Day 5 UK Retreat (Sept 2023) - Dependent Origination

Today and tomorrow we'll be discussing dependent origination. And if you thought the last two days had a lot of information, just do wait. Today we are going to be going through quite a bit. So you don't need to know everything that I'm saying. You don't need to absorb everything I'm saying. Whatever it is I'm talking about when it comes to the links, whatever seems to be best applicable for your situation, understand that. Dependent origination is a very deep and subtle process.

And in Majjhima Nikaya 28, Sariputta has said that the Buddha has said that one who knows dependent origination knows the Dhamma, and one who knows the Dhamma knows dependent origination. So it is the backbone of everything. When we talk about Buddhism, we understand that it's really about the Four Noble Truths, right? There is suffering, there is the cause of suffering, there is the cessation of suffering, and there is a way leading to the cessation of suffering. Dependent noble truths. That is that there is suffering and there is the origin of suffering. But understanding the cessation of each of these links and applying the fourth noble truth, one experiences the third noble truth. So what that means is dependent origination is an explanation and elaboration of all four noble truths.

So we're going to work backwards. If you see on your charts, it shows ignorance, formations, consciousness, mentality, materiality. It shows the sixth sense basis, contact, feeling, craving, clinging, becoming, birth of action, and suffering. We're going to work with suffering and move our way backwards. So let's talk about suffering. What is suffering? Say suffering. First of all, the word suffering is a very dramatic word. I don't think it's really necessary, but there we go. Dukkha is the Pali word for suffering. Dukkha actually comes from an image of back in the day when you had a wagon or a chariot and the axle, one of the axles, was misaligned. The modern-day equivalent of that is when you go to the shopping center, and you have a shopping cart, and one of the wheels always tends to be a little off.

That is dukkha. There's a sense of unease. Not everything is right with the world. And we seem to experience that in our everyday lives, one way or the other. categories of it. There is what is known as viparinama dukkha, there is dukkha dukkha, and there is sankhara dukkha. Viparinama means change, constant change, the dukkha of change. The dukkha dukkha is the essential dukkha that we talk about. That's things like bodily pain and so on. And sankhara dukkha is an existential suffering. It's the suffering of existence itself, a sense of unease with life. So let's go with the simplest one for now, which is dukkha dukkha. Dukkha dukkha incorporates bodily pain, so pain in the body.

It incorporates old age. It incorporates death. It talks about mental anguish, despair, grief. Things like that. So let's talk about old age or the process of aging. That's something that happens to all beings. Even in the so-called deva realms where everything is wonderful and people live for millions of years and whatever it might be, there too, aging does happen. And it happens at a very late stage in the game. And so before you know it, you're gone. Can't do anything about it. But we have the ability to know that we're aging from a very early point, relatively speaking. So how do we deal with that aging process? Nowadays in the modern world, there are many ways that people deal with it.

They use plastic surgery, right? And that is because they have a fear of death, a fear of ending. They do all kinds of things to say, no, no, I'm not aging. My skin is okay. My bones are fine. Nothing's wrong with me. But even if modern-day science allowed us to go at the cellular level and be able to reverse our aging process, there is still the notion of death, the understanding of death. There's still illness. Even if we could eradicate all kinds of illness, fear of the end of this life. And that is all part of dukkha dukkha. If it were so easy, we could just fix our death. We could fix our illness away.

We could fix our aging away, right? What a wonderful thing it would be. Great marketing, right? Fix your wrinkles away, right? Unfortunately, we can't do that because that is the nature of existence. Things that arise will pass away. That is the nature of life. Birth, death, birth, death, birth, death. Indeed, we are experiencing this in every moment. When we talked about the arising and passing away of iota of consciousnesses, this is what we're referring to. There's the arising of one consciousness and the passing away of that consciousness. Then the arising of another, and the passing away of that consciousness, and this happens at every level of existence. So when we talk about mental anguish, despair, grief, these are all things related to the mind, right? Related to the emotions. In some sense we can deal with them by understanding them, by seeing them for what they are. All of these can be understood, can be recognized, can be noticed, and we can let go of our identification with them.

And we start to create a space between what we see and what we experience. In other words, the experience is not the same as who we are, right? There's an experience going on. But because we have attached to it the experiencer, to that mental anguish, to that pain, to that grief, to that suffering, then there is a sufferer. There's somebody to suffer. So there's a very tongue-in-cheek kind of comic or cartoon. And it's this guy who goes to the doctor and he says, it pains, it hurts when I do this. What? When I exist. Right? Every time you take something personally, every time you identify with something, there's a liability to have an experience of suffering.

But if you can notice that, if you notice that tightness that's around the experience, which is the craving, which is the mindset that this is me, mine, myself, and you let go of that, then there's nothing to do. Then you allow the experience to be as it is. Everything's okay right there and then, even if it's a painful experience. Now these are all parts of dukkha dukkha, the more apparent kinds of stress that we deal with on an everyday basis. There is also the dukkha of change, the suffering of change, viparinama dukkha. That is the dukkha of not getting what we want or getting what we don't want, right? The unexpected. Always change, right? On a very cold morning you go to the shower, you turn on the hot water and it's all nice and comfortable, very nice. You can stay there for hours. And all of a sudden the cold water hits you, right? The hot water stops and the cold water hits you. How do you feel in that moment? The suffering of change, right? You have to get onto your flight. You do all your, you pack up and everything.

You get on time. In fact, before time. And then you find out that your flight's cancelled. Not in your control. This is viparinama dukkha. These are things that are not in your control. The events that happen. The death of a loved one. Breakups. All kinds of things that are related to change and impermanence. So how do you deal with those? The same way. Grief, of course, for a loved one, the death of a loved one, is essentially grief not for the loved one. It's grief for yourself. I'm no longer going to have this person in my life. That's the grief. Not that the person is actually gone. It's the same thing with the breakup. That person is no longer in my life.

