Thu, 18 Mar 2010
Uphill Climb
I have this recurring dream where I'm going somewhere and the road keeps getting steeper and steeper until I wake up out of a sense of frustration. Now we're coming to the steep part of the grade in the Heart Sutra:
and no ignorance or ending of ignorance, up to and including no old age and death or ending of old age and death.
This is the twelvefold chain of dependent origination (pratiyasamutpada). Ignorance and all that arises from ignorance is what binds us to samsara. Without explaining all twelve links, the core of the process is that from the contact of the five senses arises pleasant feelings, and from pleasant feelings arises attachment. And all of this arises from ignorance. But what is this ignorance? It is what has just been explained. There is no independently existing object out there whhich meets and independently existing mind in here, and thus there is no contact between the two. When it is seen that both the experience and the experiencer are unreal, merely dependently arisen phenomena, then there is no basis for attachment to unrise. It's not enough to intellectually understand all phenomena are dependently arisen, you have to come to a definite understanding of this truth through your meditation practice. Once this key link is broken, the whole chain falls apart. But it never was real, hence there is no old age and death nor ending of old age and death. This point will be explained further in the next section.
