6. Ignorance

Given the importance that Ven. Sāriputta placed on the central role of desire and passion in the Buddha’s teachings, it’s odd that the standard description of dependent co-arising doesn’t mention the words “desire” or “passion” at all. This seems even odder in light of a fact that the Buddha noted in another context: All phenomena are rooted in desire. The only thing not rooted in desire is unbinding, (nibbāna—better known by its Sanskrit name, nirvāṇa), which isn’t really a thing. It’s the final end of all phenomena (AN 10:58). Everything else, good or bad, skillful or unskillful, is rooted in desire.

The question is, how can this principle be squared with dependent co-arising? The answer is that if we poke around in the discussions surrounding the standard description of dependent co-arising and its alternative versions, we find that even though desire and passion are not explicitly mentioned anywhere in the list, implicitly they’re everywhere.

We can start by noting the role they play in giving rise to the ignorance that lies at the start of the standard description of dependent co-arising. This ignorance is a specific kind of ignorance: ignorance of the four noble truths. These are the truths of:

A full understanding of these truths would entail a full understanding of all the Buddha’s teachings. And not only that: It would entail mastering a wide range of skills related to those truths. So, even though the following description of these truths is a little long, remember that it’s only an introductory sketch.

The four noble truths can briefly be defined as follows:

1) Suffering (the Pali word here, dukkha, can also be translated as “stress” or “pain”): The Buddha lists many instances of suffering that are familiar to everyone—the suffering of birth, aging, and death; sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, despair; being with things and people you don’t love, being separated from things and people you do love; not getting what you want.

Then the discussion gets less familiar as the Buddha points to what all these forms of suffering have in common: the five clinging-aggregates. These are called aggregates because, on their own, they’re random heaps or masses of phenomena. They’re called clinging-aggregates, not because the aggregates cling, but because they’re the objects of clinging.

The aggregates are the five things mentioned by Sāriputta as the objects of desire and passion:

The act of clinging to these aggregates can come in any of four types:

The aggregates, on their own, can be either pleasant or painful (SN 22:60). The act of clinging to any of the aggregates in any of the above four ways is what constitutes suffering.

By discussing suffering in this way, the Buddha is casting his net wide: He’s making it clear that he means to cover all forms of mental suffering, so that when he teaches the cessation of suffering, he’s teaching the total solution to mental suffering of every type.

2) The cause of suffering: any act of craving that leads to becoming. Becoming is the act of taking on an identity in a world of experience centered on a desired object. An example would be thinking about an ice cream cone: The ice cream appears in your imagination and is located in certain surroundings, also in your imagination, such as a refrigerator or an ice cream shop. You then decide that you want it, and then mentally enter into the world of those surroundings as you decide how to obtain the ice cream, taking on the role of the agent who will do what’s needed to get it. Aspects of the outside world or your general identity as a human being that are relevant to the issue of obtaining the ice cream are part of the world and your identity in that particular becoming. Aspects that are not relevant to the issue of obtaining ice cream—such as the weather in another part of the world or your tastes in music—are not.

These worlds, and the identities in them, can exist on any of three levels: the level of sensuality, the level of form (as in states of concentration focused on the form of the body as felt from within), or the level of formlessness (as in states of concentration focused on formless phenomena, such as space, nothingness, or consciousness) (AN 3:77). Becomings can happen on the macro or micro level: macro on the level of the physical world, micro on the level of worlds in the mind. Your identity as a human being in this human world would count as a macro-level becoming. More fleeting identities and worlds in your imagination would count as micro-level becomings.

Macro-level becomings come from micro-level ones. A micro-level becoming at the moment of death, for instance, can lead to rebirth in a world on the macro level—another indication of the mind’s power to shape experience.

There are three types of craving that lead to becoming:

This last instance may seem counterintuitive, but the Buddha regarded it as one of his most important insights that, in taking on the desire that either you or the world you inhabit be destroyed, you’re also taking on a new identity (MN 49).

3) The cessation of suffering is the abandoning, through dispassion, of all these three types of craving.

4) The path to the cessation of suffering is the noble eightfold path—right view, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. These eight factors come under what’s called the triple training of:

You’ll notice that the factors of the path listed under the triple training follow an order different from the order they follow in the noble eightfold path. That’s because the two lists are ordered on different principles. The noble eightfold path lists the path factors in the order in which you undertake them: First you listen to the Dhamma and try to understand it, pondering it to see that it makes sense. That’s the beginning of right view. Then you develop a desire to practice it, which is the beginning of right resolve. These two factors then guide your practice of the remaining factors that develop virtue and concentration.

