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Guided Meditation: Conditioned Arising

Well, good morning everybody, good day. I'm aware that this is being webcasted as well, and so there may be folks joining online. So we have to stretch our imagination to feel the sense of practicing together in multiple forms.

We'll start with a meditation. This morning, I wanted to invite in our meditation paying particular attention to the conditioned nature of our experience. I'll offer some guidance, maybe particularly at the beginning of the meditation and maybe towards the end, and hopefully those pointers will offer something for you to explore in our meditation.

So we'll begin our meditation by maybe just beginning to pay attention to our sitting position and sitting postures. If you'd like to close your eyes, feel free to gently close your eyes, or if you like to keep them open, that's fine also.

The first few moments arriving at our seats and our cushions, allow this arriving to be just taking its time, letting it take its time. Maybe having some generosity towards this process of arriving. Sometimes there is a sense for me as if the flights are landing, I'm not completely stopped just yet and coming to our seats, arriving may feel a little bit like that.

Maybe our minds are still moving about, thinking this and that. Our bodily energy can feel a bit bubbly. Just by noticing that the arriving is happening, mindfulness is already here. Become available to this process however it's unfolding.

Taking a few long deep breaths. Maybe as you breathe out, allow that sense of arriving to settle even deeper. Become aware of this whole body sitting right here and right now.

In the first few moments of our sitting, I invite you to rest your awareness in the lower half of the body. What's the felt sense of sitting against the chairs, the floor? Pressure, a weight, underside. Maybe some sense of energetic settling downwards. Supported by earth, grounded.

We can tune in to the stability aspect of the body by resting in the felt sense of the earth element. Firmness of the bones, the stability of the pelvic floor supporting the rest of the body. Sitting like a mountain.

We can expand to include the earthy feeling of the rest of the body. Maybe the strength of the spine, the weight of the limbs. Steady.

Maybe you already noticed with the steadiness as the backdrop, there is a movement in the body, movements of the breath. Dancing sensations of the body. Receiving both the steadiness and the movements.

We can expand our awareness even further to receive the movements in the mind, the emotions, our dancing emotions in our experience. Thoughts, memories. Waves of emotions, or ripples. Including in our field of awareness all experiences coming through our senses. Sound, smell.

Today I would like to invite you, if you like, to pay particular attention on how experiences arise and pass as a conditioned phenomenon. Maybe the sound of my voice coming, you hear the words, having some perceptions of it. And noticing what arises right after that. Curiosity, aversion, too much, too little. And there may be stories about it, about yourself, others. This comes through a conditioned process. With a sense contact of hearing, evaluation and judging and storytelling arises. And noticing how they pass away.

Becoming really interested in the unfolding of your lived experience right here and now, not to think about it, trying to figure it out. Just sitting here, becoming available to the unfolding of our experiences.

If you find yourself having wandered away from the here and now, it's never too late to simply return to the simplicity of this experience right now, right here.

Existence and Nonexistence and Exploration of the Kaccana Sutta

So good to see you all, to be with you all. What's on my mind today to share as a dharma talk, I'll continue to invite you into a simplicity of being as you listen. Just bring your body along, bring your mind along, and check in on how you are periodically. What I'm offering is not separate from it.

I want to start by sharing a story. I recently read an article by Lama Rod Owens^[1] called Do You Know Your True Face? In this article, he wrote about the period after his three-year dharma teacher training program where he felt quite uninspired and even used the word "breakdown." It was challenging, so he turned towards it and very quickly he had an insight into what was happening. These are the words that he wrote: he said that "My identity as a lama and a resident teacher had somehow choked my identity as a queer Black man. I was privileging the lama over Rod." Rod, this being, has many different needs, different roles, and different identities, and the Rod got subsumed by lama and the resident teacher.

When I read this, I immediately resonated with it deeply and found much humility and wisdom in what he said. I think all of us probably have seen this version affecting ourselves. In the pursuit of our own ambition, our hobby, our passion, or simply wanting to be who we wanted to be—really wanting to be very inspired for being this person—we may have choked or suffocated other aspects of our beings.

I want to share a story of my own. I remember some years ago in my work life, I was very busy and was doing very well, and I got caught up by the momentum of it. I remember there was one morning that I had to get up to do a presentation that happened at 5:30 in the morning to a very important client. I had hoped that my baby boy wouldn't wake up at 5:30 in the morning. He was very young. But the moment I started my presentation, he was sitting upstairs crying, "Mommy, mommy." I ignored him because I had a very important presentation right now and I had to go do that. I finished my presentation and went upstairs to check on him. He was sitting by the stairs very quietly, holding a piece of paper in his hands. I looked at the paper—he barely was able to write anything at that time—and it said, "You are the baddest mom I ever knew."

