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Dharma Talks by Vanessa Zuisei Goddard

 
 

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: An Introduction to Dependent Origination

 

Photo by Udit Chandra

How do our actions shape our lives and the lives of everything, everywhere, all at once? What does it mean to be so interconnected? More importantly, how does our interdependence lead to liberation?

In this talk Zuisei brings to life the teaching on dependent origination, pointing out that nothing exists in isolation, but instead, every moment arises within an infinite network of causes and conditions. She stresses that although all sorts of things happen to us that we cannot control, we can always choose how to respond.

This talk draws on the practice of the Four Immeasurables and the Karaniya Metta Sutta, as well as a story about chanting the Daimoku.

This dharma talk was given by Zuisei Goddard.

Transcript

This transcript is based on Zuisei's talk notes and may differ slightly from the final talk.

Everything, Everywhere,
All at Once: An Introduction to Dependent Origination

 

We have been speaking about karma in our study of the Buddhist Guided Meditations by Thubten Chodron, a collection of meditations on the lamrim or stages of the path as framed in Vajrayana Buddhism. We also recently completed a short class with my friend Kim Allen, looking at karma in the context of the early teachings, the suttas or Pali Canon. At the beginning of the month I spoke about karma and free will, and we had a nice discussion. And on Saturday, during the Half-day sit, I talked about causes and conditions: what they are and what they have to do with karma and dependent origination. In addition, some of you are participating in a Buddhist philosophy reading group and are studying the teachings of Nagarjuna on emptiness—the emptiness of all dharmas, of all conditioned existence.

Given all this, I felt it was time for us to begin an exploration of conditioned existence, this seminal teaching of the Buddha’s called pratityasamutpada, dependent origination or dependent arising. I’ll do this in more depth during a class on Feb 21st. But tonight I wanted to set the ground for that study and also tie some loose ends regarding these topics we’ve been broaching.

To begin, let me repeat the classic formula for dependent origination:

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.

This is what the Buddha saw on the heels of his enlightenment. After sitting in meditation for seven days after attaining realization, the sutras said, he saw the way things come to be, and he saw the way they end. And with this insight, he delineated the twelve steps or links that lead to suffering and that put an end to it (moving forward and backward through the chain and starting from ignorance).

Ignorance is what gets the wheel rolling, and its absence is what makes the wheel stop. As far as Buddhism is concerned, ignorance is the prime mover, the linchpin on the wheel of samsara. Remember that dukkha, suffering or dissatisfaction, refers to the ill-fitting axle of a wheel. When the hole isn’t carved true, the wheel wobbles in its axle. That’s dukkha, and although it’s craving or tanha that the four truths identify as the source of dukkha, it’s because of ignorance or avidya that craving even comes to be: I think there is something to want, and someone to want it. We’ll return to this point.

The Chain of Causes, Conditions, and Effects

Tonight I won’t go into the chain per se, since there’s a lot to cover there and there are a few things I’d like us to get clear about before we get there, starting with the formula: When this is, that is. When this isn’t, that isn’t. When I yell at you, you are hurt. When I don’t yell at you, your hurt doesn’t come to be. That’s straightforward. When I water a seed, it blooms into a plant. When I don’t water it, the seed dries out. The seed is the cause, the plant is the effect or the result. And an effect generally matches the cause. If I plant a lemon seed, I end up with a lemon tree, not an apple tree. When I plant a seed of anger, I end up with some sort of harm, not happiness. That’s why, in Buddhism, the ends never justify the means. Because you can do a lot of harm along the way

So, causes are the primary drivers of an effect. Conditions are the supporting factors that allow that cause to operate. An effect arises only when causes (heti) and conditions (pratyaya) come together. In the example of the seed, the seed is the cause. The right soil and enough water, light and air are the conditions that nurture that cause and turn it into a plant (the effect). But, when we look closely, we also see that: 1) Cause and effect aren’t separate—you can’t ever say a plant is separate from its seed, because it’s completely dependent on it. It’s not so easy, so linear, as A leads to B, and 2) there’s never a single cause for any effect. There’s only a set of conditions.

What is the cause of that seed? A plant! A plant which came about through another set of causes and conditions: another seed growing in the right conditions. And that seed came from a plant that came from a seed that’s inseparable from the soil and the air and the light and maybe the hand of the farmer who planted it. Or from the animal who ate the fruit and then carried the seed in its stomach and pooped it somewhere else. And the food that animal ate, which came from another animal or another plant which had to have the right conditions to grow… you get the idea.

