From 'Buddhism Plain and Simple' by Steve Hagen:
Appendix
Dependent Arising
-------------------
The Buddha's teaching on how ignorance and intention are linked
to duhkha (suffering) via a twelve-link chain is called Dependent
Arising (pratityasamutpada).
He said,
Dependent upon ignorance arises dispositions; dependent upon
dispositions arises consciousness; dependent upon consciousness
arise mind and body; dependent upon mind and body arise the six
senses; dependent upon the six senses arises contact; dependent
upon contact arises feeling; dependent upon feeling arises craving;
dependent upon craving arises grasping; dependent upon grasping
arises being; dependent upon being arises birth; dependent upon
birth arises old age and death, grief, lamentation, suffering,
dejection, and despair. Thus arises the entire mass of
suffering.
However, from the utter fading away and ceasing of
ignorance, there is ceasing of dispositions; from the ceasing of
dispositions, there is ceasing of consciousness; from the ceasing
of consciousness, there is ceasing of mind and body; from the
ceasing of mind and body, there is ceasing of six senses; from the
ceasing of the six senses, there is ceasing of contact; from the
ceasing of contact, there is ceasing of feeling; from the ceasing
of feeling, there is ceasing of craving; from the ceasing of
craving, there is ceasing of grasping; from the ceasing of
grasping, there is ceasing of being; from the ceasing of being,
there is ceasing of birth; from the ceasing of birth, there is
ceasing of old age and death, grief, lamentation, suffering,
dejection, and despair. And thus there is the ceasing of this
entire mass of suffering.
The Buddha described this chain in terms of bondage and
liberation. Bondage is the taking hold of any link of this chain
(and thus the entire chain); liberation is the letting go of the
chain. This letting go comes through seeing.
In this teaching, the Buddha points out what our actual
experience is -- that all things arise together, or dependently.
Nothing appears by itself; everything we experience appears in a
context and against a backdrop of other things that are dependent
on and conditioned by each other.
A literal translation of the Buddha's words would be, "When this
arises, that becomes." In other words, the Buddha never spoke of
things as they are, since this is the very delusion we suffer from
in the first place. He spoke of things as they have come to be in
this moment, dependent on other things. When the sunrises,
we have daylight. The Buddha would further remind us that these two
things are always found together. Sunrise and daylight are not
exactly two, but inextricably linked together.
In everyday life, however, the idea that all things come
intimately joined is not at all obvious to us. This ignorance is
what keeps us in bondage.
The twelve-link chain the Buddha spoke of is not a progression
through time or space, as if link one leads to link two, and so on.
Rather, if you pick up any one of these links, you have the whole
chain -- not in a temporal sequence, but all at once.
In the chart on page 161 the chain is presented as a straight
line going from link one to link twelve. I've presented it this way
for the sake of easy reading and comprehension. But a truly
accurate picture would array the twelve links in a circle, like the
numbers on the face of a clock.
Let's look at this chain in detail. We'll start with ignorance,
which is considered the first link. Ignorance is like a black hole
that sucks everything into it, even illumination. Thus we can't see
it, at least not directly.
One of the characteristics of ignorance, then, is that we're
ignorant of our ignorance. This puts a pernicious spin on our
predicament.
There are two kinds of ignorance: blindness and self-deception.
Blindness is ignorance of the basic realities of existence:
impermanence, duhkha, and selflessness. (Buddha called theses the
"three marks of existence.") Self-deception is our belief that we
can know intellectually what things are. "Oh! That's water," we
say. "Hydrogen and oxygen." And then we dismiss the actual
experience of this moment. (But if you really want to know
what water is, just take a drink, or go for a walk in the rain, or
take a swim.)
In short, we're simply confused about this moment. As Huang Po
said, in our ignorance we reject actual experience in favor of what
we think, thus we posit a self in our thought, and we see
permanence where there isn't any.
If instead we would attend to this moment, we would see that
nothing actually arises, persists, or dies as a separate entity.
This is what we truly can know -- but we ignore it and
suffer greatly as a result.
This moment is complete unto itself. There's nothing lacking in
this moment. If we would actually see this moment for what
it is, we would see all of space and time as nothing other than
here and now.
In ignorant this -- our actual experience -- the mind
no longer rests quietly in Wholeness, but begins to lean. The
Buddha called this "disposition of mind," or intention. This forms
the second link on the chain. Any actions that come out of such a
mind are willed.*
(*To understand the nature of willed action and how it binds us
to duhkha, we must first look at the nature of action, or motion,
in general. If I throw a ball, it will continue to move at the same
speed and in the same direction I threw it, without stopping or
changing course, unless it's acted upon by some other force. This
would be obvious if we were in outer space. On earth, of course,
the ball would just fall to the ground and roll to a stop. This is
because the ball is being acted upon by the force of gravity. This
is just simple physics.
When we see the ball bounce and roll to a stop, however, we tend
to think the action is over. But only the ball has stopped. The
action we took doesn't stop it all. When the ball hit the ground it
jostled the soil and the grass and it converted its energy of
motion to heat. Even though the ball comes to rest, the energy that
once moved it is still here; it's been converted into heat and
dispersed. It will continue to disperse, but it won't
disappear.
My point is that the energy, or action, doesn't stop at all.