That's why I feel this way. We say it's about the other person, but it's actually about how we feel. So it all comes back to our perceptions of reality and how we take things as me, mine, or myself. If we just make this little tweak, then we see for ourselves that there really is no suffering in this moment. intention that we have to let go of. When we talk about sankhara dukkha, that's really the dukkha of the five aggregates. So the five aggregates are modes of experience, let's say, through which we have experience. What are the five aggregates? Form, feeling, perception, intention, and consciousness. When we talk about form, we're not only talking about our body, but everything that has a form.

When we talk about feeling, we're talking about experience, sensation, things that happen in the present moment, or have happened before, or might happen. All kinds of experiences related to the experience that happens through the sixth sense basis. When we talk about perception, remember what I said about perception is? Recognizing something. It's you see the color red, but you recognize it as the color red. You see the apple, but you recognize it as an apple. The recognizing, the labeling, the conceptualizing of it as an apple is the perception. Intentions or formations. We have a tendency to think that our decisions are our own. That our intentions are our own. But if you really look at it, there is no such thing as an intention that comes unconditioned.

In other words, you think about free will, the idea of free will. It's more like a conditioned will. It comes about because of a series of causes and conditions that create the illusion of choice, that we either choose to do this or we choose to do that. But in reality, these intentions are dependent on previous choices, previous situations. And then when we talk about consciousness, we're talking about the consciousness that is dependent upon the sixth sense basis. There's three things, right? Feeling, perception, and consciousness. Feeling is the bare sensation, the bare experience of something. Conceptualizing of what it is that we're experiencing as pleasant, painful, or neither pleasant or painful. And consciousness is the cognition of what it is that we're experiencing.

So that is the awareness, right? The attention is being put on something and the awareness that sheds light on it is the consciousness. Now there is a tendency for the mind to think that any of these things are self and that's where the dukkha arises. That's where the existential angst arises. The reason is because there is this notion of self. In ancient India, at the time of the Buddha and even before him, there was this idea that there is a soul, an atman, and that this soul, or this self, that is there is all-pervading. It's sat-chit-ananda, which means that it is self-existing, independent of all causes and conditions, that it is permanent, and that it is a source of happiness, and that it is our true nature.

It's the true nature of all beings. Now, when the Buddha was asked whether there is a self or there is no self, he didn't say anything. And when Ananda, his attendant, asked him why he didn't give a response, he said, if I were to say that there is no self, and I say that to a person, to that person who's asking, then there is a self that thinks that there is no self. In other words, there is a concept of no self that the mind takes and reifies as a self, identifies with that.

With that, but what he talked about was not something known as anatman or anatta. That is the idea that if you say that there is a self that is permanent, that is the source of happiness, and that is our true nature, then it needs to be able to say that anything that we're experiencing also is ourself. But if you take all the modalities of experience, namely these five aggregates and the sixth sense basis, and you use this concept of self as the touchstone, and you, with a microscope, inspect each of these five aggregates, what you will see is that indeed form, as we see in terms of our bodies internally and externally, in terms of everything around us, is subject to disintegration.

Obviously, our bodies keep changing. They are impermanent. That which is impermanent, even if it is pleasant, even if it is pleasurable, is bound to dissipate. And so that pleasure or that pleasant experience of the body, being impermanent, is liable to cause suffering in the end, not liable to cause long-lasting happiness. If that's the case, then we cannot say that this body, that form, is self. Likewise with feeling, likewise with perception, likewise with intention or formations, likewise with consciousness. So that identification with any of the five aggregates, with any of the six sense bases, is what causes the sankhara dukkha, the existential suffering. Once you let go of that, first you get your view straight, and see for yourself on an intellectual level that indeed these are not me, not mine, not myself.

And then an experiential understanding of that, and a very implicit understanding that becomes the reality, the true reality of your mode of experience. When that happens, then there is no suffering at all that arises. It doesn't mean that you won't experience pain. It doesn't mean you won't experience discomfort, but there won't be any mental agitation related to that. This is where we talk about the two arrows that the Buddha talks about. The first arrow is the physical pain, the physical suffering. The second arrow is when we project that this is me, this is mine, this is myself. In the case of somebody fully awakened, they're still subject to experiencing pain, bodily pain, but there won't be any projection of this suffering is mine, and so they won't have any mental or existential suffering. Now, when you are sitting for a long period of time, what happens? You experience suffering, you experience pain, you experience bodily pain. That's non-negotiable, that's okay. But you can also experience mental pain tied to that bodily pain.

Every time you have discomfort and you say, why is this happening? Can I move a little bit? I don't want to experience this excruciating pain. And the only reason why you're experiencing that is because you have an aversion to it. Your relationship with experience in general, pain or pleasure, is what needs to be looked at, not the pain or pleasure itself. It's how you identify with it, how you perceive it, how you take it, is what you have to look at. And be able to relax. Let go of the aversion. Let go of the identification. And the pain will still remain. But it won't be as bad. And eventually, actually, it does subside. Because your attention to it is no longer fettered by craving, fettered by aversion.

And because your attention is no longer on that, fettered by the craving, the pain might dull out, and it dissipates bit by bit by bit. That's the nature of pain. That's the nature of pleasure. That's the nature of all experience. So when we talk about suffering or dukkha, we're also talking about the karmic repercussions of actions that we've produced in the past and the actions that we produce right now. Why do I say that? Preceding dukkha, which is birth, jati. When we talk about birth, we're talking about two levels of understanding. So one is the birth in terms of coming into existence, so that birth can be being born as a human being, born in the hell realm, being born as an animal, being born as a Deva, being suffering, because the nature of that existence is that it is temporary, impermanent, liable to change, and therefore not a source of unending happiness.

But anytime we identify with this existence, there's a great ancient Indian epic called the Mahabharata, and in there, it's a bunch of different stories, and really it's a story of two sets of cousins who are fighting for territory and things like that. That's the main story. But there are a lot of great stories within it. And one of the stories is about these five brothers who go to the lake. They are now in the forest, and they go to the lake, and there is what is known as a yaksha in Sanskrit. That is a troll who has taken control over that lake. And each of the five brothers goes there one by one, and the troll says, you need to first answer my questions before you can drink from this lake.

