What It All Comes From

The Buddha tends to put aside most of the questions that activated Western philosophy: Who am I? Where in the past did everything come from? Is there some benevolent intelligence in charge of all things? A malevolent intelligence?

The Buddha said that the beginning point of all this wandering on is inconceivable. Not only unknowable. Something you can’t even conceive. And he did say there’s no one in charge. So we can’t blame our suffering on some being in charge of the universe.

To understand how and why things are the way they are, the Buddha has you look into the present moment: What are you doing in the present moment? He says everything is rooted in desire. All our actions come out of a desire to get something, and the nature of that desire is that it wants our actions to have consequences: That’s something we want.

As it turns out, they do have consequences. The problem is that there are often unintended consequences. We see something that we want, then we look for the world in which that thing exists, and then we want to take on a role in that world so that we can get it: This whole construct is called becoming.

It builds on the nature of desire. Desire is always moving someplace. When you look in the present moment, there’s nothing static. It’s moving, moving, moving toward a goal. One question is whether you’re going to attain that goal or not. Another is, will it make you happy? That’s all part of the desire. You want to find happiness.

But sometimes the things we want are in a world where they’re connected to other things in that world—things that may not be desirable at all. It takes a lot of insight to see the connections, to see the whole picture.

Ajaan Chah’s simile is of a snake. You glance at the tail of the snake and it looks like it’d be harmless to grab hold of. It doesn’t have anything dangerous. But it’s connected to the mouth, and the mouth has fangs. So if you pull on the tail, you get bitten. After a while, you begin to see how the tail is connected to the mouth. And you avoid that. You’ve learned.

But often the connections are a lot subtler and harder to see. Even when we see them, we can quickly forget what we’ve seen. Which is why we keep aiming at things that end up causing us trouble. This is what we’ve been doing as we keep wandering on, wandering on—a slave to craving, as we chanted just now.

That teaching comes from a sutta in which a young monk is talking to a king. The king had asked him why he had ordained, because the king assumed that most people ordained because they had family problems: They lost their relatives, lost their health, lost their money. Hard up, basically. Or in today’s parlance, they were losers.

But here the young monk came from a wealthy family. His parents were still alive. He was healthy. So why did he ordain? The monk gave a series of Dhamma summaries he said he learned from the Buddha.

They start with: The world is swept away. All those things you aim at just keep going, going, going away.

It does not endure. It offers no shelter. There’s no one in charge.

You have nothing of your own. When you die, you have to leave everything behind as you go on.

But yet we’re still a slave to craving.

That’s the problem. We can’t think of anything better. We’re not sure that there would be anything better. So we keep coming back for what we know, hoping to tweak it here, tweak it there, to make it better.

And we can, to some extent. As the Buddha saw in the night of his awakening, there are some very high levels of heaven where the beings live for a long, long time. More than one universe. Forty universes sometimes. That’s a long time. They think they’ve reached the goal. They aimed at acting in ways that lead to happiness, but it turns out that the results of their past good actions wear out and they eventually fall because they get complacent.

So it takes a lot of determination to figure out the way out. We can’t blame the situation on anybody. It’s part of the nature of being a conscious agent: wanting something, acting on your wants, and then seeing the results of your actions.

The Buddha basically took that combination—the combination of desire and being able to be sensitive to the results of your desires—and turned it into a path. As he said, the Dhamma is nourished by commitment and reflection. You commit yourself to a path of action, you reflect on what you’ve done, what you’ve accomplished, and you adjust your commitments accordingly. Again and again. You take your role as a conscious agent seriously. You try to keep as honest as possible, willing to do whatever is needed to act in ways that lead to true happiness.

This is a lot of where we fail. We put forth an effort and either we don’t get the results we wanted and we just give up, or we do get the results and we get satisfied with them.

Like the Brahmās: They’re satisfied with where they are. The Buddha tried to teach them, but there were cases where he couldn’t get through to them. They were just going to stay where they were. But of course, that meant that eventually they were going to fall.

It’s when you really assume responsibility as a conscious agent that you can actually get out. We take this role that we’ve already started assuming and we take it seriously. Why are we assuming it to begin with? There’s no answer to that. But just take it as part of being a conscious agent. This is what happens. You have to learn how to be more and more conscious of what you do with your agency. There’s no need to complain about that. Just complain about your old habits.

