INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY
SEMINAR FOUR
Text IV. Conditioned Co-origination[1]
Thus have I heard. On that occasion the Lord was staying at Uruvelå, on the bank of the river Neranjarå at the foot of the Bodhi-tree, having just become Prefectly Awakened.[2] Now on that occasion the Lord was seated for seven days in one posture[3] and experienced the bliss of release.[4] The the Lord, after the lapse of those seven days, during the first watch of the night roused himself from the (deepest) concentration of mind, and directed his attention[5] to the conditioned arising of all phenomena. First (he did it) in direct order[6] – “by arising of this arises that” or “by this is conditioned[7] that”. So by ignorance[8] are conditioned synergies,[9] by synergies conditioned consciousness, by consciousness is conditioned name-and-form,[10] by name-and-form are conditioned the six sense-spheres,[11] by the six sense-spheres is conditioned contact,[12] by contact is conditioned feeling,[13] by feeling is conditioned craving,[14] by craving is conditioned grasping,[15] by grasping is conditioned becoming,[16] by becoming is conditioned birth,[17] by birth are conditioned old age and death, sorrow and despair, grief and lamentation. Such is the arising[18] of all this mass of suffering.
Thereupon, the Lord, seeing the meaning[19] of (all) this, uttered the following lines:
“In truth, when dharmas[20] become manifest to the ardent meditating[21] brahman,[22] all his doubts vanish, since he knows dharmas with their causes.”[23]
Then the Lord directed his attention to the conditional arising (of all phenomena) in reverse order, “by the non-arising[24] of this, that does not arise”, namely: by the non-arising of ignorance the non-arising of energies is conditioned; by the non-arising of energies, the non-arising of consciousness is conditioned; by the non-arising of consciousness, the non-arising of name-and-form is conditioned; by the non-arising of name-and-form, the non-arising of six sense-spheres is conditioned; by the non-arising of the six sense-spheres, the non-arising of contact is conditioned; by the non-arising of contact, the non-arising of feeling is conditioned; by the non-arising of feeling, the non-arising of craving is conditioned; by the non-arising of craving, the non-arising of grasping is conditioned; by the non-arising of grasping, the non-arising of becoming is conditioned; by the non arising of becoming, the non-arising of birth is conditioned; by the non-arising of birth, the non-arising of old age, and death, lamentation, grief, sorrow, suffering and despair is conditioned. Such is the non-arising of all this mass of suffering.
Thereupon, the Lord, seeing the meaning of (all) this, uttered the following lines:
“In truth, when dharmas become manifest to the ardent meditating brahman, all his doubts vanish, since he knows the way of causes.”
SEMINAR IV: How has it all come about?
This is the question that text IV answers. But what is “it all” which has come about? – Eleven conditioning (and conditioned) factors called nidåna and determined by the order of their arising. “How?”, in fact, means “in which order?” – “In the order exposed by the Buddha in this text. So we may say that eleven nidånas, from the second to the twelfth are named and determined, but the first is only named. This is the circumstance of paramount philosophical significance, from which we shall start our philosophizing over the text IV. So, let us deliberate on the first nidåna, ignorance, which is the clue to a philosophy of this text. Now we shall single out four moments.
First, the notion of ignorance, as it is introduced in this text – which, note it, according to the conventional (and merely formal) quasi-sequential, “mythological chronology” accepted by the compilers of the Pali Canon, was uttered by the Buddha immediately after his Awakening, that is before the texts I-III – is utterly untrivial, bordering on the uncanny in its untriviality. But untrivial in what sense? Not in the sense of a philosophical tour de force, an unexpected blow against the trivial and accepted. That which is really untrivial must have its own positive content. As in the case of anatta (in text II), though much stronger, ignorance is meant to radically resolve the growing tension between the tendencies predominant in the intellectual atmosphere of the Indian ascetic milieu around the middle of the 1st millenium BC. The most important of those tendencies were: tendency to oppose soul (åtman, jîva, etc.) to body, soul to mind (manas), and the phenomenal world (samsåra) to the world of complete asceticism. It would not be an exaggeration to suppose that at the time of the Buddha the “super-density” of religions and philosophical ideas in the ascetic milieu reached such a degree which threatened a collapse of the whole religious life. The early “historical” Buddhism portended a change in the paradigm of Indian religio-philosophical self-consciousness on the scale from the Upanishads to Jainism. The concept of ignorance must have been aforteriori untrivial to play a very important role in that change of paradigm. And untrivial it was first of all because it remained purposely not only indeterminate, but indeterminable; indeterminable, because, though it conditiones the second nidåna, but is not conditioned itself by a hypothetical “zero” nîdåna, nor by any other un-named conditioning factor.
