A Path Through Complex Territory

The Buddha’s teachings on dependent co-arising, in which he describes the mental and physical processes that lead to suffering, often inspire complaints: The standard list (SN 12:2) is too complex. And there’s not just one list. Some lists contain factors that aren’t contained in the standard list (Sn 3:12), some lack some of the standard factors (DN 15), and some put the factors in a different order (MN 18). There’s also the problem that the factors don’t follow in a neat line: Factors sometimes reappear in different places within a single list. Feeling, for instance, appears in four places in the standard list: as a sub-factor of fabrication, as a sub-factor of name in name-and-form, as a separate factor between contact and craving, and at the end of the list in all the forms of suffering.

From these facts, some people have come to the conclusion that the Buddha’s lists are confused and that he didn’t understand causality at all. But you have to remember that dependent co-arising is an attempt to describe the workings of the body and mind from within, and if you’ve ever observed your own body and mind from within, you’ll have to admit that their inner processes don’t always follow the same pattern. You’ve probably seen them jump around and refusing to line up politely in a single file. Sometimes they go back to undo something you thought you’d already decided, or to reconsider, from a different angle, something you thought you already understood.

So the complexity and reiterations aren’t the fault of the person describing these processes. They’re built into the body-mind complex itself. The Buddha’s many attempts to map these processes, with all their iterations and reiterations, are simply an attempt to give some insight into the many and varied ways that the mind can operate and drive itself crazy by creating suffering even though it wants happiness. If one of the maps gives you insight into how you’re creating suffering for yourself right now, use it, and leave the other maps for other people or for other moments in your own practice.

And try to understand the need for the reiterations. Take, for instance, the fact that your mental processes don’t stop when you’ve given rise to the pain of suffering, the last factor in most of the lists. Time and again, your mind has reacted with even more complexity to that suffering in ways that give rise to more suffering: blaming yourself, blaming others, trying to find a way to get rid of the pain by running away from it or wishing it out of existence. That means that the pain of suffering, in reality, feeds back into the process of dependent co-arising over and over again.

The question is, where? Traditional commentators have said that the suffering at the end of the standard list leads to ignorance, the first factor in the list, and the cycle starts up all over again, turning around and around like a wheel. In fact, that’s how a standard diagram from medieval India presents the whole process: as a wheel. But this interpretation raises at least two problems: One, does your mind always behave like a wheel, running mechanically through the exact same pattern repeatedly? Doesn’t it have many loops and surprise alleyways through which it can travel? Two, if suffering leads inevitably to ignorance, how are you ever going to put an end to the turning of this wheel? You’d have to depend on someone or something from outside to break the wheel for you.

These two weaknesses in the traditional diagram are serious: The first weakness means that it bears little resemblance to the way the mind actually works; the second, that it leaves no room for a path to the end of suffering. As the Buddha noted, if causes and conditions from the past were totally deterministic, with no room for your present-moment choices to make a difference in how you experience the present moment, a path to the end of suffering would be impossible (AN 3:62).

There is, however, an alternative way of understanding how the standard map of dependent co-arising leaves an opening for understanding the feedback processes in the mind in a way that avoids both of these weaknesses. It bears a closer resemblance to the complex way that the mind actually works, and it allows for choices in how you respond to the pain of suffering, making a path to the end of suffering possible. Not only that, it explains how the path to the end of suffering that the Buddha taught actually works.

This alternative interpretation reads like this: The suffering at the end of the list can feed back into the list at any of the three earlier spots where feeling occurs in the list. In each of these spots, it’s surrounded by other factors and sub-factors that show the various ways in which the mind can respond to suffering. Those surrounding factors can then influence whether you make the suffering worse or actually alleviate it. Because the causal relations described by dependent co-arising can happen instantaneously or stretched out over time, these factors can play out in many time frames. You can react quickly to a sudden sharp pain, but you can also mull over painful injustices from years and years ago.

In the factor of fabrication, feeling is surrounded by the way you breathe, the way you talk to yourself—what the Buddha calls directed thought and evaluation—and by the perceptions you use to label things. It’s easy to see how any of these other subfactors could actually aggravate the suffering: You could breathe in a way that makes you physically uncomfortable, you could talk to yourself about how the suffering comes from conditions you hate, and you perceive the suffering either as a sign that you’ve been victimized or as proof that you’re inadequate as a human being and you deserve to suffer.

But it’s also possible to breathe, talk to yourself, and apply perceptions to the pain and its surrounding conditions that actually alleviate the pain.

