of things you want are going to make you miserable. But there are some desires, the desires in line with the path, that will lead to genuine happiness.

There’s a lot in the four noble truths that’s counterintuitive. Someone was once visiting Ajaan MahaBua, an American hippie, who at one point said, “I’ve just got to follow my heart.” The monk who was translating for Ajaan MahaBua had to translate that sentence several times before Ajaan MahaBua understood what the guy was saying.

His response was, “That cesspool? You want to follow that?” That’s basically what the Buddha is saying: We’re chock full of defilements. Our intuitive sense of what’s right and wrong is based simply on our habits, and our habits come from all over the place. We have some good habits; we have some bad habits. We can’t just follow our intuitions, our urges, which is why we have to borrow the Buddha’s wisdom to shine some light in this area inside us, which is our own private property—our body as we feel it from within, the mind as we feel it from within—about which we’re so ignorant.

It’s in this area where we’re causing ourselves suffering. The suffering is felt here; the cause is happening here. It’s something you’re doing right here.

But the path to the end of suffering is something you can also do right here as well, if you’re willing to take on the Buddha’s instructions and borrow his wisdom. Then, as you develop the skills that are needed to see through your suffering, to see through your causes of suffering, the wisdom becomes your own.

So this is your private property. This is your personal area. And when the cessation of suffering comes, it’ll come in this area as well. This is why, when the Buddha gained awakening, he didn’t pull everybody else to nibbāna as well. This is something that each of us has to do for ourselves alone.

We depend on the Buddha for his help. We depend on other people who’ve found the way and taught the way to shine some light. It’s up to us to take that light and shine it in ourselves. When we do, we find that not only do we benefit, but the people around us benefit as well. We can be a good example for them, to inform them of the path and to inspire them on the path that frees them from suffering.

So even though Theravada is often accused of being selfish, it’s basically saying a point that’s unavoidably true: You’re suffering because of your own lack of skill. Nobody else can make you skillful. You can’t make anyone else skillful. Each person has to develop skills within him- or herself.

But it’s something you can do, if you’re willing to listen. As the Buddha proclaimed, he opened the doors to the deathless for those who have ears. You’re not going to use your ears to walk through the doors, but you can listen to his proclamation. It’s up to you to go through the doors on your own power, following his instructions.

The Buddha found that each of us has this area within ourselves where we’re suffering, and he was able to get out and make an escape from this confined area we all have here. He could see the structure of how everyone’s inner sense of body and mind is put together, how it functions, how we lack skill in managing the way it functions, and how we can develop skill and use its way of functioning to get out. That’s why, when he was able to gain awakening, he didn’t just go on his own. He was able to leave behind teachings that say, “Look, this is how it’s all put together. This is how you can take it apart.”

It’s up to us to decide whether we want to follow his advice or not—but it’s the best advice out there.