And each of the first four brothers ignores the troll's demands, drinks from the lake, and dies. It's only the fifth brother. His name is Yudhishthira. He is understood as somebody who's very wise. Demand, tell me what it is that you want, and he says, answer some of my questions. And so the questions are very, very like riddles and very interesting questions about existence. And then he asks Yudhishthira, what is the greatest wonder in this universe? And he says, every single day beings pass away, and yet we all live like we will never pass away. That is the greatest wonder. So the identification with this existence, that we will never pass away, yet we see everywhere decay and destruction and death. And when we are met with it, what do we feel? We feel scared, we feel upset, we want to push it away. We try to decorate death into something that's more manageable.

Just like we've decorated Mori over here. Right? But this is the truth of existence. We will all turn out like Mori. Our bodies will become like this. Right? In somewhere, the mind doesn't want to accept that. There's a resistance in the mind about that, because it's identified with this birth, with this existence, in such a way that this is all there is. That's one level of understanding the birth of beings. And because of that birth, that happens on a consistent basis, in every moment there is the birth of karma, the birth of action, which leads to further suffering every time we identify with it.

Then there is the birth that is related to birth of action itself. That is the birth of karma. So when we say karma, what do we mean by that? Karma, the Buddha has said, is intention. Every intention that we have has some kind of repercussion. And there are three kinds of karma. There's mental karma, there's verbal karma, and there's physical karma. Mental karma are all the thoughts we intentionalize: wanting to share merit, wanting to send loving kindness, wanting to hurt another person, wanting to say this or that. Verbal karma is the actual breaking out into speech. So the speech can be unwholesome, which causes harm and division, creates gossip, or is false speech. Speech which is all about bringing unity, which is noble in the way that it's said, right, which is all about helping others, uplifting others. And the greatest speech of all is silence, noble silence. And then finally, physical actions, deeds that we do, all kinds of things that we might do, either to harm or to help, either to cause hurt or to benefit ourselves and others.

As soon as you release the arrow, you cannot recall it back. This is the same nature of birth of action. As soon as you think the thought, as soon as you've said the word, as soon as you've done the deed, you can't reverse it. And so that leads to further consequences. So, karma is twofold: the intentions that we produce and the effects of that intention. Now, the way karma works is that it cannot all manifest all at the same time. You take four different kinds of seeds. You take a watermelon seed, you take an apple seed, you take an orange seed, and you take a mango seed. Right? And you plant it in the soil.

Its contents in the seed, it will germinate at a certain pace. This is the same thing with karma. Now, if the soil is unhealthy, there's not enough nutrition for that seed, there's not enough water, there's not enough sunlight, then that seed, even though it germinates, will not produce good fruit or will grow up slowly, might not even grow at all.

But if all of the factors are right, enough sunlight, good soil, enough water, then that tree will bear fruit. That seed will bear fruit. That's the same thing with karma. We bring out intention into the world. But if the causes and conditions are not ripe, then that seed will not come to fruition. That karma will not come to fruition. But it will when the causes and conditions are right. So this is the nature of karma. But what we have to understand is everything that we do has some kind of a boomerang effect, whenever it has some kind of an intention. So that is birth of action. And all karma, even if it's wholesome karma, is still liable to cause suffering because of the nature of it.

It is also impermanent and is not me, not mine, not myself. Now, dependent on what does this birth of action arise? It's known as bhava, which can be translated as existence, being, or becoming, or habitual tendencies, habitual emotional reactions, and so on. So what is bhava? Bhava is, again, multilayered. There is the bhava, which has to do with different categories of beings. In the Buddhist cosmology, we have three categories, three broad categories. We have the sensual spheres, we have the form, luminous form spheres, and we have the formless spheres.

The sensual spheres are encompassing everything from the different hell realms all the way up to the hungry ghosts to the animal realms to human existence and the deva existences that are six different kinds of heavens these are all sensual in nature because they are experienced through our physical senses the luminous form has to do with the brahma lokas and there are four categories of those which are associated with each of the four jhanas And then the luminous, or I should say the formless sphere, there are four categories of those, which are associated with the ayatanas, infinite space, infinite consciousness, nothingness in need of perception or non-perception. Why am I saying all of this?

Because it doesn't matter whether they actually exist out there or not. What matters is we actually do possess these psychological traits that correspond to these different natures. If we cultivate anger in our system, if we cultivate hatred, if we cultivate violence, we live in a hellish realm in our minds. If we cultivate animalistic desires, we cultivate animalistic behaviors, animalistic tendencies. Forgiveness. If we cultivate these kinds of traits, we cultivate a deva-like psychology. If we continue to be in a certain jhana, the first jhana, the second jhana, the third jhana, the fourth jhana, we cultivate that kind of mindset that corresponds to that particular being, that Brahma being. That's why you can be in jhana in whatever it is that you're doing.

This is called like in your Walking around, you can be in the first jhana, or the second jhana, the third jhana, the fourth jhana. This is known in the sutras as celestial walking. If you cultivate infinite space, if you cultivate the experience of infinite consciousness, nothingness, or neither perception or non-perception, then your mind states will correspond to those particular realms. So these are different categories of mindsets. that we cultivate through what? Through continual intention, continual action. And then our inclinations become automatic or almost automatic.

If we continue to cultivate wholesome states of mind in every given moment where there is a choice presented to us to either be wholesome or unwholesome, if we continue to say, no, I am going to be wholesome, to go towards the wholesome, and we produce wholesome tendencies, likewise for the unwholesome. When we talk about a being, the word bhava can also mean being, to become, to be something. It's the notion that there is this being that's there that is experiencing all of this. That's one way to understand it, but if you really go down and explore who it is that you actually are, who it is that your mind thinks that you actually are.

It is actually a collection of various reactions and concepts. A being is that which reacts to situations, and every reactivity that happens results in a new being in every moment. How you choose to behave is your bhava. And this is dependent upon clinging. So what is an example of bhava in this case? Let's say you are met with an experience that is unpleasant. So you don't like that experience. That's the craving. We'll get to that. You don't like that experience and you say, I don't like it. And you push it away. Now there's a sense of self that's projected onto it that says, I don't like it. And then there's clinging to that, which we'll get to very shortly.