That was a wake-up moment. Just like Lama Rod Owens, I was privileging a scientist, a career woman, over a mother, a spouse, and the rest of me.

It's worthwhile to notice that in each of us, there's a whole community within us, and there's a whole community around us. Our dharma practice invites us to become aware there's a whole dynamic of the different aspects of our being. When we're not aware, it's very easy that we create favorites: the ones that we really want to be, and the ones that we'd rather they don't exist.

This brings me to a short sutta that I want to share with you today called Kaccana^[2]. This is in the Samyutta Nikaya^[3] and in the chapter around dependent origination. In the sutta, Venerable Kaccana is asking the Buddha a question about how to define right view.

Many of you might be very familiar with the notion of right view, which is the first path factor of the Noble Eightfold Path. In this sutta, the Buddha had a very specific definition for it which I want to share. But in answering this question, the Buddha first made a few quite dramatic statements. He began by saying: "This world mostly relies on the dual notions of existence and non-existence."

Let me unpack this a little bit, first by unpacking the word "world." When the Buddha spoke about the world, the world is not necessarily something "out there," but the world is often defined as our direct experiences through our sense contacts—our six senses: sight, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and mental activities. Through this, our subjective experience comes about. We make contacts with the sound, with the smell, and we can directly experience what's happening. The broader world is kind of experienced through our senses as well. So there is, in a way, no world out there, but through our direct experience with the senses.

The world mostly, or by and large, relies on the notions of existence and non-existence. So what does this mean? Existence and non-existence—in the Chinese parallel, they use the words "becoming" and "non-becoming." Some of you might be familiar with this, and it's often present in the suttas. If we go back to the stories I told earlier, we can see that sometimes we get stuck on the idea of who we are, our identities, our roles. "I am so-and-so, and so I must do so-and-so." When we have these kinds of ideas, sometimes they're very deep and subtle. We don't even know they exist. Sometimes they may be very visible momentarily, but when they really are at the core of our being, what happens is that we can orient and organize our whole life around these ideas. If you want to be or you are a great poet, then your whole life activities could be centered around that notion. At six o'clock in the evening, you might forget about putting dinner on the table, or your child is asking to go out and play in the backyard, but you think, "No, I'm busy, I gotta write this poem." And so these ideas can become a basis, or in this notion, we rely on those ideas to live our lives.

The opposite could be true also. Some of us may have parts of ourselves we would rather not be there. We have certain ideas that, "Maybe I'm just not this material, I'm just not an artist." Maybe that's something that happened very early on in our life. When we were very young, we had these ideas, "I'm not good enough for a certain thing," and that got reinforced by the culture around us or the environment that we're in, and then we have deep-seated ideas that this is who we are and, no, we're just not that.

With these kinds of ideas, what can happen is that we also organize our lives around these ideas, or organize activities around these kinds of activities. Maybe we don't care about this part of us at all. We may even be violent against them when these parts of us show up. So there can be this sense of what the Buddha is pointing to, relying on non-existence, kind of really denying that.

Lama Rod Owens in his article spoke a bit about this. He said, "To resist naming our identity locations is to commit a kind of aggression toward ourselves and to further obscure blind spots that hurt others. Others are hurt when they're not seen. Invisibility is another form of violence and oppression." So this non-existence, in a way, is also pointing at the invisibility that can happen.

Because these ideas are not the reality of our direct experience... in our direct experience, maybe we are working on poems or doing some activities for a while, being a poet, but the other situation comes up for caring for others, and caring for ourselves happens. Then the situation changes. In the situational transitions, can we recognize that is happening and honor that that is how that is happening in our experience right now? When we don't, we hang on to that idea of "I am so-and-so," we rub against the reality of the situation, and that rubbing against begins to create a lot of stress in ourselves and for others. These are not mistakes that we blame ourselves for, but it's pointing to the fact that when we're not aware of what is happening, we can live huge parts of our lives based on these kinds of ideas without us knowing it.

We can also see that those ideas can play at a societal level. Certain categories of people may have certain ideas about being more worthy of their existence, and others may have the opposite. You can see a lot of the inequality, conflicts, and injustice begin to bubble up from these kinds of ideas, and they often can trace down to the notions of existence and non-existence, of becoming and non-becoming. It's quite humbling to see those ideas live and operate in us in quite deep ways.

