In dependence upon the eye and upon visible objects visual consciousness arises. The union of these three [i.e. the eye, objects, and visual consciousness] constitutes contact. Dependent upon this contact feeling is constituted. One perceives what is thus felt; what one perceives one considers; and what one considers one develops all sorts of notions about. (M I 111-12)
In this view, objects of experience, the organs of experience such as the eye, and the consequent consciousness of experience, ‘the mind’, are indissolubly linked. None of the three is conceivable without the other: they lean upon each other as one sheaf of reeds leans upon another, to use a canonical simile.
Furthermore, those features of experience which might be said to lie within the ‘mind’ itself, such as perception, feeling and consciousness, are themselves ‘conjoined, not disjoined, and it is impossible to separate them in order to specify their individual characteristics’ (M I 293). So right from the objects of perception, through the physical organs of perception, to feeling, consciousness, thought, and volition, there is one dynamic, interdependent, ever-changing complex, which might be called an ‘individual’ or a ‘self’, but which has nothing lasting in it.
The five aggregates
Indeed the very term which I have translated as ‘all aspects of experience in the mind and body’ is one of the analytic descriptions of this process, a description in which the impersonal, dynamic and interdependent nature of the process is already implicit. This term is the ‘five aggregates’ (pañcakkhanda). The first ‘aggregate’ is materiality, which includes physical objects, the body, and sense organs. The other four ‘aggregates’ are feeling, perceptions, impulses, and consciousness. Within these ‘aggregates’, this process, are included all that pertains to an individual and his experience. Feeling is but one face of this process, a face available to insight meditation. The mutability and inadequacy of feeling are characteristic of the whole process: ‘all aspects of experience in the mind and body are suffering’. Or, as the Buddha said elsewhere, ‘as the aggregates arise, decay, and die, O monk, so from moment to moment you are born, decay, and die’ (P I 78).
This seems a gloomy doctrine, and a common instinct is to question it. Surely there must be some happiness in the world? However, the Buddha’s teaching does not deny that there are satisfactions in experience: the exercise of insight assumes that the meditator sees such happiness clearly. Pain is to be seen as pain, pleasure as pleasure. What is denied is that such happiness will be secure and lasting.
But this does not fully answer the doubt, for the real grounds of it lie elsewhere, in a radical difference between the experience of the questioner and that of the Buddha. The doctrine of suffering presupposes a vulnerability to disease, death, natural calamity, and human oppression that characterized the Buddha’s world, as it does much of the world today. It is in these terms that the doctrine is illustrated in the canon. But for many in the societies of the West this vulnerability is suppressed or rendered inconspicuous – by prosperity, by medical advances, and by those peculiar institutions surrounding death which render it invisible. Without that sense of vulnerability there might be little reason to connect suffering as unsatisfactoriness on the small scale, with death, disease, and lasting failure on the grand scale: one could just put up with the discomforts (as indeed Buddhist monks learn to do). However, for those whose experience includes vulnerability – a vulnerability that might be psychological or social as well as material – the connection can have a compelling cogency.
The cause of suffering
Though the announcement of the Four Noble Truths is in fact brief and bare, there is a good deal of dramatic tension in it. For if suffering is such a pervasive and unending process, what could be its cause? How could one break into the cycle to see what makes it revolve? And from this point of view the discovery of the second Noble Truth (that there are discernible causes of suffering), the Truth of the Arising of Suffering, is the centre-piece of the awakening. Some Buddhists celebrate this as a dramatic moment in which the Buddha saw the ‘house-builder’. the cause of this flawed and unsatisfactory existence. He is said on that occasion to have uttered this verse:
Seeking but not finding the house-builder
I travelled through life after life
How painful is repeated birth!
House-builder, you have now been seen
You will not build the house again
(Dhammapada 153–4)
We can already see the directions in which the Buddha would look for this cause. One direction is given by the Buddha’s pragmatic turn of mind. He tended to think of causes not in a purely abstract way, but rather by using analogies from practical activity. The meditator, for example, is likened to a goldsmith, or to a fletcher straightening the mind like an arrow. In one passage (M I 240–3), concerning the Buddha’s search before the awakening, he speaks of his efforts on the analogy of a man trying to start a fire: just as a man could not start a fire by rubbing a dry stick upon a wet one lying in water, or by rubbing it upon a wet stick lying on dry land, but only by rubbing a dry stick on another dry stick on dry land, so a meditator must be bodily withdrawn from sensual pleasures (a stick out of water), and also mentally withdrawn from such pleasures (a dry stick out of water). This way of thinking has a good deal of subtlety in it, for it recognizes that there are subsidiary, enabling causes and conditions, such as the dryness of the stick and so forth. But it places the chief cause with the agent, the meditator, the man making the fire. The chief cause is conceived as being agent-like, like a person bringing about a result. This is certainly the sense of describing the cause of suffering metaphorically as the ‘house-builder’. The pieces of that ‘house’ had to be lying to hand, but there also had to be a ‘builder’, a purposive and active principle. Hence, in seeking the cause of suffering, the Buddha was seeking something active and purposive, which was to that extent like an agent, a person.