Clinging are all of the associations that we have related to that experience. And then there's an automatic reaction to that, a reactivity to that. That arises from the library or collection of reactions that we have inherited through past choices, which result in us reacting a certain way, causing the birth of action and further karma and suffering. So what is clinging? Upadana. Clinging. So upadana can mean to grasp at something. It can mean fuel. It can mean attachment. But clinging basically means to rationalize why it is that we think we like something or why we think we don't like something. It's all of the things that you create in terms of the favorites. I create this personality. It's all of the ingredients that you put together that come into and snowball into a personality and bhava. And so there are different kinds of clinging. There's sensory clinging, there's clinging to views, there's clinging to rites and rituals, and there's clinging to self-view. Sensory clinging?

Sensory clinging has to do with our five physical senses. What we see, what we hear, what we smell, what we taste, what we touch. These are all related to the five physical sense experiences. This is what makes up the matrix of our experience. When you plug into the matrix, this is your interface. You interact with the world and you receive information from the world. But what happens is the mind starts to create different kinds of associations with each of these experiences. So what happens as you grow up? When you are born, when you are a newborn, the first thing that you crave is the feeling of the mother. The scent of the mother, the touch of the mother.

And that's only natural for all beings that are born into this world. And then for the first six months, we think that we are part of the mother, at least for the first six months. And then we start to create our own identity around what we like and what we don't like. I have a favorite kind of food. I have a favorite kind of color. I have a favorite kind of smell. I have a favorite kind of taste. I have a favorite kind of feeling. A certain kind of blanket, they'll only take that blanket with them. That's the clinging. That's their security blanket. Or they only like the color red. They don't like green foods. I don't want any broccoli on my plate.

Or they have certain kinds of smells that they enjoy. So when you grow up attuned or connected with certain kinds of experiences, your mind creates an identity around them. These associations that happen. On the flip side of that, that can also create trauma. When you have PTSD, what is that? You're associating certain experiences with that trauma. And every time you relive that experience, what happens? You relive that trauma. This is all part of sensory clinging.

These favorites are always changing. You can see that this clinging also is not me, not mine, not myself. You can 6R the clinging. You can 6R the becoming before you react. Before you say anything, you can notice in your mind all of these thoughts bubbling up to create some kind of reaction. And just before you react, right when you look at a river and the bend of the river is the becoming, and then the waterfall is the birth of action. As soon as you go around the bend and down the waterfall, you can't come back up. But before you go around the bend, you can swim your way back up. Make the effort to 6R or 4R to let go. So before you react, you notice it and you say, no, no, no, I'm not going to say that. I'm not going to do that.

I'm going to let go. I'm going to relax. I'm going to tranquilize the bodily formations and the mental formations. When you do that, you create a pause. You create a space in your mind. And in that space is where compassion and wisdom arise. And then you speak in a wise manner. Or you do something out of compassion.

Defend the sense of self. You're doing it because you recognize the suffering in the other, and whatever it is you do is for the purposes of alleviating the suffering. So, clinging. How does clinging manifest in the case of sensory clinging? You look at chocolate cake, for example, and you really like chocolate cake, and you say, you see the chocolate cake. Or I'll give you another example: hear that chocolate cake is going to be there on the menu tomorrow for lunch, and you're somebody who loves chocolate cake. So you've built up this personality. You've built up this association with chocolate cake, maybe because your mother made it a certain way, and now you've grown up liking chocolate cake. So when you hear the word chocolate cake, what happens? That's the experience, that's the feeling, and then the craving is, oh, I want chocolate cake. And when you sit down for meditation, what happens?

You're meditating, you're sending loving-kindness, and chocolate cake comes into mind. And you 6R that and come back to loving-kindness. Chocolate cake. So you're trying to let go, let go, let go. But your mind is grasping towards it. It's craving for chocolate cake. It's clinging towards chocolate cake. And then, tomorrow at lunchtime, you stand in line, ready for chocolate cake. The anticipation of chocolate cake. And you stand in line, and you go there, and guess what? No chocolate cake today. That is the suffering. You stand in line, what do you experience? Dukkha. No chocolate cake. So what is going on in the mind? It's creating fantasies. It's creating all kinds of illusions. It's creating all kinds of anticipation.

That is the clinging. You experience the grasping, the obsession around something. If you can notice that, recognize that, you can let that go. And when you let go of that, you replace it with wisdom. You replace it with self-compassion. You replace it with equanimity. Clinging to views. What does that mean? Generally, what that means in the context of Buddhism is it's clinging to wrong views. So what is right view? In the case of Buddhism, right view is the understanding that there is cause and effect in terms of actions. That's the primary view. There is the view that there is mother and father, which means that we owe a debt of gratitude to our parents because they are the ones who brought us into this existence, even if they were shitty parents.

It's okay. Because the fact that they brought us into this world allows us to know that we have the capacity to experience Nibbana. So just that gratitude for that is enough. Then there is the view that there are those who have practiced this Dhamma of suffering. And so there's the understanding that it is possible to experience Nibbana. Having that kind of view has a lot of psychological benefits to the mind. So what are wrong views? Wrong views are related to the idea of things like nihilism. There is no meaning to anything. There is no meaning in giving. There is no meaning in sacrificing. There's no meaning in being generous. Other views, like there is no such thing as karma, or materialism, that there is only these five sense bases that we have to satisfy and that nothing else exists beyond that.

When you start to experience jhana for yourself, then you see that there is a pleasure beyond the five sense bases. Or there's the view of asceticism, that I have to be creating all kinds of ascetic practices of suffering. There are people who do that in ancient India and even now in India. They have all kinds of practices that they do. In fact, the Bodhisattva, before he became the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, he did the same thing. He did all kinds of ascetic practices and he realized this is not really leading to any suffering. I mean, to the way out of suffering, but it's leading to more suffering.

So, this understanding of asceticism is a wrong view. Skepticism, or beating around the bush. They call them eel wrigglers in ancient India. You know, being on the fence about things, indecisive about things, not making conclusions for fear of being criticized. These are the kinds of views that can arise. But there's also clinging to right view, clinging to the Dhamma itself. You have come to right view and you are living a life in accordance with the Dhamma, but now you have an attachment to the Dhamma. You have an ownership of the Dhamma, and anyone who tries to say otherwise is seen as wrong or incorrect or an enemy or anything like that. That is also part of wrong view, the attachment to right view.

