Chapter 4: Dependent arising and psychodynamic analysis¶

When Chapter 3 closed, two questions stood beside the fire. First, if there is no dispossessed owner, how does this fire burn and continue by itself? Where does the drive to keep burning come from? Second, why is the urge to be recovered so tenacious in that owner who keeps expecting to be found again among the ashes, and what sustains that urge? This chapter takes up both questions. The Sutta Piṭaka's general name for the whole answer is dependent arising.

Before taking them up, we must receive a warning. At the opening of the Great Discourse on Causation, Ānanda eagerly reports an insight: this dependent arising is wonderful and profound, "yet as I see it, it is exceedingly plain." The Buddha stops him at once: "Do not think so. This dependent arising is exceedingly profound, and its appearance is also exceedingly profound."¹ Ānanda's illusion deserves sympathy. The formula of dependent arising really is plain: when this exists, that exists; when this arises, that arises. Everyone can recite these ten Chinese characters. Its depth lies not in the formula but in the range the formula takes over. From pregnancy to fighting, from a moment's wandering attention to the destination of a life, the tradition connects them on one map. This chapter takes that map apart to see the wiring clearly.

The name's prior record. Psychodynamics has a prior record in Buddhist studies. Johansson's 1979 monograph is called The Dynamic Psychology of Early Buddhism. Its eleven chapters rearrange the Nikāyas under psychological headings: consciousness, perception and feeling, motivation, personality, the taints, and understanding.² He states the book's program on p. 79: perception creates the world; by understanding and controlling perception, the world can be controlled; whoever controls their perceptual processes controls their own state of mind. In a sentence, he stakes the framework of dependent arising on epistemology. This book fully accepts the wager made in his title: the Nikāyas do contain a serious, systematic dynamic psychology. That is not a courtesy title bestowed by later generations. But this book borrows his name without following his method, differing on two points. First, the direction is reversed. He files the categories of the discourses under modern psychology, making taints and underlying tendencies fit the headings of motivation and personality. Chapter 3 established a discipline of standpoint: the two maps are not exchanged cell for cell. This chapter therefore moves the other way. It leaves links, nutriment, hindrances, fetters, and underlying tendencies in place, and brings out their dynamics where they stand. Second, the reading of the backbone differs. He reads the twelve links comprehensively as a psychologist, taking the entire cycle of dependent arising as the creative causality of perceptual processes. Dependent arising thus becomes a psychology within epistemology. This book's judgment below parts company with him.

The backbone and the literal definitions. First establish the backbone. Ignorance conditions formations; formations condition consciousness; consciousness conditions name-and-form; name-and-form conditions the six sense bases; the six sense bases condition contact; contact conditions feeling; feeling conditions craving; craving conditions clinging; clinging conditions becoming; becoming conditions birth; birth conditions aging and death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and distress. Thus this whole mass of suffering arises. Cessation has the same structure: with the cessation of ignorance, formations cease, and so on through the cessation of the whole mass of suffering. The Discourse on Analysis defines each link; its literal wording deserves close attention.³ Ignorance is not knowing the four truths in the Pāli version. The Chinese unfolds a long list: not knowing the past and future limits, karmic results, the Buddha, Dhamma, and Saṅgha, or suffering, its origin, its cessation, and the path. It describes this ignorance as "deluded darkness, ignorance, great darkness." The scope differs, but the manner of definition is the same: ignorance is a cognitive absence, not some positive evil energy. Formations are divided into bodily, verbal, and mental formations. Another discourse divides them by karmic quality into meritorious, unmeritorious, and imperturbable formations. The two axes of classification run side by side.⁴ This discourse gives six classes of craving; elsewhere there are craving for sensuality, craving for existence, and craving for nonexistence, while the Chinese also has craving for sensuality, form, and formlessness. Even the threefold classification has two versions. Becoming is sensual becoming, form becoming, and formless becoming. Birth, aging, and death are fixed to the literal definitions: birth is beings' birth, entry into the womb, and appearance in their respective classes, the manifestation of the aggregates, the acquisition of the sense bases. Aging is teeth falling out, hair whitening, skin wrinkling, life declining, and faculties maturing. Death is dying, dissolution, the breakup of the aggregates, the discarding of the body. These two ends leave no room for allegory.

