Before what?
Imagine the wave crashing onto the beach, fragmenting in a jumble of foam and gravel, its energy spent and dissipated. Imagine the water being slowly drawn back into the ocean.
***
The sea and the wave form a metaphor for the Buddhist idea of dependent origination. In this teaching, the Buddha set out an understanding of ‘cause’ and effect in the phenomenal universe. Dependent origination later became, in a modified form, a cornerstone of Zen philosophy, and it’s in this form that it’s perhaps most useful to us today.
The teaching sets out the 12 ‘steps’ through which the mind becomes trapped in Samsara (the cycle of rebirth; the unenlightened state). These are (in plain English and with some latitude in translation):
• Delusion
• Kamma
• Consciousness
• Reification
• The senses
• Contact
• Feeling/sensation
• Craving
• Clinging
• Becoming
• Birth
• Suffering and death
Traditionally, these steps are viewed as a chain of cause and effect, which goes something like this:
Because we are deluded, we don’t understand our kamma, which condemns us to act in fixed and repetitive, sometimes harmful ways. These habits inform and influence our conscious mind, without our knowing it, and because of our habit of making things out of experience (reification), we come to develop a fixed idea of our self, based on these habits.
When contact between our senses and stimuli is made and a sensation arises, we posit a thing out there that has caused us, the self ‘inside’, to feel that sensation.
This imaginary relationship between a subject (us) with an object (the thing ‘out there’) results in a craving or desire for the object and the sensation it produces. This desire results in subjective attachment (clinging) to the object we have created.
But just as we have created an object we’ve also modified a subject. In other words, we become a wanting thing, a self that wants something. This self is born in both a literal and figurative sense. But because it has been born it must eventually, like all conditioned (dependently originated) things, die. The intuitive knowledge that this will happen causes us to suffer.
***
The good news is that understanding the process and seeing our kamma in action results in what’s known as ‘cessation.
So as we become less deluded, we begin to free ourselves from our kamma, and this gives us more clarity about our consciousness and our habit of reification. Once we see this, we can begin to see how the interaction of an imaginary self with stimuli through the senses creates the desire, clinging and becoming that lead to birth, death and suffering.
As we develop this understanding, we increase our ability to let go of unhelpful mental states. Because we are clinging and becoming less and less, we begin to free ourselves more and more from the cycle of birth and death.
In other words, if we can let go of our subjective desire for what we see as the object of our desire, then our clinging begins to weaken and we begin to operate more naturally, more spontaneously. We begin to free ourselves.
***
How does this relate to our analogy of the sea? We can think of the ocean as our natural state and the wave as the operation of dependent origination.
A ‘wave’ arises because of an interaction between our deluded, karmic-ridden consciousness, our tendency to make a thing of the self and a sensation. The ‘wave’ picks up speed as we become subject to desire, clinging and becoming. However, this wave, having been ‘born’, is now condemned to die. And so, painfully, the wave crashes onto the gravel shore and then is dragged back slowly into the ocean.
If we understand that the wave is only a part of the wide ocean and that its apparent independent existence is an illusion, fuelled by the momentum of desire and clinging and interaction with our kamma, then we can begin to reduce our attachment to it. If we begin to see the wave as only a temporary phenomenon, a ripple wrinkling the surface of the mind, we begin to sense that there is wider reality outside our normal, contracted existence.
***
In this way, contemplation of the workings of dependent origination within our own minds helps us to see how the arising and passing of dharmas (mental objects) is given life only by the extent to which we cling to these phenomena.
***
Dependent origination is described above as a sequential or time-bound process. But if you examine its workings carefully you might see that the way ‘cause’ and effect interact is actually much more like a net than a series of steps. Within this ‘net’ each element influences and is influenced by all the other elements.
Actually, there is never a single cause, a place where the process begins. Instead there’s an endless series of ripples and waves criss-crossing and interacting with each other and everything else that is and has ever arisen. Nothing exists purely on its own.
Some people call the idea that nothing exists on its own emptiness (Sunyata). This may be a difficult concept to grasp, especially for people in the West who are taught tend to believe that the adjective ‘empty’ means having nothing in it.
But in this context emptiness means that everything is in it – and that there’s no ‘it’ anyway.
Here’s an example. Take an empty cup. Is it really empty? Isn’t what’s inside it exactly the same as what’s outside it?
Let’s fill the cup up. We pour in something we like, and we ask the walls of the cup to keep out everything else. But of course the ‘something we like’ is also made out of everything; coffee beans depend on soil, sunshine, water… As Carl Sagan said, ‘To make an apple pie, first take the universe’.
So the outside, the inside and even the walls of the cup are simply the result of myriad elements briefly coming together. To put it another way, the cup is not a single, impermeable membrane at all but a temporary manifestation that’s come into being through a combination of factors (dependent origination).
As it is for the cup, so it is for the drinker. The cup and the coffee have arisen and will fall away, and it’s the same for us. We’re born and we die – most people can accept that. What we might find harder to accept is that we’re not ‘single impermeable membranes’; we’re not individual entities that exist in some solid way in time.
The self that we use to navigate the world, useful though it is, is no different to the walls of the cup. It, the self, is a temporary manifestation of infinite effects without permanence, ever-changing, an expression of everything, empty.
The same is true of what we would call consciousness, this knowing. It arises and falls and changes ceaselessly, without stopping.
If you can accept this, and you can see that treating the cup or even yourself as a fixed entity is a fundamental error of perception, then you’ve begun to understand emptiness. But it’s vital to see that, just as the cup is not an existential object, neither is emptiness a fixed entity. In other words, emptiness itself is empty.
***
To go back to our original metaphor, not even the ocean exists independently. It is as much a gathering together of factors as is the wave.
So although we can talk about ‘cause’ and effect it’s vital to see that there’s no cause as such, only an infinite number of effects. There’s no prime mover, no God, no Big Bang, no self to set the whole thing in motion.
The universe and everything in it, including even our deluded selves and our wider consciousness, is not a set of distinct and sharp-edged objects. It’s a kaleidoscope of ever-shifting and impermanent fragments coalescing and dispersing continuously.
This is the true beauty of life. Everything is both there and not there at all in any meaningful sense.
It may seem obvious, but can you see it?
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