You have to use the Dhamma, as the Buddha would say, as a raft to get from one shore to the other shore. In other words, go from suffering to the cessation of suffering. But once you have gotten to the other shore, you don't carry the raft on your shoulders and walk. You leave it be wherever it is. It's fine. It's the same with the Dhamma. It doesn't mean you let go of the Dhamma, you let go of the Eightfold Path. It just means you don't make it another view. There's a great sutta called Majjhima Nikaya 74. It's the Dighanakha Sutta. In Dighanakha, because it means long nails, apparently he had long nails. But his real name was Aggivessana.

And it was said he was the cousin or the nephew of Sariputta, who was one of the chief disciples of the Buddha. And he says to him, you know, I have an attachment to no views. I don't hold on to any views whatsoever. And the Buddha says, that's great. That's wonderful. But do you hold on to the view that you have no views? And so Aggivessana gets it. And the Buddha goes into the understanding. And then he has an experience. And while Sariputta is fanning the Buddha, he hears this, realizes the Buddha doesn't have an attachment to his own views either. He has no attachment to the Dhamma either. And right there and then becomes fully awakened.

So let go of all opinions, all views, all judgments. If you approach the meditation in that way, that there is no expectation of what is going to happen, no opinions about what is happening, no judgment, just complete, as J. Krishnamurti would say, choiceless awareness, aware of things without any kind of judgment. Your meditation will be amazing. You'll have let go of everything and then just seeing things as they actually are. So how do you let go of clinging to views? How do you let go of clinging to opinions? Notice every time the mind becomes defensive towards something. Somebody says something about what you hold dear as a view, and how do you react? Is there this internal grasping that wants to defend that view?

If you can let that go, then you'll be at peace. Then clinging to rites and rituals. So when we say rites and rituals, there's a few things we're referring to. At the very gross level, at the time of the Buddha, there was a lot of animal sacrifice going on. And so when we talk about animal sacrifice, it's the destruction of one being for the sake of appeasing another being and getting something from it. The Buddha was explicitly against that. So he said you have to let go of that. And then there are subtler levels of clinging to rites and rituals.

Does that mean that you can't light a candle? Or you can't go to church and you can't pray? Does that mean that you can't light incense or chant or do the different things that you might do to uplift the mind? Does it mean you can't do that? No, it doesn't mean that. What it's really talking about is attachment to routine. Things have to be a certain way for me to experience something, right?

The room has to be totally silent for me to have a good meditation, right? Or I have to have my cup of coffee at 6 in the morning. Otherwise, watch out world, right? So all of these different kinds of things that we think that we need to do, things that we feel that we have to do. You know, OCD is the very, very extreme form of this. It has to be a certain way. Things I have to say, five times before I go out, or whatever it might be. These are all just mechanisms in the mind to create some sense of security that everything is okay in the world. But actually nothing is okay in this world. As soon as you come to terms with that, as soon as you have that pessimistic attitude, you'll be fine, right? So clinging to rites and rituals means clinging to routine. It can also mean clinging to rites and rituals with the idea that they will take you to the ultimate.

Just understand everything that you do is steps leading to the ultimate. Indeed, even the meditation that we do, when we say that this is the meditation we're doing, that in itself is not going to take you to Nibbana. Letting go of everything. Letting go of even the meditation. When I say letting go of the meditation, identifying with the process will take you to Nibbana. So this is also part of clinging to rites and rituals. Then there's clinging to self-view. This is an intellectual kind of understanding, more than an experiential.

It is a view, so it means that it is a perspective. It is an idea, it's a concept about self. And the Buddha has categorized them into 20 different kinds of self-view. And it's very easy to understand what that is. It's the five aggregates multiplied by four different kinds of self-view. So it's either the five aggregates as me, mine, or myself. As the sense of self within the five aggregates. As the sense of self the five aggregates are contained in. Or the sense of self is beyond the five aggregates, or that the sense of self is separate to the aggregates. It's an independent sense of self. All of these are different kinds of self-views. But the fact that they are views, the fact that they are perspectives or perceptions, means that they are tied to the mind.

Is tied to the mind, it has the nature of arising and passing away. So if you understand that perspective, then you let go of all self-view. Now these different kinds of clinging go away separately when you have certain kinds of levels of awakening. When you become a stream-enter, for example, what is let go of completely is the clinging to self-view. What's let go of is the clinging to rites and rituals, and what's let go is the clinging to any kind of wrong view. When you become an anagami, the clinging to sensual pleasures goes away. And then when you become an arahant, fully awakened, the clinging to even the Dhamma is gone.

But until then, you have to be able to recognize the mind starts to tighten up around a view, around some kind of association, around some kind of sensual perception or experience. And then just release, relax, let go, and experience the freedom in that moment, the spaciousness in that moment. The more you do that, you recondition the mind bit by bit from being grasping, from saying that this is me, mine, myself, causing yourself suffering, so to speak, to having more clarity, having more expansion, more relaxation. And so when the mind sees pleasure in that, for lack of a better word, then it will start to incline towards that and let go of trying to cling to these things.

Upon craving. Now that's the crux of the whole matter, craving. Craving is the start point of suffering. It is the starting ingredients for the recycling or the emergence and creation of new kamma. So craving, tanha. Tanha actually means to thirst. I find it quite funny that nowadays, when we go on Instagram and things like that, they call, you know, thirst traps, or being thirsty, you know, means that person is attractive or whatever it might mean. So we've come full circle now, from tanha to thirsty, right? To hunger for something, to be thirsty, that's tanha, that's the craving. So how does that craving manifest? The way our bodies and our minds react to situations is we have certain kinds of reactions.

We have a fight or flight or freeze response to situations. And that situation creates aggravation, tension, tightness in our nervous system. There's a sense of unease. We look at the object of our craving, the object of what we want, and there's a sense of unease. I want that. But as soon as we grasp at it, and as soon as we take it, and as soon as we consume it, what do we feel? We feel relief. We feel content. We feel satisfaction. But that satisfaction is short-lived. So what do we do? We look out more for those things, crave more and more and more. Or things that are fearful, things that cause us fear, what do we do?