The Buddha continues to point out the deeper phenomenon that exists behind these notions. I want to just point out for some of you who might be very geeky about this, the way that I'm choosing to express the unfolding of the sutta is based on the Chinese parallel version. They have a different order in terms of how the teaching is presented in the Pali Canon. It makes not a whole lot of a difference in what I'm presenting here, but for me that ordering seems to make a little more sense in my own mind.

The Buddha continues to say that the world is, for the most part, shackled by attraction, grasping, and existing. But when it comes to this attraction, grasping, mental fixation, existence, and underlying tendency, you don't get attracted, grasped, and committed to the notion "myself," you will have no doubt or uncertainty that what arises is just suffering arising, and what ceases is just suffering ceasing. Your knowledge about this is independent of others. And this is how right view is defined.

So the first thing the Buddha is pointing out, after he spoke about the world mostly and by and large relying on the notions of existence and non-existence, is that he's pointing out a deeper force that keeps those ideas alive in us, and that is the forces of grasping, clinging, craving, and attachments. It's through grasping and attachment that these ideas are kept alive in us.

This is something for us to see in our direct experience. Without grasping, the idea "I am a scientist," "I am a career woman," is just momentary. It's a thought that comes from time to time and it goes—just a thought. But when there is a craving to continue to establish this—I like the translation word "commit," we commit to it again and again—now this idea becomes hardened in us more and more and can almost become a core of ourselves because "I am this person, right? I am."

What the Buddha is pointing at is to begin to see this underlying force of grasping, clinging, and craving. In our meditation, I also offered to maybe see this conditioned nature of our experience directly. These are things that we can see. We can even do a little experiment right now and see how the conditioned phenomenon of existence comes to be.

I'm going to tell you all a little secret about yourself that you don't know. Maybe you know, but pay attention to what I have to say and see what happens in your experience. I'm going to say this: You are all such wonderful yogis. Has anybody told you about this? You are all wonderful, brilliant yogis.

See what happens in your lived experience. Maybe there's some pleasantness in you, pleasant feelings in you, some recognition. Maybe sometimes there is that kind of a huff and puff, kind of leaning in, like, "Boy, wow, I am a great yogi." Or some of you might say, "But it can't be me, you know, that can't be me." You can see just by hearing something I said, there can be different responses coming out of it. Sometimes the sense of self is very obvious, and sometimes that sense of denial is very obvious, right?

This is the direction that the Buddha was pointing at: begin to notice that leaning in or pushing against. You can see, if the whole room is telling you the same thing, and watching this process happening again and again, "No doubt, I am a great yogi. There's no doubt." And here it is, a great setup before a failure, right? Somebody just shows up and mildly criticizes, boom, the whole bubble bursts. This commitment to this notion keeps these ideas held up there.

The notion of existence and non-existence can feel quite abstract, high level, and philosophical. But this right view, the definition of right view that the Buddha is pointing to, is really inviting us to see this directly in our lived experience. I like that the Chinese translation for right view also has a literal meaning of "direct seeing."

The second half of the sutta, the Buddha explained how this right view can be established through seeing. Here it goes: "But when you truly see the origin of the world with right understanding, you won't have the notion of non-existence regarding the world. And when you truly see the cessation of the world with right understanding, you won't have the notion of existence regarding the world."

There are two things happening here, and let's unpack this a little bit one by one. A few keywords here: "when you truly see with right understanding." Right understanding here, the Pali term is sammā paññā, right wisdom, a clear wisdom. When you see with wisdom, what do you see? Seeing the origin of the world. Seeing how the world, how phenomena arise. Seeing the conditioned nature of arising.

For example, we are all here in the situation of listening to a dharma talk and practicing together. This is the arising of the situation, but it comes with a whole host of causes and conditions. You all probably drove, walked, and the schedule happened to be like this, and you and I are all present here. There's a whole host of conditions that led to the situation we're in right now, right here. We can't just say this doesn't exist. We can't just deny, "No, this doesn't exist, this is all just a fantasy." No, in our direct experience, we experience this truthfully. There's a truth to this existence. So when we know this, the notion of "nothing truly exists," "all doesn't exist," that makes no sense, right? That's what the Buddha was pointing at. When we see the conditioned arising of our phenomena, "nothing exists" makes no sense.

