In a mostly excellent article called Transcendental Dependent Arising on an extended version of Dependent Arising found in the Upanisa Sutta (SN 12.23) Bhikkhu Bodhi says:
The mundane version, with its twelve links, describes the movement of samsara, which revolves in a perpetually self-regenerating circle leading from beginning to end only to find the end lead back to the beginning.
The article discusses a series that takes Dependent Arising past “becoming” and “birth”, substitutes “dukkha” for “aging-and-death” and then goes on to describe the process of liberation — which is quite instructive. But the quote, above, is describing the usual versions, the 12-step process that creates dukkha and it remains beyond me how anyone who has read as many suttas as Bhikkhu Bodhi has can say that Dependent Arising describes movement *revolving* in a *circle* “leading from beginning to end only to find the end lead back to the beginning.”
Please, can someone point out any sutta in the Pali canon in which the Buddha has Dependent Arising leading from the end back to the beginning? Or has someone presented a good working theory as to why the Buddha does not describe these 12 steps as doing as the bhikkhu says here that they do, going back around, yet that is what he meant? Is there a well-known theory that explains why the Buddha did not take that obvious step, of making it a circle if it was one?
Sure, what Bhikkhu Bodhi literally says is that Dependent Arising describes samsara, and samsara goes around. DA = samsara = circular, which is the same as saying: DA = circular.
And, thanks to Jayarava, I have had it pointed out to me that the Buddha does say that Dependent Arising causes samsaric recycling, but I don’t see him saying that Dependent Arising *is* samsara (if he does say it directly somewhere, I hope someone will point it out to me). Samsara is a useful metaphor, but it isn’t the equivalent of Dependent Arising. If it were that easy, the Buddha would surely have made that plain at least once.
I am not wanting to be unkind here — I end up singling out Bhikkhu Bodhi a lot because he is one prolific translator, and he has a very consistent view of what is being said in the suttas he translates, and there is nothing wrong with that. But a few folks have suggested that I may be bending suttas to make them say what I think they should say, as if (1) that were the only possible explanation of what I am saying being different from traditional readings and (2) no one with a traditional understanding would ever do such a thing. As if it’s not done all the time. So here I am presenting an example that should be clear to anyone.
To be fair, a little later in the article Bhikkhu Bodhi does, at least, acknowledge that the turning of the circle is “unstated”:
In the usual version the forward sequence ends with the statement that birth is the condition for aging-and-death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair. With this it concludes, leaving unstated the implied aftermath — that this “mass of suffering” will generate anew the fundamental ignorance at the head of the whole series, thus beginning another run through the cycle.
I can see how this view came to be — if we take literally all the talk about samsara, then the wheel has to go around, right? But since it doesn’t — ever — go around, perhaps we should not take samsara so literally? It’s either that, or Dependent Arising is not describing samsara, because Dependent Arising is not a wheel.
Funnily enough this lokuttara version of paṭicca-samuppāda is widespread in the Canon, but seems to go un-noticed for centuries, and when it does get noticed people only focus on the Upanisā Sutta which is not representative of the idea! I’ve just uploaded a new draft of my survey of the texts on my dependent arising page. http://www.jayarava.org/dependent-arising.html
To be fair to Bhikkhu Bodhi it has been the tradition of the Theravāda that the nidānas form a cycle since at least Buddhaghosa’s time, and he is working within that tradition. Other Theravādin bhikkhus have contested this however, notably Ñāṇavīra and Buddhadasa. The cycle supposedly happens over three lifetime (hence it is called the Three Lifetimes interpretation). The arguments for and against are complex but I tend not to accept the Three Lifetimes interpretation, not because it is not canonical (which would be a fundamentalist argument), but because it isn’t consistent with other doctrines, or self-consistent.
The Buddha does often say at the end of enumerating the stages of dependent arising : Evametassa kevalassa dukkhakkhandhassa samudayo hoti “That is how this whole mass of misery comes into being”. Does ‘this whole mass of suffering’ = saṃsāra? I think it probably does. Saṃsāra just means ‘going on and on’ and refers to cycles of birth and death – a pan-Indian belief common to most cultures within India (and in many other parts of the world) from well before the Buddha’s day – traces of it are found in a later Ṛgveda mantra (and, I suggest, in certain Pāli passages!). The idea that this cycle was a miserable calamity to be avoided or escaped from seems to emerge in the samaṇa communities in north-eastern India (if we accept the argument made by Johannes Bronkhorst in ‘Greater Magadha’) and by the time of the early Upaniṣads (ca 800-500 BCE?) to be spreading to brāhmaṇa communities as well.