We push it away. We say, I don't want this. That, right? We experience relief in that moment. And so what are we doing for ourselves? We're conditioning the mind to say every time we see the object of craving and satisfy the consumption of that, we're feeling relief, so we just have to do more of that. Or every time we see something that is averse and we create aversion towards it and run away from it, and we feel relief, and that is the natural inclination that we're going to keep doing. Or when we freeze, we identify with an experience and say, this is me, this is mine, this is myself. We find security in identifying with something, identifying with this body, identifying with a nationality, identifying with a gender, identifying with socioeconomic status, whatever it might be.

We find comfort in that. We find security in that. We find relief in that. But what if there was a way to experience relief without having to crave, without having to have aversion, without having to identify with things? If we find relief in every moment, then we won't crave. So a mind that is fully awakened experiences relief all the time. It doesn't need anything. It doesn't require anything. It just is. And everything else that is added onto it is just the cherry on top, the icing on the cake. It is independently happy. It has experienced the ultimate happiness, the ultimate bliss of Nibbana. And its mind always tends towards that. Free from all greed, free from all hatred, from all delusion.

So any kind of form of happiness that is given to that mind in the form of sensual pleasure, in the form of whatever it might be, is just happiness added on to that happiness. It's not happiness adding on to a mind that is seeking happiness, because it has understood its true nature of mind, which is to be independently happy. And how do you get to that? Right effort. 6R, 4R. Let go of any time the mind tightens, clamps down on anything. Any time it wants something and says, I need to have that. Any time it says, I don't like that. Any time it tries to say, no, I identify with this as a person. And if you let go, continue to let go.

Eventually, through the process of reconditioning, cravings stop. All kinds of craving cease, whether that's sensual craving, craving for sensual experiences, craving for existence. I want to be a certain kind of person. I want to have a certain kind of experience. I want nibbana. I want awakening now. Granted, that's a wonderful thing to have. That's a wonderful thing to aspire towards. But again, that's just setting the rudder, setting the intention towards that, but not being obsessed by it on the way. I want to experience the seventh jhana. I want to experience this. I want to do this. That's all existential craving. Craving for non-existence. I don't want to be here. I don't want to do this.

I don't want to be part of this family. I don't want to live. All of these kinds of craving arise because of identification. Craving for non-existence, in terms of suicide or suicidal ideation, for the most part arises aside from symptoms from or side effects from medication and other things like that. Just the sheer existential angst that arises. It's because the mind becomes so bombarded by so many things that it feels like if it just ends this whole thing, it will feel relief. So what is it actually humans are after? What is it that beings are actually after? It is relief. And that relief can happen every time you let go of craving.

Every time you let go of this need to identify with something. Now, this craving is dependent upon feeling, or Vedana. Vedana comes from the root word Ved, which is to know, to experience. So when we say feeling, what do we mean? We're not saying emotional feelings. We're basically saying sensations: seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching, thinking. These are all parts of Vedana, parts of feeling. And a feeling can be pleasant. It can be unpleasant or painful, or it could be neutral, neither pleasant nor painful. And a feeling can be physical, or a feeling can be mental. So it can be a worldly feeling, or it can be an otherworldly feeling. A feeling can be a quality of mind.

Loving kindness is a feeling. Equanimity is a feeling. Being in the first jhana is a feeling. Having regrets is a feeling. Listening to the birds is a feeling. Experiencing pleasure is a feeling. Tasting food is a feeling. So in other words, any kind of experience is feeling. So there is the feeling of eating or tasting food. Knowing it to be salty, sour, bitter, spicy, sweet, whatever it might be, is the perception. Now whether it's painful or pleasant or neutral is according to the mind. And so that's a projection of perception to that feeling, and it is definitely a very profound one. There's a story about a monk named Bahiya of the bark cloth. And Bahiya is meditating, and he feels like he has experienced full awakening.

But one of the Devas, who used to be his relatives, comes to him, and he says, Bahiya, you still have work to do. Go and visit the Buddha and get the full knowledge. So Bahiya goes to see the Buddha, and he says to the Buddha, I have been told that you have full awakening, and I want to know what it is that I can do to experience this total cessation of suffering. So what does the Buddha say? Come back later, I'm on my lunch break.

Basically he says it's time for me to eat, come back after I'm done, I'll tell you. And Bahiya says, No, no, no, no, no. I could die the very next moment. If you just give me a very short teaching, it would be great. So what does the Buddha say? I've got to eat. Come back later. And for a third time, Bahiya says, please, Master Gautama, please show me the way. And so the idea is every time you ask the Buddha something three times, he's bound to give it to you. So he says, okay, let me tell you. So this is the teaching he gives. He says, "When this is the case, just that is the end of suffering."

And so Bahiya understands what the Buddha says, becomes fully awakened, and then he says, thank you very much, and he goes, and in the very next moment, a bull gores him, and he dies. So the moral of the story is, when you become fully awakened, look on both sides of the road. So this teaching is very profound. If you understand this teaching, in the seen there is only the seen. In the heard there is only the heard. What does that mean? In the experience there is only the experience. When there is no you being projected in that as I am experiencing it, there is no you in that, where there is an experience happening to me.

who is the originator of that experience, then that is the end of suffering. If you understand all experience and fully experience it, fully integrate that entire experience without adding the sense of I, me, or myself, then there's nothing else to do. is fully immersed in the meditation, but there is no meditator in it, then that is said to be a good meditation. Just the meditation, no meditator. Just the process of letting go, no one letting go. Just the process of experience, no experiencer. Once you understand feeling in this way, there's nothing else left to do. But the question is, how does Vedana lead to craving? How does experience itself lead to craving? It doesn't. There is a connecting force between experience or Vedana or feeling and craving.