The same possibilities hold true if the suffering feeds back into the list with feeling in the factor of name-and-form. There it’s surrounded by the four physical elements that make up your inner experience of the body—solidity, liquidity, warmth, energy—and by other mental subfactors such as intention, attention, and perception. Here again, you could aggravate the suffering by focusing on the discomforts in your body or on unskillful versions of the other mental factors.

Especially important in this case are attention and intention: The Buddha explains attention as the way you frame an experience in the mind and the questions that come from the frame. For instance, you could frame the pain in the context of any number of toxic narratives you have about yourself and your relationships in the world, and ask how you can either strike back at the world or punish yourself.

As for intention, that’s what you aim at accomplishing. If you aim at self-punishment, revenge, or the simple desire to obliterate the pain, that simply adds more suffering on top of the pain.

But here again, the way you pay attention to the pain and what you intend to do about it could actually help to alleviate the suffering.

As for the third place that the pain of suffering could loop back into the list, between contact and craving, that offers the choice as to which type of craving you want to follow with regard to the pain:

the desire to fantasize about sensual pleasures to smother the pain;
the desire for a becoming—a sense of your identity in a world of experience—in which you feel no pain or in which you can punish yourself or others as you think you or they deserve;
or a desire for non-becoming, in which you want to destroy either yourself or the world you’re in. The choices in this last case could range from binge-watching and intoxicants all the way to violence directed against yourself or the world.

Viewed in this way, the many reiterations of feeling in the standard list of dependent co-arising help to explain the many complex ways in which the mind responds to the pain of suffering. Although they show how we often make our sufferings worse, they also point to junctures in the mind where it’s possible to head in the opposite direction. And the noble eightfold path taught by the Buddha makes use of these junctures.

Even though he doesn’t mention the steps of dependent co-arising when he describes the path to people getting started on it, the way he strategizes the path points them to precisely these junctures, getting his listeners to become more sensitive to the junctures and giving them advice on how to handle them in skillful ways that tend to the end of suffering.

He starts with the teaching on karma, pointing out—in contrast to other karma teachings of his time—that your intentions are what determine the results of your actions. Skillful intentions lead to happiness; unskillful ones, to pain. Based on this principle, he teaches the precepts of virtue that emphasize intention: You can break a precept only if you intentionally do the act they advise you not to do. When you follow these teachings, you become more sensitive to the intentions that motivate your actions. This makes you more sensitive to the sub-factor of intention in name-and-form in a way that helps convert it to a factor of the path.

Similarly with concentration: On the one hand, the practice of concentration heightens your sensitivity to your intentions as you try to keep in mind the intention to stay focused on a single object and do your best to resist other, contrary intentions that would distract you. On the other hand—given that the first level of right concentration involves directed thought and evaluation, along with the perception that allows you to stay anchored in the theme of your concentration with a sense of ease and well-being—you become more sensitive to the factor of fabrication in dependent co-arising, at the same time creating feelings of pleasure that allow you to step back from whatever suffering you’ve been feeding on. If you’re concentrated on the breath—the concentration topic that the Buddha taught more extensively and often than any other—that makes you even more fully sensitive to the processes of bodily, verbal, and mental fabrication, at the same time showing how to engage in these fabrications in a skillful way.

Discernment, the third part of the path, is expressed in terms that the Buddha calls appropriate attention: seeing the problem of suffering in terms of the four noble truths and the duties appropriate to each truth. This helps you apply skillful attention to any pains encountered in the factor of name-and-form, transcending them by comprehending them, rather than trying to push them away. At the same time, this type of attention then influences everything that follows it in the list of factors. And, given the many feedback loops in the list, it can influence not only the factors that follow it, but also those that come before. As the Buddha said, if you apply knowledge of the four noble truths to any juncture in dependent co-arising, you can cut the sequence right there. This point applies especially to the juncture between feeling and craving: Appropriate attention shows that craving is not the best way to respond to pain, and it offers the alternative responses taught by the path, including the skillful desires of right effort.

Which means that dependent co-arising explains the Buddha’s strategic emphasis on virtue, concentration, and discernment in the path he taught to the end of suffering. But more than that, it also shows how the sequence of dependent co-arising can cut itself from within. Even though you may have to learn the terms of appropriate attention from others, appropriate attention acting within the sequence of dependent co-arising is what cuts through all the connections and feedback loops that lead to suffering. That’s how it brings all the possibilities for any more suffering to an end.