Second. As not conditioned, ignorance has no source or origin from which may follow that it does not arise as do other phenomena (dharmas); therefore it could be imagined also as a certain postulated state of things. Ignorance, in this sense, is timeless and, phenomenologically speaking, its “thinkable existence” starts from its being postulated by the enlightened consciousness and ends with the elimination of the eleven nidånas, from the 12th to the second, in the reverse order. Therefore, ignorance can be thought of as a “pristine” and ubiquitous state only from the point of view of the “final” state of nirvana. Therefore, it may be said, by us, that ignorance is a pseudo-ontological concept which derives its “pseudo-ontology” from quasi-ontology of nirvana.
Third. To the question “ignorance of what?”, there are two answers. One trivial: ignorance of the Four Noble Truths, etc. The other untrivial: ignorance of the indeterminable, that is, of that which is indeterminable by definition, nirvana and of itself which is indeterminable on the strength of the rules of inference from initial postulates formulated in texts I-III. I think these two answers form the general epistemological dimension of ignorance. At the same time, ignorance finds its own “positive” epistemological definition. To wit: ignorance is all that which is thought by thinking, construed by reason, constructed by intellect, imagined by imagination. Whereupon all points of view, ideas, and opinions are ignorance.
Fourth. But what is ignorant? The text itself does not answer this question, but we can attempt to tackle it, gradually approaching that “what” by detours. Let us begin with the order of sequence of nidånas. The second nidåna, samskåras (in plural only!) which is the fourth aggregate of individual existence (see in texts I and II), here is conditioned by ignorance. Samskåras are simultaneously arising momentary forces or energies. They are arising only together – there can be no separate, “individual” arising of any of them. That is why they are sometimes called “synergies”, “co-actions” or “co-factors”. They are acting upon all phenomena (dharmas). Moreover, it could be said that all that we call “phenomenon”, a “thing”, or a “thought” is nothing but a configuration of mental, physical, or neither mental nor physical elements held together or continuing to arise by samskåras. Or we may even say that all things, facts, and events (i.e., all dharmas) are samskåras (though as it was said in Seminar I, “are” here is a misnomer). Thus, anything (with two exceptions, nirvana and space, but about this later) can be reduced to samskåras, but samskåras are irreducible to anything. But how can we imagine their arising as conditioned by ignorance? There can be no direct answer, but an indirect one may be attempted: such imagining would be possible only if we admit the existence (note, not the arising!) of some purely transcendental “nirvanic position”. Then, from the point of view of this position, there will be no Path to nirvana, nor conditioned co-origination, and ignorance will be thought of as one of the elements of the cosmic arrangement. Samskåras will be purely spatially contingent on ignorance as it were coexisting with the latter within the same “sphere”. But to this we will come towards the end of our Buddhistic philosophizing. Now we are, still, in search of an answer to the previous questions.
So, samskåras are arising where (not when, there is no time separating one nidåna from another!) ignorance has already taken place. But, returning to “what is ignorant?”, let us note, that samskåras are not only mental, or that they are not specifically mental, so it would be stretching it too far to ascribe to them any mental subjectivity and thereby capacity to know: they are neither knowers nor non-knowers, because their mind-ness is merely objective.
