That which originates dependently
Does not cease and does not arise,
Does not come and does not go,
Is not annihilated and is not permanent,
Is not different and not the same—
To the true teacher who reveals this peace,
The complete pacification of constructs,
To the perfect Buddha, I bow down.
With these words of noble Nagarjuna, I wish to begin by paying homage to our Teacher, the Samyaksam-Buddha Shakyamuni. May the priceless and immaculate Triratna bless us all.
The World’s Teacher
Following his wondrous birth in the sacred Lumbini Grove, our Teacher grew to become a magnificent prince. Yet although he had been born into all manner of royal splendor and perfection, young prince Siddhartha was nonetheless moved by the painful and undeniable facts of impermanence. Therefore, in the darkness of night, the young Bodhisattva left behind the royal palace at Kapilavastu to instead pursue perfect wisdom and knowledge of the way things really are. Leading the life of a humble mendicant, he sought learning and insight from the most esteemed and powerful teachers of his time. But the Bodhisattva remained dissatisfied, spurred on and sustained by his compassionate, enlightened resolve. After years of intense austerities, he finally came to the banks of the Naranjana river and there took his seat by the tree of awakening. Thus, at midnight, he definitively conquered the deceptions of the maras and at dawn became the Buddha, demonstrating the way of true and complete awakening to the way all things are. We hear that soon after his awakening, the Buddha spoke these words, marveling at the nature of true insight, and with pity for the world:
Profound, peaceful, free from constructs, lucid,
and unconditioned—
Such is the nectar-like truth I have realized.
Were I to teach it, no one would understand,
So I will silently remain in the forest.
Nonetheless, heading a vast divine assembly, the great gods Brahma and Shakra went before the Buddha to offer their worship and to beseech him to share his liberating wisdom with the world. Responding to their prayers, and in accord with his compassionate vow, the Buddha thus went on to turn the wheel of Dharma. At the deer park at Sarnath near Varanasi, he set in motion the initial Dharma wheel on the four noble truths; at the Vulture Peak mountain near Rajgir, he turned the intermediate Dharma wheel on the absence of characteristics; and at Sravasti and elsewhere, he turned the final Dharma wheel on fine discernment. Thus, he skillfully conveyed to innumerable beings the path of peace and non-violence, as it manifests through the view of absence of self and dependent arising. Finally, at Kushinagar, our Teacher completed the cycle of great deeds of awakening. Demonstrating the way of mahāparinirvāṇa, he empowered his Sangha to embody and spread the teachings of the Dharma throughout the world.
Suffering and its causes, freedom and its path
As noble Nagarjuna states, the Buddha is a true teacher of peace. If we allow ourselves to sincerely listen to, investigate, and experience his teaching of profound dependent origination, we can all discover the path of natural peace, harmony, and the perfection of wisdom. Let us note the way our Buddha Bhagavan encourages us to meet his teachings with an open and critical mind. “Examine my words carefully,” he instructs us. “Be like a goldsmith, who tests and analyzes gold, and only accept my teaching once you yourself have seen its value.” What, then, is it that the Buddha teaches us? What is his message, and might there be something special to gain from following his teaching? Let us, as the Buddha himself advises us, examine these issues with an open and critical mind.
When in response to the prayers of the gods the Buddha began to teach, his first word was duḥkha, “suffering.” Nobody wants to suffer and yet every sentient being of the world must endure suffering, again and again. No matter how powerful, wealthy, respected, and successful we may be, no sentient being escapes pain, because nobody escapes impermanence. All things produced by causes and conditions are just transitory, and so there is nothing that we can truly rely on, nothing in which we can fully trust. No wandering being, whether high or low, is safe from suffering and misfortune, and we often find that those whom we might otherwise assume are the happiest in fact live in constant agony and fear. All that we build will, as the Buddha points out, sooner or later have to fall. Whatever we may succeed in gathering will at some point be depleted, and whomever we may meet and keep company with, eventually we must separate from. Birth always ends in death. These are sorrowful thoughts to think yet they are also quite simply matters of fact. And facts should be acknowledged and taken into account. Of course, nobody would bring impermanence and suffering to mind simply for the sake of dwelling on painful issues. On the other hand, if we dare acknowledge these hard facts, we can thereby also begin to explore what may lie behind and cause them.
The Buddha teaches that when we suffer it is not due to the wishes of some supernatural being who is the master of the world. Yet neither is it the case that suffering is an unavoidable part of the natural world. When we examine things carefully, we will, explains the Buddha, find that it is our own mind, with its ignorant and unwholesome habits, that is the creator of pain. With this insight comes a tremendous sense of empowerment, because when we know what it is that causes suffering, we can begin to take charge of the situation. We can begin to heal ourselves, and help others find health and happiness too. This healing and transformation of both ourselves and others is what the Dharma path is all about:
Do not commit any evil,
Do what is perfectly virtuous,
And tame your own mind—
That is the teaching of the Buddha.
