True Stoppings, True Paths & First 3 of the 12 Links

Now we need to go a little more deeply into our analysis, to understand how this uncontrollably recurring rebirth – which is what samsara means – actually works. How does it occur? If we understand its mechanism, we will have a better idea of how to stop it. The description and analysis of the process of samsaric rebirth is described by the twelve links of dependant arising, which is a very extensive and very deep topic, and one that is very important to understand and recognize. It has many different ramifications in terms of not just stopping our uncontrollably recurring rebirth, but also in dealing with our daily lives.

The first link is unawareness. Unawareness – remember I was using this as a translation for the word “ignorance” in order to avoid this connotation that we’re stupid. It simply means we don’t know or we know in an incorrect way. Here, unawareness is specifically about how persons exist – ourselves and everyone else. 

For this, we always need to think of persons in terms of individual mental continuums – individual persons that are imputations – and later, we’ll discuss what that means – imputations on continuities of individual subjective experience that go on from moment to moment to moment. This is usually called the “mind-stream,” the “mental continuum,” the “continuum of mental activity.” That mental activity is always individual. When I experience eating, you don’t experience eating – it’s individual and it’s subjective. It is subjective in the sense that it’s accompanied by all sorts of emotions, memories and so on of each individual person that is experiencing moment-to-moment changes.

Each individual continuum goes on from lifetime to lifetime with no beginning and no end. It continues even after attaining enlightenment. The demonstration of that is in terms of the analysis of causality. We don’t want to go too deeply into that analysis, but you can’t have something that starts from nothing and then, all of a sudden, begins to change from moment to moment. That makes no sense. 

Further, with individual mental continuums, we’re not talking about something that falls apart and degenerates, like water dripping out of a vase with a hole in the bottom. Eventually there will be no more water; we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about a mental continuum that from moment to moment is subjectively experiencing something. That doesn’t slowly run out over time – though its physical basis, a brain, may wear out and be replaced in a next lifetime with a different physical basis – but the individual continuity of experiencing things, based on previous moments of experience, goes on from moment to moment. Something that doesn’t decline can’t start from nothing and can’t not produce another moment. 

As the result of various tendencies and habits built up during previous lifetimes, then in each lifetime, an individual continuum of moment to moment experiencing of things is going to be based on a different limited physical basis. Because of the limitations of this so-called hardware, the mental activity based on it will be correspondingly limited, like in the example of being reborn as a fly. Because of various instincts and so on, a mental continuum that had as its physical basis a human body in one lifetime can have as its physical basis in a next life the body and brain of a fly. Then its awareness and understanding will be even more limited. It can even be more limited than that if it has as its basis the body of a ghost or a hell being.

In any case, there’s no fixed identity to a mental continuum as this or that type of limited being. It’s individual, and it’s not necessarily male or female, or human or animal or whatever. The type of aggregates it will have – the so-called “tainted” aggregates coming from unawareness and all the things that develop from unawareness – will vary from one lifetime to another. 

This is part of the all-pervasive suffering that we are talking about. We never know what’s going to come next. That’s the scary part of what type of basis is going to ripen from our karmic tendencies in our next lifetimes. Of course, the basis will have among its causes the sperm and egg of the parents, the physical elements, and the phase of evolution of the world. You can’t be born on Earth as a dinosaur now. So, there are many, many causes and conditions coming together for the type of rebirth we’re going to have.

When we attain enlightenment, our mental continuum will have the Form Bodies of a Buddha as its basis. But it’s not as though that is inevitable. It’s not as though each moment our mental continuum is automatically getting closer and closer to that attainment, which some Indian philosophical systems assert is the case. To attain the physical bodies of a Buddha, we need to rid ourselves of all our unawareness and the deeper obscurations that prevent that from happening; and that takes a bodhichitta motivation and a great deal of practice and effort.