The triple training, on the other hand, lists the factors in the order in which they’re mastered: first virtue, then concentration, then discernment. Training in virtue makes you more sensitive to your intentions and more honest in judging them, which helps in the development of honest concentration, able to see through the deceptions that can easily arise in a quiet mind. The practice of concentration, as you enter into four levels of absorption (jhāna) in a single preoccupation, gives you hands-on experience in dealing with the desires and passions of the mind as you try to bring them to stillness. This trains your discernment to see these desires and passions more clearly and to judge their results more accurately, to the point where you can develop dispassion for them and bring the mind to release.

These factors constitute the how-to training for the subduing of desire and passion—although here it’s important to notice three things:

a) All of the factors are mutually reinforcing. It’s not the case that you have to master one factor before you can attempt the second one, or that you can master one part of the triple training without help from the others. For instance, the Canon says that at the point in the practice where you’ve completed your mastery of virtue, you also have a partial mastery of concentration and discernment as well (AN 3:87). A simile from DN 4 states that it’s like washing your hands. Your left hand washes your right; your right hand washes your left. In the same way, virtue washes discernment—which, in the context of the simile, means discernment together with concentration—while discernment washes your virtue.

b) The descriptions of all four truths in the discernment factor of right view are part of the how-to. The Buddha doesn’t make a distinction between theory and practice. How you view the problem of suffering is an important part of how you can put an end to it.

c) If you compare the factors of the path with the four forms of clinging, you’ll notice that the path actually makes use of three of the four. This means that as you follow the path, you’ll feed off of those factors instead of feeding off the unskillful types of clinging that simply left you in suffering.

• In holding to right view, you hold to a skillful form of view.

• In holding to the factors of virtue and concentration, you hold to skillful habits and practices;

• In holding to right effort, you motivate yourself by developing a skillful sense of self playing three roles: as a responsible agent, capable of following the path (AN 4:159); as the person who will benefit from following the path (AN 3:40); and as the inner commentator who can reflect intelligently on how well your practice is going, so that it can offer helpful comments on how to improve your skills (AN 6:20).

The only form of clinging not used by the path is clinging to sensuality. However, the path does provide a skillful alternative source of pleasurable mental food to compensate for renouncing sensuality: the pleasures of right concentration.

Ultimately, of course, these forms of clinging will have to be abandoned once they’ve fulfilled their duties, so that your release from suffering will be complete. As we will see later, clinging is identical with passion and desire, which means that to follow the path, you have to develop desire and passion for skillful views, skillful habits and practices, and skillful senses of self. This means further that the way the Buddha has you use clinging in the course of the training is simply one of many instances of how he recommends using desire and passion strategically along the path. The factors of the path are designed in such a way as to aim your desires and passions in a skillful direction, but they also contain implicit directions for how to let them go when they’ve completed their work.

It’s for this reason that the Buddha compared the path to a raft that you build out of twigs and branches on this side of the river, and that you hold on to as you swim to freedom the other side (MN 22; SN 35:197). Once you’re there, you don’t need to carry it around on your head. You let it go with a sense of appreciation for it, and then you’re free to go on your way as you see fit.

These four truths are called noble because they inform the search for a noble goal: the dimension that’s free of aging, illness, death, sorrow, and defilement (MN 26). The Canon also lists two other reasons for why they’re noble:

1) They are “real, not unreal, with no alteration” (SN 56:27). In other words, they’re always true.

2) They are taught by the noble one, the Buddha (SN 56:28).

As we stated above, the ignorance that drives dependent co-arising to lead to suffering is ignorance of these four noble truths. One of the ways of being ignorant of these truths is that you simply haven’t been informed of them. Another way is knowing about them but without having mastered them as skills. You don’t apply them to your experience, and as a result you haven’t completed the duties appropriate to them:

Before you can complete these duties, of course, you need some guidance in how to take them on. That will be the purpose of the remainder of this book: to explain these duties and, in particular, to show the role of desires and passions in the context of mastering those duties, both as targets to be subdued and as tools to be used in their subduing. As we noted in Chapter 4, dependent co-arising provides the main framework for the body of this book. From this point on, we’ll be focusing on how to take advantage of the main shift in the sequence of causes in dependent co-arising—from ignorance to knowledge of the four noble truths—to turn the sequence away from causing suffering and to redirect it toward suffering’s end.