Beside the defining discourse lies another case, the third for Chapter 3's scalpel. Someone asks: "Who ages and dies? To whom do aging and death belong?" The text rejects this way of asking and answering together. To answer "I am aging and death; aging and death belong to me" is "the same in meaning" as the views that the life principle is the body, or that the life principle and the body are different.⁵ The text itself treats the "who" question and the life-principle/body question as the same case. The unresolved case of Chapter 1 and the case closed in Chapter 3 meet again on the ground of dependent arising. The Kevaṭṭa Sutta rewrites "where"; the Phagguna discourse rewrites "who consumes"; this discourse rejects "who ages and dies." The same technique serves all three: invite the subject out of the question, and invite conditions in.

Numbers of links and formulas. With the backbone established, examine its flexibility. The standard version has twelve links; the City Discourse has ten, turning back at the mutual conditioning of consciousness and name-and-form; the Great Discourse on Causation has nine, omitting the six sense bases as well.⁶ The City Discourse also gives dependent arising its best account of its own place: someone finds an ancient path in the wilderness, follows it, and sees an ancient city. The path is old, the city is old; the discoverer did not build it. The Discourse on Sheaves of Reeds gives the mutually conditioning part a simile. Consciousness and name-and-form are like two sheaves of reeds leaning against each other. Remove one, and the other falls.⁷ Still shorter chains concerning this life are scattered through the discourses: the six sense bases condition contact, contact conditions feeling, and feeling conditions craving. Four links light the hearth, going straight to the origin of suffering.⁸ The four versions can be compared link by link:

Two things are immediately visible in the table. First, omissions occur mainly at the two ends: ignorance and formations can be omitted at the beginning, while clinging, becoming, birth, and aging and death need not be set out at the end. The nine-link version also omits the six sense bases. Contact, feeling, and craving in the middle remain intact in all four versions. The ends expand and contract, with this additional omission in the nine-link version; the fire's mouth remains constant. Every point at which the side circuits examined in the second half of this chapter attach lies in this segment. Second, the number of links—twelve, ten, nine, or four—changes with the needs of the teaching. Chapter 3 counted sets of four, five, and six elements; this chapter adds another set. For the third time, the verdict presents itself: what can expand and contract is an inventory of tools, not a sacred number of stages in a process. Even the threefold classification of craving has two versions; the axis of classification changes with the purpose of contemplation.

The philosophical weight of the formula is realized in the Kaccānagotta Sutta. The world relies on two positions: existence and nonexistence. One who rightly sees the world's arising as it really is does not form a view of the world's nonexistence; one who rightly sees its cessation as it really is does not form a view of its existence. "Avoiding the two extremes, one teaches the middle way, namely: when this exists, that exists; when this arises, that arises."⁹ The section on two registers in Chapter 3 left a door of existence in place. Dependent arising takes a route around it: answer neither existence nor nonexistence; ask instead about arising and cessation. Nāgārjuna explicitly quotes this discourse in the chapter examining existence and nonexistence in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. That is the ground of Essay 18; a signpost suffices here.

Three lives or the present moment? We now reach the point where a position must be taken. What span does the backbone of twelve links actually describe? The commentarial tradition answers with three lives and two rounds of cause and effect: ignorance and formations are causes in the past life; consciousness through feeling are results in the present life; craving, clinging, and becoming are present causes; birth, aging, and death are future results. Chapter 17 of the Visuddhimagga arranges these assignments into a complete scheme.¹⁰ Present-moment readings rose from the twentieth century onward. Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu condemns the three-life account as a Brahmanized misreading, arguing that all twelve links occur within this life and this mind.¹¹ Ñāṇavīra rereads them through an ontological approach, taking dependent arising to describe the structure of present experience, not the machinery of rebirth.¹² On the academic side, Shulman examines the original meanings of the links and judges dependent arising to be a study of psychological processes.¹³ Bhikkhu Bodhi defends the traditional reading, criticizing Ñāṇavīra passage by passage in two long articles.¹⁴ There is also a third reading. Jurewicz finds that the wording of the twelve links corresponds item by item to Vedic genealogies of creation: dependent arising is a word-for-word parody of Brahmanical cosmogony. Gombrich adopts and develops this reading.¹⁵ Johansson's book stands next to the present-moment readings on this map. One earlier entry must also be connected: Part I, Essay 1, Chapter 5 presented the three-life and present-moment readings side by side without deciding between them. That was the proper work of historical exposition. This chapter analyzes; its judgment must go one step further.