In fact, there are seven connecting forces. These are called underlying tendencies. There's an underlying tendency towards craving, an underlying tendency towards aversion, an underlying tendency towards ignorance, an underlying tendency towards doubt, an underlying tendency towards existence, and an underlying tendency towards conceit. Oh, and an underlying tendency towards views. So, when we say underlying tendencies, what it means is, itself. If it's a pleasant experience, the mind has an automatic inclination to say I want more of that and to possess it. That's the underlying tendency towards craving. When it's an unpleasant experience, the mind has a tendency to say I don't want it. That's the underlying tendency towards aversion.

When it says underlying tendency towards ignorance, that can underlie pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. The ignorance here, when we say that, it means lack of mindfulness, lack of proper attention. What is that mindfulness? What is that proper attention? The wisdom that this experience is not me, not mine, not myself. The lack of seeing that gives rise to the craving, or the aversion, or the further identification. The underlying tendency towards views. What did I say? Having an opinion about things. Projecting concepts and ideas and judgments about the experience. The underlying tendency towards doubt. What is doubt here? Confusion about what kind of state of mind is related to this experience. Is it wholesome or unwholesome? Or is it neither wholesome nor unwholesome?

The underlying tendency towards conceit. What is conceit? Comparing. This is better than that, or this is equal to that. Even that is conceit. The underlying tendency towards existence. What does that mean? Through this experience I want more of that experience. And all of these underlying tendencies stem from that notion of self, that notion of taking things personally, that this is me, this is mine, this is myself. So you can't 6R an experience. You can't 6R the pain away. You can't relax the pain. But you can see the underlying tendencies related to that pain when you're sitting. And you can let go of those and change the mind's relationship to that pain or that pleasant experience.

Thus ended the lesson for now. To be continued. Any questions? In Majjhima Nikaya 9, you'll find it. And you'll find it in the Malunkyaputta Sutta, Majjhima Nikaya 64. Thank you. And just one other question about purifying karma. Karma isn't deterministic, I'm aware. But would you say that six R-ings, stroke four R-ings, is the method to achieve that? Yes, so the idea here is there's the understanding of old karma and new karma. I'm going to get a little bit into that tomorrow, but I'll touch upon it now. The Buddha spoke about karma in old and new, because what he said is there's karma that we inherit. So when we take the reflections, we say karma is my relative, I am an inheritor of my karma, and so on.

So that karma, he said, is everything that we have to experience or that we do experience. And so he said the sixth sense bases are part of that old karma. The way our body functions is part of that old karma, to be made contact with and experienced and felt. So what that means is, if you look at your chart, everything from ignorance all the way to feeling the experience is all old karma. Nothing you can do about it. You can just experience it. But as soon as you identify with that experience and you say, I want more of it, or I don't like it, and then you have craving, clinging, and becoming, now the ingredients for the renewal of that karma arise.

So for example, when we talk about becoming, bhava, another way of looking at bhava is habitual patterns. We seem to be stuck in the same kinds of relationships. Oftentimes we go to a different country and still attract the same kind of people in a group of friends, or certain kinds of habit patterns or certain kinds of situations, and that's because we keep identifying in those ways. As soon as we let go and see with wisdom, using the 6R's or the four right efforts, then we let go of all of the different ingredients that renew that new karma in the birth of action and further suffering. So karma in that sense is not deterministic, because it can be alleviated, it can be purified, as you said, through the process of letting go.

So you can experience old karma all the time, but the option to experience new karma or the renewal of that karma is up to you: to hold on to it, or to choose to let it go. That's right. Not just the Buddha, but most fully awakened beings in the suttas, you'll see, experienced very terrible karma. Moggallana is beaten to death, you know, or Angulimala experiences the effects of karma he's already produced in that life. So the Buddha, for example, when he would meditate, he would have a lot of back pain, right? So you guys are in good company. The explanation for that in the commentaries is that in a previous life he was a wrestler of sorts.

And his signature move was the backbreaker. Right? And so obviously, as a result of that, he experienced back pain. That's one of the explanations. But he was subject to old age. He was subject to sickness. He was subject to dying. Right? He was subject to all kinds of pains. So the understanding is that for fully awakened beings, they still have to experience, if the causes and conditions are ripe, the repercussions of karma that they produced prior to full awakening. So the momentum of all that karma, including even the longevity of that life, is still there. It's still in active mode. But the fully awakened being will not produce new karma. This is why I say old karma and new karma.

Even the fully awakened being has to inherit old karma and experience repercussions if the causes and conditions are right for it. But because their reaction to it is not a process of identifying, because the way they see it is that this is just an impersonal process, they don't have any craving. They don't have any clinging. They don't have any becoming any further. What does that relief that you feel feel like? Only you'll see it. It's like if I have to tell you what sugar tastes like, I can give you an entire Dhamma talk on sugar. But until you experience it for yourself, you won't know it. But that relief, on a very mundane level, is like just letting go.

It's like when you get into the hot tub and all of your muscles relax, right? And there's a sigh of relief. That's the kind of relief. Or the relief of when you've been working all day long and a lot of things are happening, and you get back home and you sit on your couch and you put on Netflix. You have the right show on. You don't have to spend hours looking for it. The food is hot and you're ready to experience it. That relief. So imagine having that in every moment, that kind of relief, everything's okay all the time, everything is perfect even when it's not. So when you spoke about the link between feeling and craving and then the underlying tendencies.

Yeah. In that process of letting go of the self more and more, so you can experience that more and more in everyday life, yeah? Through the 6R's? Right. Yeah. That's right. That's kind of like just a continuous practice. Yes. In other words, you're not just 6R-ing while you're sitting in meditation, but this is a tool, or a set of tools, that you can use in your daily life. So anytime you find yourself in a difficult situation, it's not like you can't do anything about it. You can recognize when the mind wants to behave a certain way, and you can let go of that process. You can relax and replace it with something that's wholesome.

process that happens in daily living, and the more you do that, the better it translates into the meditation, and the more you do it in the meditation, the easier it is for you to apply in daily life. So it's a feedback loop system that you continually do. Yeah, it makes sense. Thank you. This might have been in the last part of the Dhamma talk, but maybe I didn't get it. Why is conceit the last fetter to go, if I've understood that correctly? No, it's not necessarily the last fetter. It's this group of last fetters to go. So conceit is essentially dependent, or I should say there are other things dependent upon conceit. So the five higher fetters: restlessness, conceit, craving for jhana, craving for formless jhana, and ignorance.