Negative and positive actions, taming the mind
To follow the Buddha’s teaching we must then refrain from ten evils—three of which are committed physically, four verbally, and another set of three mentally. As followers of our Teacher, we must physically avoid killing other living beings, we must not take what was not properly given to us, and we must refrain from sexual misconduct. To avoid verbal evil, we must not lie, must not speak harshly, not create divisions among others, and we must refrain from idle chatter. Finally, to ensure that our minds do no evil, we must give up covetousness, ill will, and wrong views. But we are also instructed to “do what is perfectly virtuous.” Therefore, not only must we avoid the ten evils, we must also actively practice their opposites, the ten virtues: Rather than killing, we must save and protect the lives of others. Rather than taking what was not given, we must practice generosity, and rather than engaging in sexual misconduct we must abide by wholesome ethics. Likewise, avoiding the four evils of speech, we must instead speak the truth, speak gently, speak in ways that reconcile people and bring them together, and our speech should be meaningful and authentic. Finally, avoiding the three mental evils, we should rejoice in the successes of others, cultivate care, and develop knowledge of the way things really are.
These practices of restraint from evil and engagement with virtue gradually allow us to “tame our own minds.” Thus, through the practices of calm abiding, śamatha, and special insight, vispaśyanā, we may ultimately break free from the beginningless processes of evil and ignorance, achieving both liberation and complete awakening, and so accomplish the aims of both ourselves and all others.
Dependent arising as emptiness, emptiness as dependent arising
Misery, pain, and death come about due to the mind’s habituation to blind craving and aggression. Yet the dependent arising of the causes and effects of suffering rests on nothing but an error, a fundamental failure to see things as they actually are. The immaculate words of the Dharma reveal the way of profound emptiness beyond all the mind’s constructs. And by taking the path of reasoning, their truth can be seen with the eye of supreme, inalienable insight.
Just as a sprout depends on a seed, and just like “long” depends on “short,” everything is what it is because of, and in relation to, other things. And yet, those “other things” are also just like that: they too are dependent and contingent on still other things. And so it is, ad infinitum. If we look closer, we find that this seem ingly simple fact of dependency and contingency—pratītyasamutpāda—pertains to absolutely everything that we might possibly perceive or conceive of. Nothing appears or exits by virtue of itself, or by its own nature. Everything owes its very existence and identity to something else, and so the search for origins, or ground truth, can in principle go on forever. There is always something more, something new, to discover, consider, and investigate. Yet precisely this fact that all things are dependent is then also the fact of their profound emptiness. Nothing is anything in and of itself, and this state of affairs can be acknowledged just as well as any other fact of the world. But the emptiness of one is the emptiness of all: when taken to heart, this insight into dependent origination carries infinitely profound and auspicious implications, for both oneself and all others.
Birth and cessation, going and coming, permanence and destruction, self and other—all of that which at first glance seems to be so solidly and undeniably real can, as we open the eye of insight, be seen to resemble a dream or a magical illusion; vividly apparent and yet not at all real the way it appears. This insight frees the mind of the ties of obscuring thoughts and emotions, and we come to witness, explains our Teacher, the inseparable unity of the appearances of dependent arising and their profound nature of emptiness. As the Heart Sūtra teaches: “Form is empty. Emptiness is form. Emptiness is not other than form, and form is also not other than emptiness.” In the end, just as wetness cannot be separated from water, this present entity, or thought, is nothing else than the limitless field of all factors. Emptiness is, at once, both the nature and the necessary condition for all that appears.
The bodhisattva path
The Buddha encourages us to acknowledge the painful and dependently originating facts of existence, and on that basis discover the true nature of dependent origination—the profound emptiness that transcends the sphere of word and thought. It is a marvelous fact that if we allow ourselves to critically investigate his teachings, we will discover their undeniable truth and authenticity. Thus, with the attainment of profound and unshakable certainty, one’s faith in and devotion for the Teacher and his Teaching will be transformed and perfected.
With faith, compassion, and true insight, the bodhisattva passes through the gateway of the inconceivable. Realizing the natural unity of appearance and emptiness one travels, quickly and with ease, beyond the otherwise infinite ocean of painful existence. Having discovered the inconceivable wealth of the wisdom mind, the noble being will then fearlessly apply the methods of great compassion, mahākaruṇā, for the sake of others. Entering into innumerable forms of action for the benefit of others, one joins the universal activity of all the buddhas and bodhisattvas, bringing suffering sentient beings to the rich and bountiful continent of liberation. That journey from ceaseless pain to lasting, true happiness is not a matter of actually travelling somewhere. Yet as we see the profound reality that is the nature of things, the path has already been accomplished.
May whatever merit there may be in here recollecting our Teacher and his Teaching merge boundlessly with the goodness of all awakened ones and their offspring throughout space and time. May thus the brilliant sun of the Dharma of peace spread its liberating light throughout the world, and may innumerable flowers of wisdom and compassion in this way come to blossom in the hearts of us all.