This book holds that the backbone should be read across three lives. Three reasons, all fixed to the texts, support this judgment. First, the defining discourse fixes both ends of the chain to literal meanings: birth is entry into the womb and the manifestation of the aggregates; aging and death are whitening hair, falling teeth, and the discarding of the body. To make a present-moment reading work, one must first rewrite the definitions as allegory: birth as the birth of a sense of self, death as its death. Such rewriting is not indefensible, but the burden of proof rests on the rewriter, and the defining discourse offers no step to stand on. Second, a joint in the backbone is obstetric. The Great Discourse on Causation could hardly ask more directly: "If consciousness did not enter the mother's womb, would name-and-form constitute this body?" "No." "If consciousness entered the womb and immediately left, would name-and-form come together?" "It would not."¹ At this link, the chain concerns pregnancy, not a simile. Third, the texts measure the chain's continuation and termination in bodies. A foolish, unlearned ordinary person, covered by ignorance and bound by craving, acquires this conscious body. "With ignorance uncut and the conditioning bond of craving unexhausted, at the breakup of the body, at death, another body is taken." For the wise, ignorance is cut and craving's conditioning bond exhausted: "at the breakup of the body, at death, no further body is taken."¹⁶ A chain that turns only within the mind in this life cannot say the four characters 还复受身, "another body is taken."

In choosing the three-life reading, three qualifications must be stated plainly. First, the precise assignments of three lives and two rounds of cause and effect are commentarial engineering. Which links belong to a past life and which to a future life? The discourses give the direction without filling in the blueprint. This book accepts the direction without committing to the detail. Second, the ancients had already made room for the present moment. Sarvāstivāda enumerates four kinds of dependent arising: momentary, connected, by phases, and across a long succession. A reading in which all twelve links arise within a single thought thus has its own entry within orthodoxy.¹⁷ The fault of the present-moment reading is therefore not finding this-life processes, but using them to abolish the three lives. The reading by phases holds the main place; the momentary reading serves as a model. The ancients' sense of proportion was adequate. Third, and this is the chapter's main work: the material on dynamics in this life is rich and real, but most of it hangs on side circuits off the backbone, not inside its links. The chapter's division of labor is therefore one sentence: read the backbone across three lives and the side circuits within this life. The philological judgment belongs to the backbone; the remaining firepower belongs to the side circuits.

The wiring of ignorance and craving. Chapter 3 asked whether the mistaken recognition of self belongs to ignorance or to craving and clinging. We can now draw the wiring diagram, with a discourse number on every line. Begin with a subversive connection: ignorance is not a first cause. Its beginning cannot be seen, yet ignorance has nutriment. Without associating with good people, one does not hear the true Dhamma; without hearing it, one lacks faith, wise attention, mindfulness, and clear comprehension. The sense doors go unguarded; the three kinds of misconduct arise; these nourish the five hindrances, which nourish ignorance. The text's simile is mountain rain: rain falls on a high mountain, flows down its slopes, fills ravines, and feeds streams, rivers, and the sea.¹⁸ Ignorance itself belongs to a food chain, fed by a whole river system of social relations and habits. The same discourse gives a reverse connection: what nourishes craving for existence? Ignorance. Now look again at the birth certificate brought in at the end of Chapter 3. Recognizing form as self is itself a formation. Where does that formation arise? Feeling born of ignorance-contact touches one; craving arises; that formation arises from it.¹⁹ As for the master switch of formations, the Discourse on Thorough Investigation answers directly. One whose ignorance has not been abandoned produces meritorious, unmeritorious, and imperturbable formations. With ignorance abandoned, one does not produce them.⁴