Where’s the beginning of this causal chain? How far back do you have to go to catch the first cause arising out of nothing? An infinite amount of time, Buddhism would say, since nothing can come from nothing. There is no absolute beginning, just causes and conditions arising, changing, and passing away. Arising, changing, and passing away. Moment after moment after moment. So, another way to speak of this formula (when this is, that is) is to say—as that well-known movie does: Everything, everywhere, all at once. That is dependent origination. Nothing—absolutely nothing—exists by itself. To be, it needs everything else: that is what Nagarjuna saw.

The Practice of Changing Causes and Conditions

Another important aspect of causes and conditions is something that Kim alluded to in her class and relates to the question I asked her: Causes come to be, and we often don’t choose them, don’t control them. Let’s say I’m born into a war-torn country, or to a mother who’s addicted to heroin. This isn’t something I chose, not something I controlled or willed into being, so I’m already at a disadvantage. Causes are not favorable for me, coming into this world. However, I can change some of the causes and conditions of my life, and therefore affect the result. It won’t be easy, but it’s possible. Which means I’m never a victim of any cause, and if I can see that, even a little, then I might be able to put in place conditions to change the results of my life.

That’s what the precepts do. That’s what the four immeasurables do, and the six paramitas. That’s what the four vows and the four noble truths are: tools to change how I view and live my life. That’s what our chanting of the Karaniya Metta Sutta is: changing causes and conditions to bring about a different result in our minds. These tools are also conditioned. They too depend on everything else to come into being. But I have a say in them. I can choose to study them, I can choose to practice them, and therefore create more favorable conditions for me and those around me.

Many years ago I was helping a writer work on a book about her life. She grew up in an extremely dysfunctional family. An absent father and a horrifically abusive, violent mother whose three girls could do little more than submit to their mother’s anger and confusion. Some people wouldn’t have made it—maybe they wouldn’t have, except one day, something happened that changed all their lives.

At the brink of despair and filled with shame, the mother decides one morning to end her own life. She’ll take a bottle of pills, put on her favorite music, and lay down and not wake up again. But, if she’s going to do that, she thinks, she’s going to go dressed to the nines. She goes to the salon to get her hair and nails done. And while she’s there, writing her suicide note in her head, she hears a voice behind her, and something about it stops her. It’s the fullest, most joyful, most vibrant voice she’s ever heard. She turns in her chair, and sees a woman talking to one of the stylists about a book she’s been reading—something about chants that can light you up. And she sees the woman is radiant.

“Excuse me, but what’s that you’re talking about?” the mother asks.

And the woman says it’s a book called The Lotus Sutra. Every day she gets together with a group of people and she chants the title, Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, and now her life is like nothing she’d ever imagined.

The mother stands up from her chair, and says, “Can you teach me this chant, please?” The other woman can hear her desperation. “Today? I need it. Please, you don’t know how bad I need it.”

She learns the chant, and then she joins the group, and she starts going every day, and something begins to happen. And one day, she makes a bet with her thirteen-year-old daughter: “Come with me,” she says. “Chant for a few minutes a day, and see what happens.”

That was over forty years ago, and the writer is telling her story—writing about the life she now has and could never have imagined.

 

All sorts of things happen to us we cannot control, but we can always, always choose how to respond. That’s what practice is, that’s what insight is for, that’s what wisdom shows us.

 

But that’s the exception, someone said to me recently. Most people can’t fight their circumstances. I don’t know. We certainly hear of the more dramatic examples of change, of transformation. But I think there are smaller ways in which everyday people find they can make choices different from those that seem obvious at first glance. Ignorance is believing there are no choices. It’s deciding that life sucks, that it happens to you, and there’s little you can do about it. Or, as Rebecca Solnit said it so elegantly in an article this morning, “the assumption that the future will be an extension of some obvious force in the present.” She’s referring to the state of the union, of course, and to our assumption that it’s too late to do anything, that the way things are is inevitable. That’s ignorance.

Wisdom is knowing that nothing is inevitable, except death—and that even that is not what we think. Wisdom is trusting that there are way more choices than we see at first glance, and having the courage to go find them, first of all, and second, to make them, even if it means staking your life. Because we’re staking our lives on ignorance too, we just don’t know it. So, let me repeat my own formula for this teaching: All sorts of things happen to us we cannot control, but we can always, always choose how to respond. That’s what practice is, that’s what insight is for, that’s what wisdom shows us.

When this is, that is.
When this is not, that is not.
Cause and effect.