And then, "when we truly see the cessation of the world." When we truly see the ending of our experiences, the notion of a permanent existence, long-lasting existence, makes no sense. We see that the meeting ends, the situation ends. Things stop. We can't just say, "Oh, this is going to go on forever," that makes no sense.

What the Buddha is pointing at is in our lived experience, when we begin to clearly see the arising and passing, and the conditions leading to arising and passing, we begin to see for ourselves that hanging on to these notions of existence and non-existence totally makes no sense. We know this for ourselves.

What that entails is very simple, direct awareness. Really being present for this arising and passing. Because what can happen oftentimes is that we don't quite see, so we just hold on to that notion in our head most of the time. In a way, our meeting ended, but we're still thinking, "Oh, this would happen again," and we just kind of have ideas to keep things going.

In his article, Lama Rod Owens speaks about "radical presence" that points to this particular dimension of being aware. He says, "Radical speaks to a sense of remembering and returning to a simple and basic way of being in the world. When we choose this way of being in the world, we feel at home in our own body with no desire to leave it. Because we feel at home in the body, we feel at home in the world. This is a radical presence."

When we know this conditioned arising and the passing of our experiences, what can happen is that we grant fluidity to our identities. It can float depending on the situation we're in. This moment we can be students and teachers, the next moment we might be buddies. We can become fluid, and we don't have to carry all these ideas along with us. Lama Rod Owens had this sentence which spoke to me deeply. He said, "Practice grants us the space to allow this shifting to happen and to call that shifting our home."

Instead of relying on notions that seem to be quite permanent and persistent, making that your home and ground, here we rely on the ever-shifting, changing of our direct experience, and call that our home.

I want to end by sharing the next piece of the Buddha's teaching, which probably really needs another dharma talk, but I think we will just end with that, and I'll do a quick summary after that. The Buddha went on to give the teachings on the middle way. He says, "Oh Kaccana, 'All exists'—this is one extreme. 'All does not exist'—this is the second extreme. Without veering towards either of these extremes, the Tathāgata^[4] teaches the dharma by the middle."

This teaching by the middle is not in between existence or non-existence, but the teaching by the middle is the twelve-linked dependent origination of dukkha^[5], of suffering, and the dependent cessation of dukkha. Usually this link starts with: with ignorance as condition, volitional formations come to be. With volitional formations as condition, consciousness comes to be. And then all twelve links all the way to how the whole mass of suffering comes to be. So there are twelve links of this.

And then the cessation also follows a similar pattern. It says something like this: with the remainderless fading away and cessation of ignorance comes the cessation of volitional formations. With the cessation of volitional formations, the cessation of consciousness. And all the way to the cessation of the whole mass of dukkha, or suffering.

Maybe what's more important is not necessarily to kind of remember these twelve links, but to begin to really pay attention to our lived experience: how dukkha comes about, and how it ceases. Begin to see the underlying conditionality in our direct experience, because when we know this for ourselves—and the sutta said that your knowledge is independent of others—no one else can talk you out of it, because you know this for yourself. And that begins to offer a potential to shift, shift the perspective, shift our behaviors.

I want to end with this quote from the activist James Baldwin^[6]. He said, "I am what time, circumstance, and history have made of me, certainly, but I am also much more than that. So are we all."

When we see the conditioned nature of our experience, we can acknowledge what is here, what is here right now, what is true for ourselves. Not denying, not indulging. But when we see this, we also let go of the limitations of notions of who we are. What this last line that he said points to is, "I am much more than that." All of us are. There is a vastness to all of our beings that is not defined by the limited notions and ideas and beliefs that we have, and that is known through our direct knowing of what is happening, what is here.

So thank you everybody for being here. We have a few minutes for any comments and questions or sharing or reflections you may have. The floor is open.

Q&A

Yogi: I appreciated and feel like I got what you just said, yet I haven't studied and I don't understand dependent origination. Do I need to understand that to have understood your main points today?

Ying Chen: Well, you seem to have answered the question for yourself! [Laughter] Yeah, so you have a sense in your own being. This talk is pointing at really beginning to pay attention to what is happening. Maybe when there is a chance to study, we don't have to resist that either, and come along, and that's good. But it's not dependent on that. I think what is more important is to begin to pay attention to what is happening.

Yogi: Do you have any recommendations for reading for understanding?

Ying Chen: [Laughter] There's so many. I'm sure even on AudioDharma, if you search for some talks on dependent origination, I'm pretty sure you'll find talks on this.