The answer to Chapter 3's question thus has three layers, not a choice between two. The cognitive layer attaches to ignorance. Its standard definition in the discourses is not knowing the four truths; the Chinese also lists ignorance of past and future limits, karmic results, and so on. It is an absence of understanding in practice, not the motive force of self-view itself. The dynamic layer attaches to craving and clinging. Among the four kinds of clinging is clinging to a doctrine of self, while craving's list of things it says to itself is still more revealing. The Chinese Discourse on the Net of Craving begins with “有我故,” “because there is an I,” and develops eighteen courses of craving centered on “I.” Its Pāli parallel proceeds from “I am” to such formulations as “I am thus,” “May I be,” and “I shall be.” Eighteen internal and eighteen external make thirty-six; across three times, they make 108.²⁰ Craving's native language is the first person. No outside interface between craving and self-view is needed: as soon as craving speaks, it says "I." The residual layer attaches to the underlying tendency to conceit. The elder Khemaka can already observe the five aggregates subject to clinging as not-self and not-mine, yet declares that "the conceit 'I,' the desire 'I,' and the underlying tendency 'I' have not been abandoned, understood, left behind, or expelled." His simile is the fragrance of flowers: it cannot be identified as the scent of roots or leaves, yet the fragrance remains. The simile for its removal is a washed cloth still carrying a residual smell; perfume it with mixed fragrances, and the smell eventually disappears.²¹ Each layer has its own time of death. The first fruit cuts identity view; only the arahant cuts conceit and ignorance. The tenacity of Chapter 3's dispossessed owner now has a list of suppliers: craving makes sentences with "I" every day, conceit diffuses like a lingering scent, and ignorance provides the background light. The view dies on the day of seeing the path; the scent requires perfuming until the very end of the path.

The three-layer dissection can be consulted in one table:

The social cascade follows the order of the Chinese Mahānidāna (MĀ 97): seeking, gain, discrimination (分), desire, attachment, avarice (悭), storing up (家), guarding, and sticks, swords, and disputes, with 分 and 家 rendered after the BDK translation. The upward chain reads "knowledge and vision as it really is." The three statements about feeling are governed by the latent-tendency heading. The seed heading and subtitle together describe consciousness becoming established and sowing a seed.

The side circuits. Outside the backbone, the texts record several side circuits attached to its links. This is where the firepower mentioned above will be used.

First, the circuit of proliferation, attached between contact and perception. The Honeyball Discourse says: "Dependent on the eye and visible forms, eye-consciousness arises. When the three meet, there is contact; dependent on contact, there is feeling. What one feels, one perceives; what one perceives, one thinks about; what one thinks about, one bears in mind; what one bears in mind, one discriminates."²² The Pāli adds a reversal at the end: where a person proliferates, perceptions and categories born of proliferation in turn assail that person. The producer becomes the one assailed; output connects back to input. This is a self-exciting machine.²³ When Daṇḍapāṇi the Sakyan asks for the basis of the Buddha's teaching, the Buddha answers by dismantling this machine: no fighting, no attachment to existence or nonexistence. The sixty-two views in Chapter 1 are this circuit's sophisticated products; the perverse question from the Full-Moon Discourse in Chapter 3 is a specimen in operation. Views do not fall from the sky. The circuit turns them out.

Second, the social cascade, attached to craving. The Great Discourse on Causation follows the current downstream: "Dependent on craving, there is seeking; dependent on seeking, gain; dependent on gain, discrimination (分); dependent on discrimination, impassioned desire; dependent on impassioned desire, attachment; dependent on attachment, avarice; dependent on avarice, storing up (家); dependent on storing up, guarding. Because of guarding, there arise sticks and swords, fighting, flattery, deceit, lies, and divisive speech, countless bad and unwholesome states."¹ From a single thought of wanting to taking up a staff and mounting a defense: nine stops, a direct route. As soon as psychodynamics steps outside the house, it becomes political economy. This cascade is the earliest social pathology in the analysis of dependent arising.