Interdependence

Now, let us return to the fact that we can’t really separate them. It’s not cause first, then effect. They arise interdependently and all at once—and that is true of everything. When I speak of any thing: my self, this cup, the computer I’m using to talk with you, what I’m doing when I refer to any of these things is refer to everything, everywhere, all at once, to the whole universe. Because if it takes the entire universe to produce a single seed, as we just saw, the same is true of me, and this cup, and the computer, and every single atom and every molecule in each of those atoms down to the tiniest, infinitesimal particle. It is all everything, everywhere, all at once. That’s what Mu is. That’s the cypress tree in the garden.

That’s why, when the student asks Zhaozhou, “Please teach me the meaning of Zen without using things,” and Zhaozhou says, “The cypress tree in the garden,” and the student protests, “But I asked you to teach me without using things,” Zhaozhou answers calmly, “I’m not teaching you using things.” What he’s saying is, That cypress tree is not a thing different from all other things, not different from anything we might conventionally call Not a cypress tree. It’s not a thing at all

Many years ago I interviewed the poet Margaret Gibson, and she said that when she was a child—maybe about 8 years old—she was standing on her porch one night when she looked up at the sky and suddenly thought:

“What if there’s nothing?” An eight-year-old’s intuition—unencumbered by knowledge and peer pressure—of the way things really are.

“What if there is no thing?”

Then she got scared and thought, “That’s nonsense! Here I am, asking the question,” and just like that, with that tiny word, she established her beingness, her thingness, and it was good.

[…]

But Zuisei, come on, I can hear some of you think, when I stand and look out the window and see a tree, it looks very real. It looks like a thing to me. That’s exactly it—it looks like a thing. Conventionally, it appears as a cypress tree, or a cup, or Zuisei. Ultimately, it is everything, everywhere, all at once. But don’t come say that to me in daisan because that’s just an explanation. You’ll have to show me how it is true, right now. Otherwise it’s a nice thought experiment, and nothing more.

 

Wisdom is knowing that nothing is inevitable, except death—
and that even that is not what we think.

 

But why does it matter that we see things this way? Well, it matters very much, because it means that when I act, I act upon everything. When I want, I want everything in the universe—which is one way of explaining why desire never ends, why greed is so ubiquitous. It’s like a perpetual motion machine. Even when you get the thing you thought you wanted, the want is still there, isn’t it? It’s like this itch you can’t fully scratch. So, to put an end to desire is not to put an end to our want. It’s to see that there are no things, including the person who desires. There is no thing to want. When you see that, desire disappears of itself. Ignorance disappears too, and the chain of dependent origination is broken.

The nice thing is that this interdependence also works cataphatically, through the via positiva. When I make a vow, that vow also extends throughout space and time to touch everything in the universe—that’s the only way it can work. Someone said to me recently, it doesn’t make sense to set an intent or make a vow for some time in the future because there is no such thing. Yes! I said. Exactly!

Let’s say that at the beginning of the year, I decide to make a vow to not lie in any of its forms. I vow to not use exaggeration or hyperbole or white lies or omission or anything that protects the self from the blunt reality of truth. When I make that vow, I’m not making it for tomorrow or next week or next month or for the 364 days of the year. I’m making it for this instant, and this instant reaches everywhere. Then, if I forget, I restate my vow, and that instant reaches everywhere. As Eckart Tolle says, “There’s only the now!” Now and now and now. But I say it and pssssh! It’s gone!

It’s like that koan of Deshan and the tea lady:

Deshan is on a pilgrimage—he’s actually on a crusade to go south and teach the ignorant southerners, according to him, about the Diamond Sutra—when he stops by the side of the road to have some tea.

The tea seller asks him what he’s up to, and Deshan says, “Well, I’m an expert on the Diamond Sutra. See all my books?” Humility was not his strong suit.

The tea lady says, “Oh, that’s great! Then let me ask you a question. In the Diamond Sutra it says, ‘Past mind cannot be grasped, present mind cannot be grasped, future mind cannot be grasped.’ Is that right?”

“That’s right,” Deshan says

“Well,” the old tea lady answers, “then tell me, o Reverend: with which mind will you take this tea?”

And Deshan cannot answer.

He still thinks the tea is a thing, he is a thing, past, present, and future, the mind—all things. He doesn’t yet know he’s facing everything, everywhere all at once. But the question remains, what does that look like? How do you answer when asked the same thing? With which mind will you drink your tea, listen to this talk, pay your bills? And how does this put out the fire burning in our world? (Because it does.)

This dharma talk on Dependent Origination was given by Vanessa Zuisei Goddard, Zen Buddhist Guiding Teacher of Ocean Mind Sangha. Audio podcast and transcript available.

 
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