5. Fueled by Intention

The Buddha’s main impersonal teaching takes the general principle of this/that conditionality and works it out in detail, in terms of specific events. It’s called dependent co-arising. This is his explanation of how actions and events in your immediate experience arise together with the causes, also in your immediate experience, upon which they depend. In its most basic form, this teaching lists a sequence of causal factors, starting with events in the mind and ending with suffering. It’s an explanation of how suffering involves, step by step, many specific mental actions working together.

The Canon contains several different versions of the sequence of causes. The differences among these versions can be explained by the fact that even though the general outlines of how suffering happens are the same for everyone, the specifics vary for each person and for particular instances of suffering. The differences also come from the complexity of this/that conditionality itself, with its potential for many different feedback loops.

One important feature that all the lists have in common is that they play out on many levels and in many time frames: across many lifetimes or from moment-to-moment in the mind. In line with this/that conditionality, an instance of suffering you experience right now can be the result of something you did either right now or lifetimes ago—or a combination of the two. The sequence of events can occur in the flash of an eye or over eons.

Each of the lists is long, but as the Canon points out, it’s not necessary to know an entire list. In practice, all you have to do is to bring knowledge to a particular causal connection—knowledge of what it is, how it’s caused, how it ceases, and the path of practice leading to its cessation. That severs that particular connection, which in turn brings the entire causal sequence leading to suffering to an end (MN 9; Sn 3:12).

So first we’ll focus on the factors dealing directly with kamma and its results.

One of the distinctive features of every formulation of dependent co-arising is the large number of factors occurring prior to input at the six senses. Even before you see a sight or hear a sound, activities in the mind that occur in ignorance can already prime you to suffer, even if the sight or sound is pleasant. The standard description (SN 12:2) places these prior factors in this order:

For our purposes here, we don’t need to understand the entire list. We can focus just on the factors dealing with kamma past and present.

Start with the six sense media. These, as we’ve noted, should be seen as the results of old kamma. Then, as you work back through the list from there, you find two factors that deal explicitly with intention in the present moment—your present-moment kamma: name-and-form on the one hand, and fabrications on the other. Because the six sense media come after fabrication and name-and-form in the list of factors, this means that you experience your new kamma in the present even before you experience the results of your old kamma.

Examples of this fact are very common: You approach a situation with ideas of what you want to get out of it even before you’ve encountered it. Or your palette of preconceived notions—political, religious, social—colors what you’ll see even before you see it.

What’s radical about the Buddha’s teaching here is in saying that your experience of old kamma, the six senses, is totally dependent on present kamma.

Therein lies hope. If your new kamma is done in ignorance, it’ll prime you to suffer from the results of old kamma, no matter how good your old kamma was. But if it’s done with knowledge, it can prime you in the other direction, toward suffering’s end, regardless of how bad your old kamma might have been. If there is no present-moment kamma at all, there’s no grounding for any experience of the six senses. That frees the mind to experience a dimension apart from the six senses. As we’ll see, that’s not a location, but it’s how suffering ceases.

Another distinctive feature of how present-moment intention is treated in dependent co-arising is that it always appears in factors that are composed of clusters of physical and mental events. This means that many physical and mental events can have an immediate effect on your intentions, and vice versa. This opens the possibility for very fast feedback loops of cause and effect in the mind.

Consider first how intention appears in the factor of name-and-form, or mental and physical events, as one of the sub-factors of “name.” There it’s clustered with:

• Feeling, here, means feeling-tones of pleasure, pain, or neither pleasure nor pain.

• Perceptions are mental labels—images or individual words—that identify what something is, what it means, or what it’s worth. An example of all three aspects of perception would be when you come to a red light at an intersection: You perceive the light as “red,” you perceive that it means “stop,” and you perceive it as “worth obeying.”

• Attention is the act of focusing on what you regard as important or interesting, and ignoring what you regard as not. As the Buddha explains the act of attention, he notes that it’s often a matter of focusing on the questions you want to see answered and ignoring the ones whose answers don’t interest you (MN 2).

• Contact in this context means contact among events in the mind—as when a perception or feeling influences an intention, or when you pay attention to one perception rather than to another.