“Bodhichitta” is a “principal awareness (gtso-sems),” in other words a composite state of mind in which our mental consciousness is aimed at our own individual enlightenment that has not yet happened and is accompanied by the mental factors of love, compassion and the intentions to achieve that enlightenment and to benefit all beings by means of its attainment. 

Unawareness of How Persons Exist

Unawareness, as the first of the twelve links, is specified as unawareness of how persons –­ we and all others – exist. It needs to be asserted that way because the twelve links and the whole mechanism of rebirth and gaining liberation from rebirth are topics shared in common among the so-called “Hinayana” traditions – there are eighteen of them – and the Mahayana traditions. Sometimes these are referred to as the Pali tradition and the Sanskrit tradition, and although these terms are politically more correct than Hinayana and Mahayana, they are not so precise. Only one of the Hinayana traditions, Theravada – the one that is extant today – is based on the Pali texts, whereas the scriptures of the other seventeen Hinayana traditions are in Sanskrit or one of the Prakrit dialects. So, although Hinayana and Mahayana are not terribly nice terms and a bit derogatory toward Hinayana, still they are the most accurate. To be less politically incorrect, I sometimes translate them as the “modest vehicle” and the “vast vehicle,” rather than the great and the lesser one. In any case, liberation is shared in common as a goal for both those that are aiming for their own individual liberation as an arhat – the Hinayana goal – and those who are aiming ultimately for enlightenment as a Buddha – the final Mahayana goal.

Several different Buddhist tenet systems of philosophy, both among the Hinayana schools and the Mahayana ones, were studied at Nalanda Monastic University in India and the Tibetans have been carrying on that tradition. Within Madhyamaka, the distinction between Svatantrika and Prasangika was only first made by the Tibetans, but in any case, from the Prasangika point of view, as asserted by the Gelug school in Tibet, the same understanding of voidness is needed for attaining either liberation or enlightenment, and that is the voidness of all phenomena, including persons. The other Mahayana tenet systems – Chittamatra and Svatantrika-Madhyamaka – assert that there’s only a certain level of understanding of the voidness of persons that we need for attaining liberation, and we need the deeper level of understanding of the voidness of all phenomena only for gaining enlightenment. The Hinayana tenet systems do not assert a voidness of all phenomena. They assert only a voidness of persons – referred to as the selflessness or identitylessness (Pali: anatta, Skt. anatman) of persons – for attaining liberation and, broadly speaking, this is the same understanding as asserted by the non-Prasangika Mahayana schools. In all these cases, however, voidness refers to an absence of anything findable corresponding to some impossible way of existing that we project onto things. 

Please keep in mind, though, that voidness as a complete absence is not the total negation of everything. It is not a nihilistic term. It is just a total absence of something corresponding to our projection of something impossible that could never exist. 

Let me illustrate the relation between nothing and the absence of something with a simplified example. There’s the absence of an apple on my table. You can see there is no apple on the table. What do you see? You see nothing on the table, but you understand “nothing” to be the absence of an apple. When you see an absence of milk in the refrigerator, you know that you need to go out and buy milk. It’s interesting, how what you’re actually seeing, though, is nothing!

Doctrinally-Based and Automatically Arising Unawareness

Getting back to unawareness about how persons exist, there are two levels of this unawareness and, in general, they will be defined differently by different schools. The two levels are doctrinally based and automatically arising.

Doctrinally-based unawareness of how persons exist is based on some doctrine that we’ve been taught, specifically by a non-Buddhist Indian tenet system concerning atman, the soul. Not only have we been taught it, but we believe it to be true. Based on the unawareness of not knowing that these assertions do not correspond to how the conventional self actually exists, we identify ourselves, for example, with an unchanging, permanent soul that currently lives inside our bodies and minds and controls them. With rebirth, that soul will inhabit another body and mind, but with liberation, it will fly off to some transcendent realm and be totally free of any body or mind. Well, the dog wouldn’t believe that. You need to be taught that and be capable of understanding it and believe it in order to hold that type of view. That’s what it means to be doctrinally-based.

