Just A Little Dust

This post and the next few step away from my usual anchor of discussing “What the Buddha Taught” as (very precisely) stated in texts found in the Pali canon. Instead it is a look at what’s stated in the canon a bit vaguely, with the intent to then examine what we can see for ourselves in our lives, and to try to match the canon with the what we can see. It’s an attempt to take the Buddha’s statements and ask if we are correctly interpreting them or if, perhaps, we sometimes over-extend our definitions of the concepts to say more than they are meant to say.

The posts will cover:

(1) That the Buddha’s “causation” is not “cause and effect” but “effect and cause”.

(2) That the division of truth into “Absolute” and “Delusion” is harmful; a more useful view would be of “necessary” and “unnecessary”.

(3) That karma is real but, in my own way of putting it, it is “not necessarily real”, but is a little more real than some things.

(4) That “interdependence” is not what Dependent Arising describes. Nor is it the arising of “this” from “that” in every case. 

Causation

When this is, that is.

From the arising of this comes the arising of that.

When this isn’t, that isn’t.

From the cessation of this comes the cessation of that.

[Udana 1.3 translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu]

In his book on Dependent Arising, “The Shape of Suffering” Thanissaro Bhikkhu states of the above that:

“The Arising of A will, at some point in time, cause the arising of B. The ceasing of A will, at some point in time, cause the ceasing of B.”

While I agree with the latter statement — because if condition A is required for condition B to come into existence, then removing condition A means B cannot come about — the earlier statement makes for a deterministic universe, and it is not consistently observable in the complex universe in which we live. Also, it seems it was not what the Buddha meant.

Some of my recent explorations in Pali (see for example “Where One Becomes One’s Natural Self“) have led me to look at the ways in which the Buddha says that action A does not always lead to result B. Much as we might wish (because the thought is comforting) that the universe always squares things up in the end or, at least, that the cosmos is predictable, it isn’t — though we often reason as if it was.

To use a purely mechanical example of this sort of causation we could say:

From the arising of a seed, comes the arising of a new tree.

From the cessation of seeds, comes the cessation of new trees.

But it does not follow that with the arising of a seed there is *always* a tree. Because life is complex, many factors need to be present for the tree to arise (soil, water, sunlight, lack of critters who eat seeds). If we aren’t paying close attention to it, the statement as worded might almost seem to say that the arising of a seed always brings a tree, but it doesn’t actually say that.  It says that only if there is a seed, is there a tree — not that a seed always begets a tree.

It is quite true, that without the seed, the tree cannot arise, but it is not true that from the seed, a tree will always arise, because there are many conditions that need to be fulfilled to allow a seed to sprout, grow into a sapling, and continue on to become a tree. Only a very, very simple system allows for that one-for-one ratio to work both ways.

When the Buddha talks about “When this is, that is”, he is referring to Dependent Arising, which is a breakdown, step by step, of how our behavior leads to our own problems (dukkha). If we are familiar with the clearest parts of this teaching, we can see that it’s quite true that if we break the chain at the eighth or ninth links of “clinging” (tanha) or “craving” (upadana) then the end effect (dukkha) should not come into existence. Removing any one of the causes does indeed prevent the effect from arising. But this also means that the conditions that were met earlier in the chain [1. for example, the recognition of the feeling in reaction to contact (pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral)] did not inevitably result in dukkha.  Some step in there *didn’t* inevitably arise from the next — in this case because we intervened and broke the cycle [2. but there could be other reasons the cycle is broken; all the early conditions could be met but then there might be no contact between our senses and the world for a while — then no dukkha arises]. The reason dukkha didn’t arise is because there are many conditions required for its arising, and if conditions one through seven arose in sequence but eight or nine didn’t, then the dukkha-tree that might have come into being from the planting of the seed of ignorance never grew.

It actually has to be the true that when A is necessary for B to arise, the arising of A does not always lead to the arising of B or, as the Buddha puts it, there could be no escape, no liberation.

The Buddha seems to have worked out Dependent Arising backwards, reasoning from the effect (dukkha, aka “suffering”) to its causes, so his causation is actually “effect and its cause(s)” not “cause always leading to effect”.

The causation the Buddha was discussing with “From the arising of this comes the arising of that” was about the complex system that results in us being a party to creating our own problems. Anyone who has examined Dependent Arising will recognize that it is in no way a simple system. When Thanissaro Bhikkhu says, “The Arising of A will, at some point in time, cause the arising of B” he opens Buddhism up to a deterministic conception of the workings of our world that is not in clear evidence in what we see around us, nor is it evidenced by the Buddha’s description of the way things work (as we can see in The Causes of Three Kinds of Results of Kamma).  A particular action does not always bring about a particular effect: for example, stealing will not always bring about bad results, since a mother stealing food for her child from a compulsive hoarder might be doing the right thing.  The world is too complex for such simplistic orderliness.

The same certainty that a cause always leads to the same effect underlies the traditional understanding of karma as a cosmic system that (1) ensures that morality is always rewarded and amorality is always punished and (2) requires literal rebirth so that every last deed — indeed one’s very last deed, if it is not resolved before the breakup of the body — will get its just deserves.  The certainty that not only does “B arise from A”, but “if A then always B” is a great comfort as a belief system because it should mean fairness is the rule of the cosmos, but the very fact that it is a comfort should ring alarm bells, and that we do not see causation being *inter*dependent in that way when we look around should make it quite evident that what we might suspect — but not want to believe — is true: that the universe doesn’t give a damn about our moral system or fairness.

This doesn’t mean that karma is not real, or its effects are delusions, though, as I hope to show in a future post.