It’s because of contact among these mental events that feedback loops in the mind can happen very quickly. For instance, you can give rise to an unskillful intention, it produces a mental feeling of pain, you generate a perception as to why the feeling has occurred, and you intend to do something about it. This allows you to correct for your unskillful actions if you’re paying proper attention.

An example would be when you feel anger and give rise to a split-second intention to say something hurtful to someone you love. That intention causes a twinge of pain. You pay attention to what you’re doing, and immediately perceive that the pain is connected to the intention, so now you formulate a new intention to abandon the original one. This is how you can self-correct.

However, the process also has plenty of room for compounding an unskillful action, as when you aren’t paying attention to what you’re doing or you perceive the cause of the pain as something other than the original intention. For instance, you can easily blame your mental pain on the person you’re angry at, and this fortifies the intention to do harm. This is how the mind spirals out of control.

The possibility for error explains why our desires can often be deluded, but the possibility for giving rise to new, more accurate perceptions and acts of attention explains why we can correct our ways. As we’ll see, it’s precisely this possibility that the Buddha exploits when he teaches people to bring knowledge to the acts of their minds.

Now consider the second location in which intention occurs prior to sensory contact, even earlier in the sequence, prior to the factor of name-and-form. That’s the factor of fabrication, which is placed at the beginning of the causal sequence right after ignorance. “Fabrication” is sometimes treated as a synonym for intention (SN 22:56); sometimes it’s explained as assembling mental and physical phenomena for the sake of a purpose (SN 22:79). The Pali term for fabrication—saṅkhāra—literally means “putting together.” It’s the creative, purposeful function of the mind.

The Canon classifies many types of fabrications, but in the context of dependent co-arising, the focus is on three: bodily, verbal, and mental.

These three fabrications occur on two levels of scale: macro and micro. On the macro level, in the world at large, the word fabrications denotes any intentional bodily, verbal, or mental actions that lead to good or bad levels of rebirth (AN 4:237). On the micro level, in your experience of the body and mind as you feel them from within in the present, bodily fabrication denotes the in-and-out breath; verbal fabrication denotes the way you talk to yourself. This the Canon divides into two processes: directed thought, where you choose a topic to talk about, and evaluation, where you examine the topic, ask questions about it, or make comments on it. Finally, mental fabrication denotes feelings and perceptions, which we’ve already encountered under “name,” above (MN 44).

The macro level of fabrication comes from the micro level. Without the in-and-out breath, you couldn’t engage in any bodily action. Without talking to yourself, you couldn’t break into speech. And without feelings and perceptions, you couldn’t engage in other mental activities. This, as we’ll see, is why meditation focused on these micro-level fabrications in the present moment can have an impact not only now but also far into the future. You’re focusing directly on kamma right as it begins. That puts you in a good place, as you meditate, to send it in the right direction from the very start.

Also note that even though feeling and perception appear both under “fabrication” and “name,” they play different roles in relation to intention in the two contexts. Under name, feeling and perception are mental events that can have an influence on intention and can be influenced by it. Under fabrications, though, the fact that feeling and perception are listed as fabrications means that they inherently contain an intentional element right within them. Not only can intention influence them, its influence is part and parcel of how they come to be. Without intention, you wouldn’t experience feeling and perception at all.

This point, in fact, applies to all five of the objects that Sāriputta, in his imagined dialog with people in foreign lands, listed as the objects of desire and passion: form, feeling, perception, fabrications, and consciousness. Not only do we feel desire and passion for these aggregates, but our desire and passion for fabricating them also plays an important role in bringing them into being in the present moment (SN 22:79). It actualizes the potentials for these things coming in from old kamma. The present moment is a construction site, fueled by intention. Because it’s perpetually under construction, it’s not a place where you can find unending peace. And as long as the intentions responsible for constructing things in the present are influenced by ignorance, those constructions will collapse on us, either right away or over time, making us suffer.

Or you can make a comparison to cooking: Your past kamma provides the raw food that your present intentions put into a form that you can actually feed on. If your present-moment skills are meager—if you know only how to put your food into a fire, for instance—you can make yourself a miserable meal even if the ingredients in your pantry today are good. But if you have a wide variety of skills—if you bring knowledge and skill to your present-moment fabrications and acts of intention—you can make a good meal even out of ingredients that are bad.

As we’ll see, the Buddha focuses a lot of attention on developing precisely these skills.