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The Pali text tells us that as he listened to the Buddha’s sermon, Konda
But the Pali texts include another version of this first teaching session in the Deer Park. This describes a much longer and quite different process. The Buddha instructed the bhikkhus in pairs, while the other three went off to Varanasi to beg enough food for all six of them. It has been suggested that in these more intimate tutorials, the Buddha was initiating the bhikkhus in his special yoga, introducing them to the practice of “mindfulness” and the “immeasurables.” Certainly meditation was indispensable to enlightenment. The Dhamma could not become a reality or understood “directly” unless the aspirants were also sinking deeply into themselves and learning to put their minds and bodies under the Buddha’s yogic microscope. Konda
The reasoned formulation of the Dhamma was complementary to the practice of meditation, which enabled aspirants to “realize” it. Through yoga, the bhikkhus could identify with the truths that the doctrine tried to express. One of the most frequent subjects of Buddhist meditation was what was called the Chain of Dependent Causation (Paticcasamuppada), which the Buddha probably developed at a later stage as a supplement to the Truth of Suffering, even though the Pali texts say that he was contemplating this Chain immediately before and after his enlightenment. The Chain traces the life cycle of a sentient being through twelve conditioned and conditioning links, illustrating the transitory nature of our lives and showing how each person is perpetually becoming something else.
On [1] ignorance depends [2] kamma; on kamma depends [3] consciousness; on consciousness depends [4] name and form; on name and form depends [5] the sense organs; on the sense organs depends [6] contact; on contact depends [7] sensation; on sensation depends [8] desire; on desire depends [9] attachment; on attachment depends [10] existence; on existence depends [11] birth; on birth depends [12] dukkha; old age and death, sorrow, lamentation, misery, grief and despair.
This Chain became central to Buddhist teaching, but it is not easy to understand. Those who find it somewhat daunting can draw comfort from the fact that the Buddha once rebuked a bhikkhu who claimed to find it easy. It should be regarded as a metaphor, which seeks to explain how a person can be reborn when, as the Buddha was begi
The terms used in the Chain are rather obscure. “Name and form,” for example, was simply a Pali idiom for a “person”; “consciousness” (vi
The Chain begins with ignorance, which thus becomes the ultimate if not the most powerful cause of suffering. Most of the monks in the Ganges region believed that desire was the first cause of dukkha, while the Upanisads and Samkhya thought that ignorance of the nature of reality was the main bar to liberation. The Buddha was able to combine these two causes. He believed that each person is alive because he or she was preceded in a former existence by beings who did not know the Four Truths and could not, therefore, extricate themselves from Craving and Suffering. A person who was not correctly informed could make serious practical mistakes. A yogin might imagine, for example, that one of the higher states of trance was Nibbana and would not make the extra effort to achieve complete release. In most versions of the Chain given in the Pali texts, the second link is not kamma but the more difficult term sankhara (formation). But the two words both derive from the same verbal root: kr (to do). Sankhara has been somewhat clumsily translated: “states or things being formed or prepared.” Thus our deeds (kamma) are preparing the “consciousness” for a future existence; they are forming and conditioning it. Since the Buddha saw our intentions as mental kamma, the Chain points out that those emotions which motivate our external actions will have future consequences; a lifetime of greedy, deluded choices will affect the quality of our last, dying thought (vi