So ignorance here is lack of full awareness, mindfulness. Rarely ignorance is the not understanding of the four noble truths and being able to apply them. Aside from that, the conceit that's there, restlessness, craving for jhana, and craving for formless jhanas, that conceit. And there is an understanding that the conceit that we talk about is primarily just comparing things. So how does that comparison happen? When there is a self and an other. When there is me and there is the other.

That is so intrinsic to the system that it takes time for it to dislodge. It takes effort to let go of it. There is a sutta called Kemaka Sutta where Kemaka is a very old man who's sick and he's living away from the rest of the monks. And the monks think that he's fully awakened, and so they send a messenger to go and ask Kemaka, are you fully awakened? And Kemaka says no. So he sends the messenger back, and the messenger just says no. And so they send another question and came up, and finally says, you know what, instead of you coming back and forth, let me go there. And he goes to the monastery and he says, this is how I understand that I'm not fully awakened, because there is still conceit in me.

What is that conceit? It is the residue of me, mine, or myself in relation to things, because there's still a comparison going on. There's still an identification process going on. There is effort you make in recognizing it and letting go and relaxing. Not relaxing into anything, just relaxing and allowing things to be as they are. And as he's giving that Dhamma talk, he becomes fully awakened. So yeah, conceit, you could say, is one of the more persistent fetters that you have to work with, because it's so intrinsic to the survival, or the so-called survival, of the mind. So as an extension of that, I think the difference between an anagami and an arahant is that an anagami still has the fetter of conceit.

Right, that's right. They still have restlessness, they still have conceit, they still have craving for jhana, formless jhana, and they still have some level of ignorance. So given now that conceit is not necessarily the last one to go, could it be possible for an anagami not to have conceit, but have other fetters, and then it's the removal of all the fetters when one becomes an arahant? I don't think so. I would say that you have to let go of conceit. It is a big one, because tied to that conceit is also clinging to the Dhamma. Like, identifying with the Dhamma. That I am a Dhamma practitioner. Or this Dhamma: if anybody says anything against it, I become defensive around it.

Maybe I ordered my question wrong. Is it possible for one to have a fetter, only one fetter left, that is not conceit? Or did you just answer that? I don't know. So you could say that there's a transitional phase, and it's not really talked about in the suttas. But it could be said that there could be an anagami on the way to becoming an arahant, sort of on the path. And bit by bit, they let go of, let's say, restlessness, let go of craving for some existential states. And you could say the second to last would be the conceit, and finally the ignorance goes away. So you could have an anagami plus, you know, a super anagami, if you would.

Right. Okay, thank you. Is this based on Theravada Buddhism? Out of interest. My other question is, is this applicable to all schools of Buddhism? Or what school is this primarily? Because obviously there's the Tibetan, and they've got things like the Bhumis and different stages and so forth. Is this very much modelled on Theravada, Thai forest? You will find dependent origination in Theravada. You will find it in Mahayana. You will find it in Tibetan Buddhism as well. You will find that the understanding of dependent origination, in fact, Nagarjuna, who wrote the Madhyamaka treatises, used the understanding of dependent origination as an inspiration for understanding emptiness, and in fact he did commentaries on dependent origination in his treatise on Madhyamaka philosophy. So you'll find it in different schools of thought. And some schools of thought take it to a whole other level.

Like they talk about interdependent origination or interpenetrative dependent origination, where it just goes to a quantum level, let's say. Yeah. Thank you. Since emptiness has been mentioned, could you explain in simple terms, probably not possible, how emptiness differs from dependent origination? The understanding of dependent origination leads you to the experience of emptiness. Now, again, emptiness in Mahayana has a certain kind of context. In the context of the Pali Canon, that is, let's say, Theravada Buddhism, emptiness is understood in a few ways. One is a very basic understanding of emptiness, which is the emptiness of what is not present in the mind. So there's a sutta called Majjhima Nikaya 121, which is the shorter discourse on emptiness.

And Ananda asks the Buddha, I have often heard you say that now you dwell in the supreme unsurpassed emptiness. Did I hear you correctly, Venerable Sir? And the Buddha says, yes, that's right. And then he goes into a whole discourse about what that is. And what he says is there is the emptiness of what is not present. For example, in the first jhana, what is the first jhana empty of? Empty of hindrances. Second jhana, empty of thinking and examining thought. Third jhana, empty of joy, and so on and so forth. So the emptiness of what is not present as a state of mind. Very basic understanding of emptiness. Then there is the understanding of emptiness, which is equated with anatta, the understanding of not-self.

Inherent existence, independent existence. In other words, everything that we are experiencing, everything that we think we are, is not independent. It is interdependent with everything else. Our existence is dependent upon the food we eat. The food that we eat is dependent upon the people who make that food and the people who make that food and how that food is cultivated and so on and so forth. of an independent self, emptiness of any kind of inherent independent existence. So dependent origination means in order for this to happen, there needs to be another thing. In order for this to arise, this has to arise. In order for this to cease, this has to cease. That's the fundamental understanding of dependent origination. With the arising of this, there is the arising of that.

With the passing away of this, there is the passing away of that. So this interdependency is the full expression of emptiness, that nothing exists without the other. You're talking about in terms of form is emptiness, emptiness is form? Yeah. Actually, this is also there in the Theravada Suttas. And again, that's the same question that Ananda asks the Buddha. He says, you often say empty is form, empty is feeling, empty is the world. What do you mean by that? And the Buddha says, so far as any kind of self is concerned, so emptiness is form, form is emptiness. When we say that, what we're saying is there is no inherent self in form. And so whether we say form is empty or empty is form, it's all one and the same in essence. There is no essence. I think that's enough for now, huh? Yeah. So before we share some merit, I just want to give a special thanks to Hugh for his five days of showing everyone Sukhita Yoga and guiding them through this process. So thank you very much. Let's share some merit. dispensation. Sadhu, sadhu, sadhu.