Sometimes it does seem as if saṁsāra is a sick joke. You work really, really hard to get to a high level—up with the devas, up with the Brahmās. Then you hang out there, and everything is very easy. You get lazy and complacent. Once you get lazy and complacent, you’re headed for a fall. You fall down, sometimes very far, and it hurts. How you respond to that hurt is going to be really important.

There’s a passage where the Buddha talks about dependent co-arising, his explanation of the causes of suffering, in an interesting way. In most of the cases, dependent co-arising ends with suffering. But there’s one version where you get to suffering and then what comes next? Conviction: conviction that there’s got to be a way out. Based on that, you start acting in skillful ways. There’s joy as a result. Based on the joy, there’s concentration. Concentration leads to discernment. And discernment, in turn, leads to release.

So to gain release, you’ve got to have the proper response to your suffering, which is confidence that there’s a way out—and that you, as a conscious agent, can succeed in following that way.

We see this in the two main emotions that are talked about most in the Theravada tradition: saṁvega on the one hand, and pasāda on the other. Saṁvega is when you get a strong sense of life going around and around and around, and it’s pretty meaningless, so meaningless that the sufferings it entails seem terrifying. Pasāda is when you’re confident there’s got to be a way out.

The Buddha found that way out, as I said, in being really good at being a conscious agent. That was how he discovered that the pattern by which our actions give results start with two very simple principles, but they can get complex.

This is why we’re so deluded about what’s connected to what, what the results of our actions really are: Some of our actions lead to results that don’t give fruit for quite a while. By the time you get the fruit, you’ve forgotten even that you planted the seed. In other cases, the results come immediately—so quickly that it’s hard to believe that what we did was related to what happened right then and there.

When you have this combination, things can get complex, because when something comes up, you don’t know: Does it come from something you’re doing right now or from something you did in the past? It could be either; it could be both.

You’ve got to get the mind really still so that you can see these things clearly. After all, how do you think the Buddha discovered these things? He didn’t have any texts to read and argue about. He just had his own mind and his ability to observe his actions, to observe the desires on which they were based. He developed really good mindfulness and alertness so that he could see connections that other people hadn’t seen before: connections between causes and effects.

First came his understanding about long-term causes—in other words, how you do something and it leads to a result in a succeeding lifetime. But he saw that even that was not as simple as many people had taught. It’s not that case that you simply add up all your good actions in this lifetime, subtract all the bad actions, and then go to whatever the result is. He said it had a lot to do with your state of mind at the moment of death. A bad state of mind could delay a lot of good kamma for a long time. A good state of mind can delay some bad kamma.

Which got him to reflect that some actions, even just mental actions, can have an immediate impact that have nothing to do with your past actions. That showed him the possibility of freedom. Otherwise, if everything were dependent on your past actions, everything would be totally determined. You’d have to room for choice. But here we do have choices.

He started looking into those choices in the present moment. That’s what led to his third knowledge, which led to his true awakening.

You see these things in the mind when it’s really quiet and you stick with the determination to find the way out. Think of the Buddha on the night of his awakening. He gained many knowledges that a lot of people before him were very satisfied with. People in the past had gained knowledge of their own previous lifetimes. They’d gained knowledge of seeing how beings are reborn after death. And they stopped there, satisfied.

But the Buddha realized that this still didn’t end the problem of suffering.

So he took the knowledge he’d gained from those first two knowledges and applied it to the question of: What is the suffering right now? What’s causing it? Can it end? And is there a path of practice that leads to an end of suffering? He found that there was.

That came from his determination, focus, strong honesty, and strong willingness to do whatever was required to get out. So: strong desire, strong awareness—those qualities of a conscious agent, just raised to an nth degree. And that takes you out.

When you get out, then you don’t need to be a conscious agent anymore. Being a conscious agent is this role that we take on because we have a sense of lack. When there’s no lack, then we can let that role go.

For a lot of us, we’re more attached to our sense of our own identity than we are to the idea of a happiness that would be total and complete. But when you remember that your sense of identity came from the sense of lack and is maintained by a sense of lack, maybe you can change your attitude. Maybe a conscious happiness that’s outside of space and time would be a good thing.

The Buddha says it is. All the noble disciples say that it is. It’s up to you to give it a try.