There can be no transition – not to speak of a phenomenological reduction – from samskåras to the third nidåna, consciousness. Let me note by the way that we know not of any ancient teaching, conception, or theory in which consciousness (or mind, or thinking) would have been described as appearing from or created by something that is not conscious or mental. The only exception I see in the beginning of the Brihadaranyaka-upanishad, where the “indefinite It” got annoyed of being alone and wished to create another to keep company with it, from which wish the mind was produced; whereas in text IV consciousness is arising, being conditioned by the pure objectivity of samskåras which have become conditioned by objective ignorance. To this we may add that only in the sequential order of the conditioned origination in text IV, and nowhere else, ignorance is objective, as nobody’s ignorance, as ignorance of nothing and every thing, and everybody. That is why the arising of consciousness from arising of synergies may be seen as a “philosophical jump” from that which, though itself purely objective but is as it were “charged” with the forces of subjectivity to that which is latent subjectivity, waiting for its hour to be patent and manifested. Let me remark here that still in pre-Buddhist texts consciousness is sometimes defined as that which is conscious of itself. This definition is on the one hand purely substantivist, for it admits of the existence of some thing, entity or “person” conscious of themselves, but on the other hand it suggests the existence of an abstract capacity of being conscious, irrespective of the subject or possessor of such a capacity. I think that the text IV is the place of interplay of these two senses of consciousness.
The arising of the fourth nidåna, “name-and-form” (nåmarüpa) conditioned by the arising of consciousness, can be considered the first step in conretisation of consciousness and at the same time the first step in its individualisation. It may be supposed that consciousness, having become energysed, activated by samskåras, has now arisen limited by “material” (for the lack of a better term) form, rüpa, sometimes translated as “body” (but body only in conjunction with consciousness!). In this “mind-body” linkage the consciousnesses, mindness is conevntionally denoted by “name”. Thus, the fourth nidåna, “mind-body” is, in this text, a unit of consciousness, separated in space by the framework of its body from any other consciousness. The essential thing here is that consciousness does not condition either the mind or the body in that pair of “mind-body”, but the pair itself.
The fifth nidåna, the six sense-spheres (see in text III), åyatanas, arising as conditioned by the nidåna of mind-body, is also marked by its spatial character. Each sphere, be it eye-sight, hearing, or mind arises as separate in inner (i.e., mental) and outer (i.e., where “physical” objects are situated) spaces. As the nåma-rüpa informs all the sense-spheres taken together as one psycho-physiological whole, so each particular sense-consciousness (see in text III) informs its respective sense-sphere. So we may speculate that in the final analysis a sense-sphere is both “real” and “conceptual”. This, of course, is not to say that the dichotomy of “real/conceptual” is admitted of in the text. It would be more interesting to imagine these sense-spheres as arising in different areas of the space of consciousness, each of which could be marked by its own particular characteristics.
With the sixth nidåna, contact of senses with their objects, we are on the habitual terrain of the classical European psycho-physiology. However with one essential difference: the conditioned origination does not admit of the temporal ontology without which no European scientific thought, from the 16th century AD till today, seems to be possible. All the 12 nidånas of conditioned origination taken together and each of them thought of separately are not a process, but simultaneously occuring momentary facts or events whose past expressed in “has already arisen” and future of “it is going to become”, merge in the present of “here and now”. Or if we put it in a more Buddhist manner: time is neither one of the conditions of emergence of phenomena, nor one of the media of their emergence. And in this sense, the conditioned origination is one of the spatial arrangements of phenomena, in which all emergences as it were “always have already taken their place”. So the contact is an event which may happen only in the sphere (åyatanai) where the senses and their objects do happen, speaking generally, but have already happened in this particular case.
The seventh nidåna, feeling (or emotion), corresponding directly to the second aggregate (skr. skandha) of individual existence is conditioned by contact, but differs from the latter psychologically – for here we are leaving out all psycho-physiology and physiology. For, as it was mentioned in the Seminar III, it is completely different qualitative dimension which is introduced in the philosophy of conditioned origination as well as the Buddhist philosophizing in general together with the idea of feeling. A contact, for example, as an event or a fact, – is what it is and as it is. Or, if we put it a little differently, from the point of view of the knowledge of things as they are (yathåbütam, see text I, n. 36), contact as a phenomenon, as a dharma, is neutral. Then, the thought that “contact conditions feeling”, can be understood in the sense that provides the object of feeling, which having been felt, becomes pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. In other words, feeling is arising as feeling only with respect to that object, in the absence of which there can be no feeling.