Then there is automatically arising unawareness, which the dog will have as well. Everybody has that automatically, because that’s the way that things appear to us. It seems to all of us that when we hear our own or someone else’s voice, we are just hearing ourselves or the person and we believe that is correct. For instance, we believe we are speaking to someone on the phone. It doesn’t seem to us that we are hearing the simulated sound of a voice produced electronically and coming out of a rectangular, flat black plastic box and the person is merely an imputation based on that. It seems that we just hear the person. 

Similarly, we automatically imagine that we, as persons, can be known independently, all by itself, without any thing about us simultaneously being known. It seems to us that we “know ourselves” or we have gotten to “know somebody,” as if we could just know a person, when in fact we can only know someone based on knowing something about them – their name, how they look, their personality and so on. We want others to love us for ourselves, not for our good looks or our brains, but just love me for “me,” as if we could exist and be loved independently of a body and mind. This is quite different from wanting people to love me as a soul that can fly off to a transcendent realm with liberation and be free of any body and mind. So, there is quite a difference between doctrinally based and automatically arising unawareness about how persons exist.

Insecurity

What happens with this first link is that we’re unaware of how we exist, or we think we exist in some inverted, impossible way and we feel insecure. Since it’s based on something impossible that doesn’t exist, naturally we experience that as insecurity. I’m sure we all are familiar with insecurity, almost everybody feels insecure. It arises because we’re conceiving of ourselves as some sort of independently existing entity that could potentially be made secure. 

The secret is that there’s nothing to be made secure, so what are we so worried about? What are we feeling insecure about? Forget it, that’s not an issue: security or insecurity. But because we feel insecure, then we experience these disturbing emotions and disturbing attitudes. Remember, these are states of mind that when they arise, they cause us to lose peace of mind and lose self-control. That brings on the compulsiveness of karma, which then leads to our compulsive behavior. 

Disturbing emotions are basically some sort of mechanism that we use – a mental framework and strategy to try to make this impossible “self” secure. One strategy would be to get things to us. “If I could just get enough money, get enough likes on my Facebook page and so on, I will feel secure.” Of course, we never have enough, do we? It’s an impossible mechanism; it doesn’t work, but we always want more. What we don’t have, we want – that’s longing desire; what we have, we don’t want to let go of – that’s attachment; and what we already have is never enough, we want more – that’s greed. More and more visits to my website, if I use my own example. All three varieties of this disturbing emotion are based on exaggerating the good qualities of what it is that we want, or adding good qualities that aren’t there and imagining that somehow what we want has the power to make this fantasy of “me” secure. 

Mind you, we do exist. There is a conventional “me.” But we don’t exist in this impossible way that we project and imagine. I exist – you’re not eating, I’m eating, so there is a “me.” But it doesn’t exist in an impossible way, an impossible way that does not correspond to reality. 

There are several levels of impossible ways that we imagine we exist. Based on each of these levels of what is impossible, we will experience that level of disturbing emotions, because believing in our projection of this level of impossible “me” still makes us feel insecure about it. So, with doctrinally-based unawareness about how we exist, we develop doctrinally-based disturbing emotions, and with automatically arising unawareness, automatically arising disturbing emotions.

We’ve discussed longing desire: “I have to get things to me in order to make this imagined self, ‘me,’ secure.” The next is anger, hostility, or repulsion, “I have to somehow get things away from this ‘me,’ and that will somehow make me secure.” Or naivety with which we deny that there is any effect of what we do on ourselves and others, so we feel we can do or say whatever we want and, because we imagine it won’t have any effects, we think that will make us feel secure – like, for instance, bossing our family and friends. That type of naivety is about cause and effect. There is also naivety about how we exist and how others exist. We deny that we or others have feelings, for instance. We imagine that by denying that we are in an unhealthy relationship, we will feel secure. 