Moreover, this principle had to be agent-like in other ways as well. First, just as the meditator can, to an extent, control himself in order to perfect his meditative skill, so this principle had to respond to corrective action. Like a person or agent, it had to be corrigible: it had to be possible to deal with the ‘house-builder’ as one deals with oneself, for otherwise there would be no possibility of liberation. Second, just because the activities of this principle had moral consequences, upon others and upon oneself in the process of rebirth, it had to be like a moral agent, a person whose acts are good or evil. These considerations may seem so abstract as to be inconsistent with the Buddha’s pragmatism, but they point to the practical obstacle he had to overcome. The simplest explanation of all this might be just that the purposive, active principle is an agent, a Self or ‘person’ or soul. But the Buddha had good reason for rejecting this idea. Indeed in his insight meditation he had found only an impersonal process, that of suffering. He had to break through to find a principle which was in many ways like an agent or person, but which was finally impersonal, not an agent or person at all.
This is what he discovered:
And this, O monks, is the Truth of the Arising of Suffering. It is just thirst or craving [taṇhā] which gives rise to repeated existence, which is bound up with impassioned appetite, and which seeks fresh pleasure now here and now there, namely, thirst for sensual pleasures, thirst for existence, thirst for non-existence. (S V 421)
So thirst or craving is that which drives the whole mass of suffering experience forward. The word taṇhā bears the literal sense of ‘thirst’, and it is this meaning that lends the term its vividness. Its technical sense, however, is ‘craving’ or ‘desire’. In this sense it is insatiable craving, ‘which seeks fresh pleasure now here and now there’, not only in this life but in the lives beyond, and because of this it ‘gives rise to repeated existence’. Moreover, in so far as craving is ‘bound up with impassioned appetite’, the metaphor of fire was never far from the Buddha’s mind, and indeed in a discourse traditionally placed v
ery early in his career, the Fire Sermon (S IV 19), each facet of experience is described as ‘aflame with desire’.
This way of thinking is in many ways poetical rather than soberly technical, and a good deal of the Buddha’s effort around and after the awakening must have been devoted to drawing out the implications of this pregnant idea. Certainly craving could be shown to be purposive: to crave is to crave something, to be thirsty is to be thirsty for something. ‘Where does this craving come into being and settle itself? Wherever there is what seems lovable and gratifying, there it comes into being and settles’ (D II 308). In most descriptions of craving there is a tendency to emphasize this positive desire, ‘desire for sensual pleasure’.
This was the puritanism of the renouncers speaking. Indeed, the idea of desire was common among the renouncers: it was the great obstacle to achieving the Self or purifying the soul. But in elevating it to an autonomous principle the Buddha expanded its definition. For him craving also included aversion, and that is probably the sense of ‘thirst for non-existence’. One craves not only what is attractive but also relief or escape from what is unpleasant or undesirable. And we crave a great deal. We crave all sensual pleasures – sexual, gustatory, olfactory, tactile, or whatever. We yearn keenly to escape pain. We crave wealth, power, position. We even lust sensually after our own bodies, or in rebirth a new body. There is even a ‘thirst for views’, the urge to be right, to be in the know, to have an answer for every question.
Craving may be spoken of comprehensively as ‘thirst for existence’. This is, to be sure, the ‘thirst which gives rise to repeated existence’, but perhaps a better way to think of it is as the desire for becoming other than what present experience gives. Under many guises it is a ceaseless striving for some new state, some new being, some new experience, at the same time as being a striving for satiety and permanence, and it is a striving always frustrated. ‘The world [in the sense of all common individuals in the world], whose nature is to become other, is committed to becoming, has exposed itself to becoming; it relishes only becoming, yet what it relishes brings fear, and what it fears is pain’ (U III 10, Ñānamoli’s reading). Rebirth may be rebirth from moment to moment of experience, or it may be rebirth in another life, but in either case it is the consequence of this lust to be something else.
This is the purposive activity of craving on a large scale, as it embraces all sentient life. But this grand vision is to be justified, as ever in the Buddha’s teaching, by reference to the fine grain of experience. In this perspective craving was in fact already written into the five ‘aggregates’, that comprehensive description of mental and physical experience, as impulses (samkhara). Let us return to the example of the pains in the knees one feels when trying to sit for long periods in insight meditation. Just because one feels these as unpleasant, one also feels an urge to change position, an impulse to seek comfort and relief by moving. This impulse is, in effect, just the active, purposive aspect of the unpleasant feeling: it arises with the unpleasant feeling, is indeed inseparable from it. In ordinary circumstances one would simply shift position automatically, without reflecting or perhaps even without being conscious of it. The same might be said for pleasant feelings: while meditating one might feel sleepy and dreamy, and one is moved automatically to follow and indulge such feelings. Or one feels hungry and thinks of having a little snack before continuing. Without the attempt at meditation many such impulses would hardly be noticed, so instantly do they follow one another. In this microscopic view, experience is revealed as having a foundation of ceaseless activity, of short-lived purposive impulses. The Buddha indeed thought of this activity as making experience. ‘What is called “mentality” and “mind” and “consciousness” arises and ceases, in one way and another, through day and night; just as a monkey ranging through a forest seizes a branch and, letting go, seizes another’ (S II 95).