Dependent Arising is not the nidānas – it is a principle which the nidānas are an illustration of. And no, it isn’t a wheel as such, though birth and death are cyclic in this worldview. The Buddhist tradition conceptualised the turning of the wheel in terms of the principle of lokiya dependent arising, and escaping from it in terms of the lokuttara dependent arising (thought this aspect was lost sight of quite early on it seems).
Hey Jayarava, thanks for taking part. Yes, I have seen the liberative side of causation elsewhere. It’s useful information.
Agreed that Bhikkhu Bodhi is just being true to long tradition; quite understandable, and I don’t fault him for it. I’m only pointing out that tradition bends what’s said in the canon to conform to their understanding. I don’t even ask the question: Is it a conscious choice to bend or just a facet of the process of meme transmission? We usually don’t even see ourselves doing the bending, it’s so natural to our worldview that no conscious thought is needed to make it happen. This is, of course, what you were asking me to ask myself, over on your blog, and please don’t think I am blind to the possibility. However, having thought about my methods and motivation, I believe I am keeping the bending to a minimum except in the moments where I am trying a new theory — then sometimes things go *sproing* from the pressure and go flying out of my hands. The fact that I try on my theories in a public forum probably distorts the sense of what I am doing and why if it is seen in terms of traditional methods, because on my blog I am quite consciously not confining myself to academic standards for publication, but am instead trying a sort of “open source” system of enquiry where I invite others to provide evidence one way or some other.
As for what the Buddha meant when he said that Dependent Arising is what brings about this whole mass of suffering, I think what he meant was what he said, and nothing more. I see Dependent Arising as an explanation of how dukkha arises, detailed so that we can understand how to stop the process.
The way I read some of the Buddha’s descriptions of how he arrived at this insight is that he was thinking about what causes suffering, using what seems to have been a formula popular in the day, “How do we escape aging and death?” where “aging and death” is a sort of pop phrase for “the whole mass of suffering”.
The Vedic worldview seems to have fostered a way of thinking on several levels at once, mundane things as equivalents of supramundane, or tactile objects representing much larger concepts. So we have a lot of talk, for example, about Brahmins being born from Brahma’s mouth — not to be taken literally, though the Buddha has fun seeming to do so — which is actually a reference to chants, which are actually a reference to the Vedas, which is actually Brahminical lore, and on and on, so that one phrase about the Brahmins being born from Brahma’s mouth bring up a whole range of contexts. We do this in our society, of course, but I suspect not to quite the degree that they did it in the Buddha’s place and time, where equivalencies and correspondence were the foundational belief systems.
But even being aware of that, I suppose it is hard to sort out which is the metaphor and which is the meaning, so that it gets tempting to see Dependent Arising as a literal answer about how to escape from aging and death, whereas the pattern seems to me to be one where if there are tangible, visible elements that are associated with intangible elements of experience, the Buddha was rarely talking about the tangible, and was instead pointing to the intangible. In that case, given an equivalency between “aging and death” and “suffering” the point he is actually addressing is suffering, not aging and death as representative of a literal samsaric round.
TBO might not be explicit about dependent arising being cyclical, and BB does insist on the infallability of Theravadin doctrine. But I have to say that his explication of DA, as three simultaneous, mutually reinforcing cycles, is the only way I can make sense of the concept. How, I always wondered, can ignorance come before consciousness, or consciousness before contact, or any of that before birth? Well it could if we’re not describing a linear series of events but three cycles that proceed together through each lifetime. View “birth” not as a natal event but the re-creation of the self in every moment, and we don’t even need reincarnation to make this a useful concept. As usual, I’m less concerned with proving what TBO did or didn’t “really” teach than with discovering how early Buddhist ideas can enrich my life and practice.
Hi Mark. I have to confess to not really finding useful insight in the interpretation of Dependent Arising as “re-creation of the self in every moment”. When I look within, I see that I change, but not that the slate is wiped clean, starting fresh in each moment. Testing against what I see in my own life, I can easily see what’s being described as an ongoing process, but the moment-to-moment view of Dependent Arising ignores memory, which certainly must play some part in how we fare through time?
I have to confess that I continue to find your reasoning hard to follow. You still seem to be arguing tendentiously about the evidence from the point of view of your conclusions.
For instance I’d be surprised if you could show that any culture did not use metaphor – which is all that the Vedic people did. Layered metaphors are not a special feature of any particular world view. Since metaphor is anchored by physical interactions with the world (per Lakoff and Johnson) there are always going to be layers in abstraction and metaphor. Any metaphor can be taken literally, and it is a very common polemical strategy to take one’s opponents metaphors literally. It’s what atheists like Richard Dawkins do all the time!