In addition to disturbing emotions, we also have disturbing attitudes. They are defined as states of mind that seek to latch onto something with an incorrect consideration of it and which add something to it that is not there. This is actually the definition of the most classic one – a deluded attitude toward a transitory network (‘jig-lta). With it, in a sense, we throw out a net of “me” and “mine” onto everything. It interpolates, or projects, “me” and “mine” onto various transitory things that we encounter. We try to claim things as “me, my partner, mine: me, my desk, me, my body, my space, don’t come too close.” That type of thing. Then we imagine that that if we have “my territory” around “me,” that will somehow make us secure, “Don’t invade my territory.” 

All this ignorance, and the disturbing emotions and disturbing attitudes it spawns, is the first of the twelve links of dependent arising.

The second link is affecting impulses and what it is talking about is karma, basically. Karma is compulsion, the compulsion that drives us to act in a certain way. There are various explanations of karma in the different Indian Buddhist tenet systems, either it is simply a mental factor like a compulsive urge that drives us to act in a certain way; or it has additional aspects other tenet systems describe as being physical – for instance, the shapes our body compulsively take when acting and which reveal our motivation, and the subtle compelling energy accompanying and following our actions, which do not reveal our motivation. Let’s just discuss this link in terms of the simpler presentation of karma as a mental impulse, an urge.

Our compulsive urges are affecting, because they affect what we do, say and think and what we will experience as the result.  Remember, we have disturbing emotions and disturbing attitudes, which, in accord with their definition, cause us to lose peace of mind and self-control. Because we lose self-control, then when we feel like acting in a certain way, or feel like saying something – which is like a wish, in a sense, like “I feel like having something to eat” – then compulsiveness kicks in. That’s where we can stop the sequence and not necessarily act out what we feel like doing. We exercise self-control, which is the way to deal with this in accord with the initial level lam-rim motivation. 

We exercise self-control based on using discriminating awareness to discriminate whether acting on this feeling will be beneficial or harmful. For instance, we discriminate that, “I’m on a diet, and if every time I feel like eating a piece of cake or chocolate, I’m just going to put on more weight and that’s not what I want to do. Therefore, although I feel like having a piece of chocolate. I’m not going to have one.” Or someone who has given up smoking, “I feel like having a cigarette” – you just don’t do it. 

What we’re dealing with here is when we feel like acting in a destructive way, or in a neurotically constructive way – for instance, we feel like cleaning the house yet again, even though we’ve just done it – we lose self-control and compulsion kicks in. That compulsiveness is the second link, which then leads to our behavior: acting, speaking or thinking in a certain way, based on one of these disturbing emotions or disturbing attitudes and accompanied by one or more of them.

Karmic Aftermath

Acting out these compulsive urges leaves karmic aftermath. The aftermath that is left is rather complex: we don’t want to go into a tremendous amount of detail about that. There are karmic potentials, karmic tendencies and karmic constant habits. The differences among them would require a lot of time to explain. That’s not so relevant here to our discussion. Let’s just speak very simply in terms of karmic tendencies – literally, a karmic “seed.” 

From yelling at people, for instance, we build up a tendency to yell at others when they don’t do what we want. Or because we imagine that we can always be in control – which is of course impossible, because there is no such thing as someone who is completely in control of what happens – we have the tendency, whenever there is something out of place, to put it in its proper place. Like this, these karmic tendencies cause us to experience the feeling to repeat the types of behavior that created them, and to experience several other things ripening from them as well.

The “ripened results,” which are presented in further links, is one of the things that we experience ripening from them. The aggregates are, to put them simply, a body and mind that will be the basis for experiencing or acting out these tendencies. In addition, with a body and mind, we encounter conditions in which we experience others acting toward us in a similar way in which we have acted toward others. Our karmic tendencies don’t cause them to act in that way; they act in that way as the result of their own karmic tendencies. Our karmic tendencies merely cause us to experience being the object of their actions. Our karmic tendencies also cause us to experience being in certain environments that will be the conditions for us to experience certain other things, like a natural disaster or a poor economy. Most importantly, for the discussion of the twelve links of dependent arising, our karmic tendencies ripen into the various levels of happiness or unhappiness with which we experience the other components of our aggregates each moment. Each of these karmic results will occur at different times, so the ripening process of karmic aftermath is quite complex.