Yogi: I have a personal question. I heard that you started your path with Buddha dharma in Mahayana^[7] Buddhism, but then you got drawn to Theravada^[8]. This is actually my first time ever in a Theravada-type monastery. Can you elaborate on what the difference is between Mahayana and Theravada, and why you got drawn to Theravada?

Ying Chen: I feel a little hesitant, I don't feel I'm qualified to kind of give a real broader perspective. I can talk about my personal perspective and what happened to myself. I continue to hold both of the lineages with high regard and deep respect. I happened to start with Mahayana first, because I met Mahayana sanghas, and I resonated with a lot of teachings there, and a lot of the community that I really enjoyed. But the particular community I was part of, we didn't have a lot of meditative opportunities. I was very caught up by all the teachings in my head, and I just felt like my head was about to explode if I kept on doing the studying. I really needed to know this in my own experience.

So when I began my meditative practice, it was in the Theravada tradition. That's when I began to meditate, and that spoke so much to me. Today, I continue to maybe study and learn in different ways in different traditions, but now I bring along my lived experience and the direct experience-driven practice with me. That helps me understand a lot of Mahayana teachings. I wouldn't say a lot, but I understand certain dimensions of Mahayana teaching. This particular sutta I quoted, it was sometimes recognized as a seed of the Mahayana tradition because the scholar and practitioner Nāgārjuna^[9] had this profound teaching around the middle way, and this was the sutta he quoted. So there are maybe deep common roots.

Yogi: Just a little follow-up, so you mentioned direct experience. Do you mean direct insight or direct meditative experience? This is insight meditation I guess, right?

Ying Chen: Yeah, the practice that I'm mostly engaged in is the insight meditation process, like noting or mindful meditation. That also changed and shifted quite a lot over the years of practice. I did start with Mahasi Sayadaw's^[10] tradition, and that kind of continued to evolve and shift and change.

Yogi: I just wanted to appreciate your talk and your being here, and to loop back to the beginning of your talk with the experience of your child. I'm remembering that my own youngest child at one point said, "I'm going to go on Craigslist and find a better mom." [Laughter]

Ying Chen: I think all parents have been told this one way or another running their lives. They're very honest and truthful. It was great to have a mirror coming back.

Yogi: You mentioned the Chinese parallel scriptures. This is just a technical point because I'm kind of interested in this. But what I've heard is that since the Pali Canon is in a language that's close to what the Buddha originally spoke, that it must be primary or primal, and that the Chinese versions of the Pali Canon must therefore be a later translation, and so we can just stick with the Pali Canon because it's closer to the original. Yet I've also heard that there are a number of places in the Chinese versions that are clearer or make a little bit more sense, and that perhaps therefore the Pali Canon might be a later translation from the Chinese that didn't get the translation done very well. In other words, it's just not entirely clear if the Pali Canon is always closer to the original teachings, whatever they were. Does that make sense, or is this something you don't know about?

Ying Chen: My understanding is this is an ongoing scholarly study topic, for sure. There is no definitive statement to say that the parallels are later than the Pali Canon. There may be certain collections that one can make a little more definitive statement than others. The Chinese parallel comes from Sanskrit collections, so that's translated through the Sanskrit version. But it's not totally clear, actually, that there is such a definitive answer about which one is first and which one is later. So this is ongoing research still in this domain.

For me personally, looking at the different versions... I encourage those who have different mother tongues or different language capacities to look at different translations, and they can be quite meaningful. For me, because I wasn't born here and I didn't grow up here, I came when I became a young adult. I had very little emotional association with the English language. So with the translations, a lot of the emotional resonance with words is kind of learned, a taste. But with the Chinese translations, I have an immediate sense oftentimes with what they mean, in an almost somatic way.

So this is something for each of us to explore. I mean, looking at the different words, even the English translations, there are different English words that translate the same Pali term. So they may be helpful. That's a helpful aspect of studying and learning. Thank you for bringing that up. It's just a technical note, but sometimes the question does come up, and maybe it's just best to look at all the translations if you have access to more than one version, and just sort out for yourself what makes most sense to you. And I know that that may change over time! [Laughter]

I think we're almost at time. So thank you, thank you for your presence here, for being here and studying, learning, and practicing together with delight. My understanding is those who are online will have an online zoom-out, and for those who are here in person, we also have a hangout opportunity. We can go to the parking lot, and there are folding chairs that you can take to go to the parking lot. You can have tea or just chat a bit as a community, and that's just about 20, 30 minutes that we can be together. Thank you everyone.