And contra what you are saying the idea of correspondences – aka sympathetic magic – absolutely pervade our culture. Take the case of something like astrology. It is precisely the same kind of thinking. And how many parallels to astrology are there? Dozens, if not hundreds. You might find Michel Foucault’s book The Order of Things illuminating on this subject. He traces the way the Enlightenment changed our way of understanding knowledge – though I think his comments really only apply to the intellectual elite of Europe, and that in the streets very little has changed.
I’m not convinced that Vedic modes of thinking were as influential as you suggest. There is some of it there, but in fact the central ideas of the early Upaniṣads are mostly missing (as I have blogged about). You don’t seem to take into account the Jain and Ājivaka influences – particularly when it comes to kamma. The Brahmans were outsiders slowly beginning to gain influence mainly through their cultivation of the kings.
Regards dukkha, I think one needs to see dukkha in all it’s breadth. Sue Hamilton is quite good on this. Dukkha is simply unenlightened experience; all of it. Across the Canon dukkha is synonymous with the khandhas; and with ‘loka’. In effect dukkha is simply saṃsāra.
As for tradition ‘bending’ what’s in the Canon – my concern would be that you seem to see the Canon as somehow fundamental. There is no way of knowing that Buddhaghosa was not reporting an interpretation preserved outside the Canon. In fact there is no hard evidence for a Pāli canon before Buddhaghosa’s time! The Canon is fragmentary – that much is clear.
Consider that the three lifetimes interpretation is not limited to the Theravāda – I have been assured that it is the standard teaching in Tibet as well (by someone who hated my view that the 3LTI was an innovation). It’s a pan-Buddhist idea. What Buddhists *do, say and think* is as fundamental to what Buddhism is, as the body of writings is. The texts are are very imperfect sources of knowledge, to fail to acknowledge this is to come across as a fundamentalist.
To say that the tradition has ‘bent’ what is ‘said in the canon’ betrays much about your own subjectivity, and tells us very little about the history of Buddhism. There are far too many unacknowledged and unexplored assumptions in how you present your ideas.
“For instance I’d be surprised if you could show that any culture did not use metaphor.” Why would I want to do that? I wouldn’t be caught dead saying that there was ever a culture that didn’t use metaphor.
“To say that the tradition has ‘bent’ what is ‘said in the canon’ betrays much about your own subjectivity, and tells us very little about the history of Buddhism. There are far too many unacknowledged and unexplored assumptions in how you present your ideas.”
Yes, it needs a fuller presentation, and without one there are many unacknowledged and unexplored assumptions. Until I can offer a fuller presentation, it’s fairly understandable if what you perceive me as doing is measuring what I find against what I want to find — I guess it’s going to seem that way because that is what most people do without being aware of it, and that’s what you have seen people doing? have you? known someone well and deeply who was doing just that? or is it just that we always assume that’s what people are doing when (their view disagrees with ours and) we don’t have an inside view of their motivations* and research?
But I didn’t go into this wanting to see that what was being said was anything in particular; only to get as close as I can to seeing what the Buddha taught*. To get there I did start from two assumptions: That there was one person (not a committee) who had the original insight, developed it, and taught it, and that there is internal consistency in that insight and the teaching of it. If either of these assumptions turned out to be incorrect, I figured close examination would disprove those theories. So far, what I’ve seen, has not.
Over on your blog you asked “…where do your filtering criteria come from? How do you choose them, and validate the result. Against what do you check your conclusions (and in your case I imagine it probably just “feels right”, yes?). There’s just no external source of validation or proof – so it all comes down to decisions we make about what is important to us. That’s a hard truth, but it is true I believe.”
As a skeptic, I’m not looking for any kind of absolute “proof”, I’m simply trying to get as close as I can to finding a consistent structure in the Buddha’s lessons. I assume that *how* he taught will have changed some over the course of time, and that, since he taught to many different sorts of people, his methods varied, but I am looking for underlying structure that pervades the whole course.
So, no, I don’t validate what I find by how it “feels” (please check your assumptions about who I am — why would you assume such a thing?) I validate it primarily by pushing the pieces up against the parts of the dhamma I’m already confident of and seeing if they fit well, uneasily, or badly. I validate by seeing how the traditions look at the pieces. I validate by checking scholarship outside of Buddhism. I validate against my own practice — if I look for this teaching in my own practice, can I see it? Then I mark it as something I have confidence in. If I don’t see it in my practice, then I set it aside as possible, but unverified.
I am reasonably certain of this: You and I have very different methods for investigating. I understand yours to be a rigorous, scholastic approach of accepting nothing that you haven’t thoroughly documented. My approach is to see what’s there from as many different views as possible and to hold the whole structure rather loosely in my mind until I have enough evidence (as described above) to stabilize any new element.