This perception through insight meditation of an animating principle of existence ruled the Buddha’s thought. It was the evidence which guided his understanding of the human condition. Because impulse is habitual and automatic, fundamentally unreflective and not a function of decision, there was no reason to think of it as the work of some person or Self, as other renouncers thought. It was just a propensity, an active disposition at the base of life which had the special and disastrous ability to reproduce itself endlessly. As a propensity he called it ‘clinging’ (upādāna). This propensity was in fact already written into the Noble Truth of Suffering, for the full form of that reads: ‘all aspects of experience in the mind and body, in which clinging inheres, are suffering’ (S V 421). The different terms – clinging, craving, impulse, thirst – each shed a different light on the activity behind and within sentient life. They all point to one thing, the impersonal active principle, the discovery of which answered the Buddha’s question, ‘how did I come to be in this sorry plight?’
The Buddha did not consider, however, that craving acts alone – his idea of causes by no means required a single or a simple solution to the problem. While craving might be the chief motive cause in the painful process of rebirth, there was room for subsidiary, enabling causes, conditions without which it could not take hold. And among these there was one which had an especially important place: ignorance or delusion. The idea was current among the wanderers and yogis: they enjoyed a special knowledge of which others were ignorant. In the Buddha’s usage, however, his knowledge was not so much an esoteric truth like the knowledge of the Self, but rather a penetrating understanding of things as they are. By comparison people are ordinarily not so much uninformed – as one might be uninformed of tax laws or of the Self-but positively deluded. They hold that the world contains lasting and secure satisfactions, whereas in fact it is riddled with suffering. They are mistaken, so craving has its way with them. The relationship between craving, ignorance, and suffering is rather like the relationship between heat, oxygen, and fire. Heat is the motive force, but without oxygen fire could not arise. ‘Thirst for existence, O monks, has a specific condition; it is nourished by something, it does not go without support. And what is that nourishment? It is ignorance’ (A V 116).
The moral significance of human craving
So far these teachings are amoral. They are the utterances of a detached specialist, a renouncer, addressing himself to others with the same concern for personal salvation. But the Buddha was also convinced that sentient beings are subjected to a law of moral causation, and he was deeply concerned with the evaluation of behaviour and its effects on others. So these amoral teachings are indissolubly linked in his thought with others that point to a radically moral significance in the human condition.
Let us begin with impulses. As I have so far described them impulses hardly have a moral significance, but they may be regarded from another point of view. They may be considered as intentions or choices, both of which are included in the key term cetanā. Sometimes ‘choice’ is the best translation, in so far as it is a mental movement which precedes action or speech. But intentions are also included, for the Buddha thought that unexpressed intentions could themselves have an effect, if not outwardly then inwardly in the mind. The Buddha held that in human affairs it is the mental choice or intention which is of ultimate significance: ‘the world is led by mind’ (S I 39). Hence, for example, in the legal system developed for the Buddhist order, only intentional actions are regarded as transgressions, and unintentional acts – such as those committed while asleep, or mad, or under duress – are not culpable.
This has great implications. It means that intentions are not negligible, that they have consequences. They do work, are in themselves actions. This is the sense of the term ‘karma’, whose primary meaning is just ‘work’ or ‘deed’, but in this Buddhist sense ‘mental action’. (Karma does not refer to the results of action, as we now assume in ordinary usage in the West.) ‘It is choice or intention that I call karma – mental work – for having chosen, a man acts by body, speech, and mind’ (A III 415). Intent
ions make one’s world; it is they that do the work whose consequences we must reap in suffering. They form the subsequent history of our psychic life as surely as wars or treaties, plagues or prosperity form the subsequent history of a nation.
To speak of impulses and urges is not necessarily to speak in moral terms, but choices and actions are the very stuff of moral discourse. One may make good or bad choices, one’s actions may be good or evil. And in fact from the Buddha’s point of view, unconscious impulses are really to be equated with conscious choices, the only difference being that impulses occur in ignorance of their nature as choices: they are choices made under the delusion that there is no better choice, no better way of acting. In this light the relatively neutral term thirst (craving) may itself be considered as greed, something morally reprehensible, and frequently the Buddha spoke in just this way. Greed may be supported by sheer delusion about the nature of the world, but it is also immoral, a propensity to be condemned and, in oneself, to be improved upon. Moreover greed is always coupled in the discourses with hatred or aversion. Hence from a radically moral standpoint it is by choosing badly, by being greedy and hateful, that we bring upon ourselves the suffering we meet in birth after birth. The ill that we cause ourselves and the ill that we cause others are of a piece, stemming from the same roots. The Noble Truth of the Arising of Suffering could be rephrased thus: ‘inflamed by greed, incensed by hate, confused by delusion, overcome by them, obsessed in mind, a man chooses for his own affliction, for others’ affliction, for the affliction of both, and experiences pain and grief’ (A III 55).
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