Third, the spring at the point of feeling. The Six Sets of Six Discourse places underlying tendencies directly beneath feeling: pleasant feeling activates the underlying tendency to lust, painful feeling to aversion, and neither-painful-nor-pleasant feeling to ignorance.²⁴ The Discourse on the Dart adds the mechanism's crucial point: one struck by a dart is struck by a second, adding mental feeling to bodily feeling. The ordinary person sees no escape from painful feeling apart from sensual pleasure and therefore flees into sensual pleasure.²⁵ Feeling is a switch on the backbone; an underlying tendency is a spring buried beneath it. The dynamics of addiction were entered on the record here more than two thousand years ago. Beneath the spring, the mind cannot stop. The texts say there is at least a semblance of reason for taking this body as self: a body can last a hundred years. The mind, however, is like a monkey in a forest, taking one branch and releasing another: day and night, one state arises and another ceases.²⁶

Fourth, the seeding of established consciousness. The three Discourses on Intention say: what one intends, plans, and has an underlying tendency toward becomes an object for consciousness to become established. With an object, consciousness gains a footing; established, it grows, and future becoming is thereby seeded.²⁷ Intention is a sowing machine. This circuit connects psychological forces back to the backbone of three lives; side circuit and backbone close the switch here. The Discourse on the Four Nutriments gives the whole maintenance system four images of suffering: eating a child's flesh in the wilderness; a flayed cow bitten wherever it stands; a fire pit; three hundred spears.²⁸ Motivation has four meals, and every meal has a cost.

The four side circuits can be consulted in one table:

Another river from the same rain. If dependent arising could produce only suffering, it would be no more than a sentence passed. The Discourse on Supporting Conditions runs the same formula in reverse. Suffering supports faith; faith supports gladness; gladness gives rise to joy, joy to tranquility, tranquility to happiness, happiness to concentration, concentration to knowledge and vision as things really are, that knowledge and vision to disenchantment, disenchantment to dispassion, dispassion to liberation, and liberation to knowledge of destruction.²⁹ Its closing simile is the very one used for ignorance's food chain: mountain rain fills ravines and feeds streams, rivers, and the sea. The same rain falls into two rivers. The second half of the Discourse on Ignorance has already established the same structure: knowledge and liberation also have nutriment. Association with good people, hearing the true Dhamma, wise attention, mindfulness, and clear comprehension feed onward to the seven factors of awakening and knowledge and liberation.¹⁸ In the upward chain, knowledge and vision as things really are follows concentration. The Susima Sutta names this station. Susima, a non-Buddhist, has gone forth to steal the teaching. Hearing those liberated by wisdom declare that they have not attained deep concentration, he is bewildered. The Buddha gives one guiding explanation: first knowledge of the stability of the Dhamma, then knowledge of nibbāna.³⁰ Knowledge of dependent arising is a formal station on the path, not a theoretical ornament. Chapter 2 inventoried the conditional vocabulary of cultivating a tree: clear around the roots, heap up soil, water it. These are the same craft. Dependent arising establishes links and draws lines so that people can inspect and repair, not so that a sentence can be passed upon them.

Both questions beside the fire now have somewhere to go. How does the fire burn and continue by itself? It needs no dispossessed owner. The "clinging" in "aggregates subject to clinging" is the same word as the "fuel" that feeds a fire; the hand that adds wood grows on the fire itself. Springs at feeling, circuits at perception, seeding through the establishment of consciousness: the fire schedules its own work. And the owner who keeps wanting to be recovered? He is not an exception to the circuits but their product. Craving makes sentences in the first person; conceit diffuses as a lingering scent; ignorance supplies the background light. The impulse is thereby explained, not confiscated. The conventional "I" keeps working, as Chapter 3 allowed. Once the backbone extends across three lives, another half of the picture waits outside the door: how rebirth unfolds through the realms, how kamma operates where no one claims it, and how to contemplate a universe without meaning and without meaning to be found. These belong to Chapter 5. This chapter ends with that rain. Rain does not choose its river. Ravines and riverbeds are places where work can be done.

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