Ever. Through innumerable transformations, it just continues on and
on and on. This is how things are. Nothing stops. This is the
nature of Reality. Indeed, this is the nature of Mind -- pure,
unending movement.
Bu there's where it gets critical. We might think that by
tossing a ball we initiate an action, but this is merely an
arbitrary point in a beginningless line of action. It's important
to understand that a line of action, or movement, or energy that
momentarily manifests as, for example a ball being thrown, has no
discernible beginning. What is discernible is when
intention steps into a line of action. To the awakened, this
qualitatively changes the picture, and the change is total. It's
the difference between freedom and bondage as defined by the
Buddha. Simply put, willed action is radically different from
unwilled, or natural action.)
We routinely act out of intent, out of a leaning mind. Nature,
acting out of the Whole, does not. We commonly see things "out
there" and go after them. Our mind is thus characterized by
division and separation.
But the Whole functions differently. There's nothing "out there"
for Mind to lean toward or away from. Thus the actions produced by
Mind -- the Whole, or nature -- are radically different in essence
(though not always in appearance) from acts of human will.
Nature acts out of the Whole, without any effort or intent.
Through innumerable transformations, the Whole continues as
beginningless and endless action and reaction. Intention steps into
the natural flow of action and attempts to control it. This is the
source of duhkha.
When in ignorance a mind images "that, out there," it leans
towards it or away from it. This disposition of mind involves
discrimination, the next link of the chain. This third link is also
known as consciousness.
Consciousness divides Reality. It conceptualizes it, packages
it, and explains it to itself. Then in our ignorance, we think it's
taking readings on things "out there."
In Buddhism, consciousness is sometimes depicted as a monkey in
a tree full of flowers. "Oh! I'll take that one, and that one, and
that one." With consciousness, there's this, that and the next
thing. The world is continuously being divided up in various
ways.
In our everyday view, we think that the world is out there --
separate and persistent, and we think of consciousness as a sort of
unifying action, a linking of pieces or parts. From such a view,
your consciousness is taking in this book -- visually, tactilely,
and even audibly as you turn the pages.
To awakened people, however, the picture is reversed. What is
actually experienced is always a seamless Whole. Consciousness
divides it. And, of course, the most basic division is "me" and
"everything else," self and other.
Consciousness not only divides the world spatially, it also
divides it temporally. We thus imagine past, present, and future,
and the persistence of separate objects.
Conscious experience is very much like a movie. It's just one
moment -- one still -- after another. But because these seem to
occur in rapid succession, we adopt the contradictory belief that
there are particular, persistent things out there that nevertheless
change. For this reason, the Buddha called this link "rebirth
consciousness," a sense that objects persist, being reborn moment
after moment.
Link four, mind and body, and link five, the senses, comprise
the delusion that we ourselves are particular, persistent
things. Each of us conceives of a particular body, then imagines
that this body supports a particular consciousness. Along with
these come the senses and the organs associated with them.
According to Buddhist teachings, there are six senses: the five we
already familiar with and the mind. Each sense is paired with a
sense organ: eyes with sight, ears with hearing, nose with smell,
tongue with taste, body with touch, and mind with thought.
Once we conceive of objects as "out there," a persistent body
and mind as "in here," and a set of sense organs to bridge the gap
between the two, we have the illusion of contact or connection.
This is link six. From our common, deluded standpoint, we think
we're connected to a world "out there."
The great Zen master Pai-chang said, "If you realize there is no
connection between your senses and the external world, you will be
enlightened on the spot." There can be no connection because there
are no separate things to be connected.
It's possible to experience directly what Pai-chang describes
here. To see in this way is utterly liberating.
In our delusion -- our sense of connection with things out there
-- we react emotionally. This is the seventh link, feeling.
Dependent upon feeling arises links eight and nine, craving or
desire, and grasping. Craving is the need to grab certain objects
"out there" and bring them closer, and to keep others at a distance
or push them away. With desire comes grasping, the ninth link of
the chain. We want to hold onto what we love, and to grab hold of
what we dislike and hurl it away from us. This link has also been
called "the hardening of craving," or "attachment."
These are two forms of grasping. Firs there is grasping at sense
objects. You see the object of your desire out there and you take
hold of it.
The second kind of grasping is holding tight to belief. The
Buddha identified three common types of belief. The first is belief
in something "out there" that will set everything right and make
everything perfect -- a heaven or paradise. But even the nihilistic
view that "After I die, that's it" is still a form of grasping on
such a belief. Grasping at any thoughts or opinions fits this
category, since grasping is an attempt to make sense of our
existence.
A second kind of belief is belief that ritual or ceremony can
somehow save us from pain, confusion, and ignorance. It's only in
learning to see this very moment, as it has come to be,
that liberation occurs -- not in wearing robes or performing ritual
acts.
The third belief we grasp at is the belief in a self, a
permanent existence. This is the belief that's most deeply rooted
in us, and that causes us the most pain.
And now we have the tenth link, being: persistence or existence.
This in turn will link to ignorance, since, in Reality, nothing
persists. But with being comes birth, the eleventh link, and with
birth comes death, the twelfth link. Thus birth and death, the
great problem we all face, we linked to the grasping of a self.
This is duhkha in its most gripping and pervasive form.
But duhkha need not grip us. To see this moment as it
comes to be -- to see that all is fluidity, that nothing
separate is born, and that nothing dies -- is to break the chain of
bondage.