But, philosophically more importantly, it is feeling, vedanå which – not only in Buddhism, but in almost all philosophies of ancient India – was a playground where the ethical ideas and axiological criteria were deliberated upon and worked out. And it is from that playground that some of those ideas and criteria became extrapolated to other areas of knowledge and practice.
The eighth nidåna, craving returns us to the Second Noble Truth (in text III) where it is the main cause of suffering. But “arising of craving is conditioned by arising of feeling” sounds in the best case pleonastic and in the worst simply nonsensical. This is much easier to be said than understood. For craving here is not feeling, pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Nor is it positive as passion or negative as hatred. As the root of suffering it possesses three essential features not shared by feeling. First, craving, unlike feeling, is a a priori synthetic notion. It cannot be empyrically deduced from, nor phenomenologically reduced to, feeling. In a very simplified philosophical explanation (“simplified explanation” means here an explanation of a subject which by itself is far more complex than explanation) craving appears as the final result of a synthesis of feeling as the outcome of the theorizing in the process of which it had shed all its psychological modalities. Second. At the same time, craving may be considered the basic concept of Buddhist psychology as “the instinct of all instincts”, the Urgrund of all psychical and mental life. Third. We may conjecture that craving possesses its own objectivity: that is, it is objective not only as spontaneously arising, but also because it is out of reach of normal, yogically untrained consciousness.
The ninth nidåna, grasping, whose arising is conditioned by arising of craving, could be thought of as the main positive behavioural and mental attitude. Craving in its arising is both extensive and intensive, centrifugal and centripetal, while grasping is intensive and centripetal par excellence. In this sense grasping can be seen as concretisation of craving or probably, more exactly, as a concretisation of the direction of craving’s energy. Psychologically, grasping could be reduced to the idea of a “pristine fallback” or the “inexhaustible source of gratification” (the idea which is very archaic and present in many ritual mythologies). Moreover, it is grasping that in its numerous modifications and variations not only concretizes the general positive objective intentionality, but provides conditions for its further individualisation and subjectification.
The tenth nidåna, becoming is one of two universal states (see in text I). However here, conditioned by grasping, it may be seen as a sheer potentiality, abstract possibility – not yet differentiated in space and time – of separate, individual bodies (rüpa) and consciousnesses (nåma). In distinction from momentary, in principle a-temporal “rising” or “arising” (P. uppåda, skr. utpåda), “becoming” in the text IV, has the meaning of “change”, “growth” and therewith, implies some temporal dimension, an “element of time”. It is in this connection that it refers us to the second nidåna – samskåras which, though themselves a-temporal in their arising, are, as it were, “time-producing”. Note, however, that the whole chain of the twelve nidånas is, in their relation to each other and in the relation of any of them to them all taken together, purely timeless. Because the arising of each of nidåna implies that not only the nidåna that has already conditioned its arising “is already there”, but all other nidånas preceding it and following it in the sequence of the conditioned origination, “are also there”. For the conditioned origination is in no way evolution, but a pure topology.
The eleventh and twelfth nidånas are merely temporal concretisations of the tenth, though there is one quirk here. The thing is that arising of birth (P. and skr. jåti) as conditioned by arising of becoming (P. and skr. bhåva) is considered by re-becoming (P. punabbhava), “becoming again”. The “arrow of time” here is directed not from the conventional “past” becoming to the “present” moment of a given birth, but the other way round – from the moment of birth to the infinite and indefinite depths of becoming. Furthermore, the conditioning of death by birth, in this text – seemingly trivial – presupposes one other change in the direction of time: “the arrow of time” flies, as if driven by the forces of the “past” becoming, into a future which is considered more definite than the past and, in principle, finite. It is here, at the last link of the chain of Conditioned Origination, that we may pose a good, old and hopelessly banal question: whose future or, more exactly, the future of what? The question to which there can be only one answer – the future of an individual consciousness, the future of which an individual consciousness may become aware. To which our last question is added: which individual consciousness? For, anticipating a phenomenology of consciousness exposed in the texts XII-XIV, we have to state that what is, no more than conventionally, called “individual consciousness” is differentiated into several subclasses, such as birth-consciousness, death-consciousness, etc. And it is only from the point of view of the last that we could speak of any future becoming.