The affecting impulses of karma and all their karmic aftermath constitute the second link of dependent arising.

The third link, consciousness, has two phases:

• causal loaded consciousness – our consciousness in this lifetime, loaded with these karmic tendencies, potentials and constant habits, and
• resultant loaded consciousness – our consciousness in our next rebirth, which ripens from this aftermath and continues to be loaded with this aftermath.

The term “loaded” needs to be understood correctly. As I mentioned, the word that I’m translating as tendency is literally the word seed (sa-bon). It is described in a simplistic way as planting seeds in a field and then something is going to grow from it. It’s a very nice image that we can use for understanding karma, on a beginning level, but these tendencies are not anything physical – if we stick to the simpler presentation of karma.

Here we have a technical word for the type of phenomenon that tendencies are: they are imputations (brtag-pa) on the mental continuum – or, more simply, on mental consciousness. What does that mean? What is a tendency, like the tendency to smoke? We experience, with our mental continuum, a series of similar events: smoking one cigarette, another cigarette and then another cigarette. Based on that sequence, there is the imputation of the tendency to smoke. We cannot establish the existence of a tendency to smoke independently from there being many instances of smoking. The tendency is not “self-established.” And also, the tendency to smoke cannot be known independently of knowing that there are instances of smoking. 

Perhaps the easiest way to understand imputations is with the example of a whole and parts. A whole is an imputation on parts. You cannot establish the existence of a whole separately from there being parts and you cannot know a whole without simultaneously knowing at least some of the parts. The analogy of a whole and parts, though, is not an exact analogy, because a whole apple and a part of the apple are both physical phenomena, although they illustrate quite nicely what an imputation is. But a karmic urge is a mental factor, a way of knowing something, whereas a tendency is the type of nonstatic (impermanent) phenomenon that is neither a form of physical phenomenon nor a way of knowing something (ldan-min ‘du-byed).

A closer analogy is a solar year as an imputation on the complete rotation of the earth around the sun. You cannot establish the existence of such a thing as a solar year independently of the earth being in successive places as it rotates around the sun and you can’t find “a year” anywhere on that orbit. Similarly, you can’t establish the existence of a tendency to smoke independently of repeated instances of smoking, and you can’t find a tendency on the mental continuum on which these repeated instances of smoking have occurred. Nevertheless, conventionally, there are solar years, there are tendencies and there are wholes – and no one has to actively impute them in order for them to conventionally exist. They are not merely concepts. 

The third link, then, is consciousness loaded with karmic aftermath as imputations on them – both in this lifetime and a future lifetime.

Tendencies

We’ve been speaking here specifically about karmic tendencies, but there are many other types of tendencies as well. These will also go from lifetime to lifetime, but here specifically we are talking about karmic ones that will bring about further aggregates, including our feelings of happiness or unhappiness, and that will bring about repetition of certain types of behavior and so on. 

There are tendencies for the various other types of mental factors: anger, love, concentration and so on. These aren’t karmic, but the mechanism is the same in terms for how they are “planted” on the consciousness and how they bring about further manifestations of what they’re the tendencies for. We experience a lot of instances of anger, and so the tendency for anger exists on our mental continuum as an imputation. This tendency for anger leads to more instances of being angry. 

Just as tendencies of the various positive and negative emotions, and of other mental factors such as attention and concentration, are imputations on our mental continuum, so too memories are imputations on our mental continuums. For instance, we experienced a certain incident and then later we remembered it, and several times later we also remembered it. A memory of that incident is an imputation on our mental continuum, based on that sequence of remembering something. We have a tendency to remember some incident. Of course, each time that memory ripens into an instance of remembering, we remember something slightly different. Similarly, each time we get angry it will be slightly different and each time we feel like yelling at someone will not be to yell with the exact same words. So, there are many, many different types of tendencies. 