Your method is entirely sound and well thought of in the world — I have a great deal of respect for you and for those methods. But there isn’t only one correct method *to* investigate things. It could well be that there is some use in the way I hold all of the meanings loosely — even if at times the bug-like compound view I see of the dhamma makes me feel a bit fractured myself — I hope that it will allow me to see something others haven’t, and then it will allow me to describe the whole in a way that’s both comprehensible and useful.
So when I say the tradition has bent the canon, and you say that reveals my subjectivity, I wonder how and where we can draw that line? If I read the canon, and apply what I read to my personal practice as part of my investigation, and what I learn through my practice changes my understanding of what I thought Buddhism was about prior to reading the canon and practicing what I found there, how can it not be, in part, subjective? Is one’s understanding of Buddhism supposed to remain objective? I think that’s not the point. If what I was aiming for was pure scholarship, then objectivity and evidence would be key. But what I am aiming for is understanding, my method is synthesis, and rigid scholastic methods aren’t the greater part of synthesis. I don’t see subjectivity in the study of Buddhism to be an error, as long as one is closely examining motivations and those filters you mention.
On the scale of relative certainty, I am about 85% certain that the Buddha was being quite clear when he formulated Dependent Arising in twelve steps that didn’t go back around — that in *not* making it a round, he was making an additional point about what he was describing. I could yet be convinced otherwise with strong evidence to the contrary, but I have relative certainty, and so, yes, I am going to say that when Bhikkhu Bodhi says, that Dependent Arising, “…with its twelve links, describes… a perpetually self-regenerating circle leading from beginning to end only to find the end lead back to the beginning” that this is quite literally bending something that is not a circle into a circle.
Is my certainty entirely subjective? Perhaps. I have no sutta that says “The Buddha said, ‘And what, monks, is Dependent Arising? It is not a circle.'” I just have a hundred examples in which it is not presented as a circle, and none in which it is.
Thank you for continuing to take the time to talk about these things, Jayarava. I know it takes time away from the work you’re doing, and I appreciate that more than you know.
* Warning: There are motivations here that shall remain unrevealed (but which have been thoroughly examined by the author) and they are the engine behind wanting to know what the Buddha taught, without prejudice as to what it turned out that might be. But please just take my word for it: my motivations are not unexamined, and I really would not have cared a whit if it turned out that all the evidence showed me that the Buddha taught that there “absolutely is literal rebirth after the breakup of the body” and that we “absolutely have to believe in it”. Certainly what started me down the road of examination was apparent contradictions in teachings about anatta and rebirth — I love to solve mysteries — but I really have had no great concern for “who dunnit” in the end. Once I have relative certainty about the perp I will, however, work from that certainty — which you may then mistake for me coming at this from the beginning with my money on “the butler did it”.
In the end, isn’t what’s important here, whether or not the conclusions reached are accurate or not, rather than why the researcher looked in the direction she did in the first place?
I can see that if motivation for trying to understand something goes unexamined, it can tend to distort the understanding gained, yes. But that should be the concern of the motivated person, not so much anyone else’s concern, shouldn’t it? Neither why I am asking the questions I am, nor why I see it as I do should really matter — only whether what is seen is visible to you, too, or not.
I can also see that if bits are presented piecemeal as they are here on my blog, it would be hard for one well-embedded in a different point of view to step outside of that view and just look at what’s being said (as in the example of the original post here: that Dependent Arising is never presented as a wheel, and that saying it does is a distortion; and that this is not necessarily the only distortion). Difficult to step outside one’s normal view, but surely not impossible.
Nor is it, I think, unreasonable to ask that my readers (all two of them) simply examine one piece of evidence. So, for example, in this post I am saying: (1) Tradition has been known to distort what’s said in the suttas. (2) Here is an example: we are being told this is a cycle, and it is never presented as a cycle.
Because I cannot, yet, present the full thesis, I am offering up just one tiny piece of evidence, to be examined on its own merits. What relevance is there, in why I came to see this, to the argument itself? Why is knowledge of my larger thesis even necessary? Isn’t the question simply whether it’s a fair understanding of this one point or not?
I must say, since I heard said Bhikkhu say that the the middle way is called such not because it runs in the middle between asceticism and hedonism, but because is rises above them, I have taken most of his ideas with a pinch of salt.
It’s like if one denies that his last failure, death, didn’t lead to the next start-up, foolish, to another birth.
If things wouln’t be serious, one could possible laugh about the way people are wasting precious time. So take care good householder. Foolishness is bound to return and most in not so pleasing conditions.