The answer to the question of this seminar, “how has it all come about?” is as ambiguous as is the question. On the one hand we have to ask (as the Buddha did at the very beginning of text III) what is “the all” that has come about? To this the only answer will be: “the all” means (note, not “is”!) all thinkable things, facts, and events that are arising. On the other hand, however, we may ask: what is the “how” of the question? The only answer to which could be: it is the order of their arising, that is, the conditioned origination, which in its turn poses one more question: is the conditioned origination itself one of those arising phenomena, one of the dharmas? On the answer to this question depends the direction of the Buddhist philosophy for the period from 1st century BC to 8th century AD. Because, if the answer be “yes”, then we are left with one fundamental ontological postulate about all dharmas, clear and unequivocal, with clearly cut one set of rules of deduction from this postulate. But if “no”, then the order of becoming finds itself outside becoming, and dharmas are classified into two classes – conditioned (P. sankhata, skr. samskrta) and unconditioned (P. asankhata, skr. asamskrta). In the second case we are at the starting ground of a philosophical dualism.
The Conditioned Origination, as presented in the text IV, is a pure content. The content that shall have to wait till it has become an object of philosophical reflection. But even as it is, it includes in itself its own awareness of itself as one of the elements of that content. That forebodes an oncoming philosophy that is anticipated in our seminar.
[1] P. paticcasamuppåda, Skr. pratityasamutpåda (Mahåvagga, 1-4 from Vinaya-pitaka in the Pali Canon).
[2] P. and Skr. abhisambuddha.
[3] P. pallanka – the standard yogic posture of sitting cross-legged.
[4] More exactly, “mental release” (as in text I, n. 42).
[5] P. manasåkåsi. This is an indication of a special yogic procedure.
[6] P. and Skr. anuloma. The word may also mean “natural order” as, for instance, when the cause figures before its effect.
[7] P. paticca, Skr. pratîtya.
[8] P. avijjå, Skr. avidyå. Note that it is not ignorance in general, but the ignorance of the basic truths (for example, of the Four Noble Truths).
[9] P. sankharå, Skr. samskåras (in plural only). “Synergies” is a merely artificial word (introduced by T. Suzuki, 1923) only conventionally used here for translation of this most complicated (or rather enigmatic) term of Buddhist philosophy. In this text it is used in the sense of the fourth aggregate of individual existence (see text I, n. 00).
[10] P. and Skr. nåmarüpa. Sometimes translated as “sentientness and body” or even as “sentient body”. Generally speaking, this term denotes both sides of individual existence, the mental and physical (or, more exactly, non-mental) as one whole.
[11] P. and Skr. åyatana. The sphere of each of the six senses comprises the organ of sense, the corresponding consciousness, the objects of this organ of sense, and the contacts of this organ of sense with its objects.
[12] P. phassa, Skr. sparßa. This is the first term denoting contact (the second is samphassa, see text III, n. 4).
[13] As in text I, n 42.
[14] As in text I, n. 27.
[15] Or “attachment”, or “clinking” (??) (see text I, n. 25).
[16] See, text III, n. 30. According to most of modern translators, “becoming’ is definitely preferable to “being”, for the term denotes the process of change, of development more than the state of things characterised by finality or even stability. It also may be suggested that in the sense of this text, “becoming” is not that which “is” in time, but that which, as it were, constitutes time.
[17] P. and Skr. jåti. This is the occurrence of birth, which starts with conception and ends with child-delivery.
[18] P. samuppåda, Skr. samutpåda.
[19] See text III, n. 10.
[20] Dharma here means “phenomenon”, “thing”, “fact” in the most general way. At the same time, it would be also possible to conjecture that it may mean here the Dharma, that is, the Teaching that “becomes manifested” (P. påtu).
[21] “Meditator” (P. jhåyin, Skr. dhyånin) from P. jhåna (Skr. dhyåna) – one of the most important varieties of the Buddhist yoga. Usually translated as meditation, contemplation, or trance.
[22] “Brahman” here means not a priest but an outstanding person, endowed with perfect understanding of the Buddhist Teaching and skilled in Buddhist yoga.
[23] P. and Skr. hetu. Cause here is equivalent to “conditioning” (P. paccaya, Skr. pratyaya).
[24] See, text I, n 32.