That’s why I was saying that each moment of experience has all these components, and all these components are coming from their own tendencies. Various conditions will cause different clusters of them to ripen, in a sense, and to manifest in different intensities. It’s very, very complex.

The karmic tendencies, then, do not exist as imputations on our mental continuum with a big wall around them that separate them from all our other tendencies. The tendencies of many mental factors, including karmic tendencies, are ripening all the time. We can conceptually isolate each of them for the purpose of analysis, but they are all interconnected and function interdependently.

Mental Continuums

All these tendencies are imputations on our mental continuum, so what is a mental continuum? It is an individual stream of continuity of the moment to moment mental activity of experiencing things. 

Now we need to look at the definition of mental activity, which is what “mind” actually refers to in Buddhism. Mental activity is defined as “mere clarity and awareness.” Clarity (gsal) is a verb here, so it’s not translated very nicely. It doesn’t mean being clear and focused, but rather refers to the arising of something, like the dawning of the sun. What is arising is a mental hologram (rnam-pa, an aspect). When we hear something, vibrations of air are translated by the audio-sensitive cells of the ear into electric impulses that are transmitted through the neural network and so on. In the end, what we actually experience is some sort of mental hologram of a sound, or with sight, the mental hologram of a sight. So, we can describe mental activity, from one point of view, as the arising of a mental hologram. 

Another way of describing mental activity is a knowing of something (rig); there is some sort of cognitive engagement. It’s not that a thought arises and then you think it, but the two are simultaneous. The arising of the thought and the thinking of the thought are the same event. The arising of a visual hologram and the seeing of something are also the same event. 

“Merely” (tsam) means that mental activity is only that. There is no separate “me” that is observing it, controlling it, or out of control. This arising and engaging are all that’s happening. The mental hologram that arises is a mental representation of something in the form aggregate: a sight, a sound, etc. The mental engagement is with primary consciousness and the various mental factors. 

The mental continuum, then, is a network of all these things, and goes on, from moment to moment to moment to moment, without any break. It does not degenerate and grow weaker, because it was never created. Something degenerates when the causes and conditions for its arising are no longer present. But since our mental continuum has no beginning, it is simply its own previous moment that serves as the condition for its next moment to arise, and there is always a previous moment of it. Also, since there is nothing that is the exact opposite of mental activity, there’s nothing that could oppose it or stop it. 

The mental continuum, with the continuity of mental consciousness being its primary component, then, is the third link. It serves as the basis on which the karmic tendencies and all the other tendencies are loaded and exist as imputations that are neither physical nor mental.

These links of dependent arising do not form a linear system. It’s not that A leads to B leads to C in terms of causality – that unawareness causes the karmic impulses and that causes the consciousness. What we are describing is a type of sequence of how things develop. 

There is a continuum of unawareness that’s going to be with the consciousness all the time, unless we’re totally absorbed non-conceptually on voidness. Because of the presence of unawareness, there are also present various tendencies of the disturbing emotions as well as karmic tendencies as imputations on the consciousness. The combination of all these are the conditions for the feeling to arise to act in a certain way and then for the compulsive urge of karma to arise to act out that feeling. That feeling or wish to act in a certain way and the karmic urge to act are both mental factors and so they accompany the consciousness as part of the mental continuum. 

Acting out that feeling, brought on by that compulsive karmic urge, leaves karmic aftermath as an imputation on the consciousness, strengthening the previous karmic tendencies. Unawareness is still also present on the mental continuum, as are the tendencies for the disturbing emotions. The mental continuum loaded in one lifetime with all this will continue into a future lifetime in which more things will ripen. 

These first three links, then, describe the process of uncontrollably recurring rebirth – samsara – from one point of view. Other links of the twelve describe the same process from another point of view, so these twelve links are not linear, not at all.