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Four Noble Truths: Nirodha (3 of 5) Arising and Cessation

This is the third talk on the third noble truth, the noble truth of the cessation of suffering. Now, some of you might know that a very central teaching of Buddhism and the Buddha himself is the idea of dependent co-arising^[1], the idea that things occur in dependence on other factors being present as well. Nothing exists spontaneously without any relationship to anything else. All things arise in relationship to other things that are also happening just prior to it, or while it is happening.

This idea of conditionality, that things arise based on conditions, is over and over again emphasized in the teachings of the Buddha. There are many reasons for this, and many ways that people are inspired by these teachings. Some people will dig deeply into the philosophy, the psychology, and the mysticism of conditionality, interdependence, and all these things.

In the early teachings of the Buddha, one of the central purposes of understanding that things arise because of conditions—that nothing arises spontaneously without any connection to anything else—is realizing that there is nothing which is permanent. Nothing exists independent of conditions, and so there is nothing unchanging that has always been there and always will be there. All things arise conditionally, and if the conditions change, they will cease and pass away in some way or another.

In the process by which the Buddha became awakened, there are various descriptions. One of the descriptions places a central role on cessation, nirodha^[2], the third noble truth, in coming to an understanding of dependent co-arising—that things arise because of conditions. It is presented in one of the stories of the Buddha's process of awakening with very strong emphasis, in very strong terms.

In this particular formulation or story, the Buddha realized what is known as the twelve-fold chain of dependent co-arising—how twelve factors come into play in the creation of suffering. But rather than emphasizing that the important understanding is conditionality, or seeing how things are dependent on each other, the Buddha makes a different conclusion. It is the culminating insight that comes after the Buddha, for the first time, understands this process of twelve-fold dependent co-arising.

He realized dependent co-arising, how deeply everything is arising conditionally. And then he exclaims—the way the language is written, it is really like a 'wow, this is how things are.' With the understanding of conditionality, he says: "Arising, arising. Thus regarding things unheard before, there arose in me vision, knowledge, wisdom, true knowledge, and light."

Those are grand terms. What he is emphasizing here is not just that he saw conditionality, but rather that conditionality broke up this idea that anything is permanent, that anything is constant and unchanging. It was his realization: "Wow, this is not constant. It is inconstant. It arises."

Seeing all that twelve-fold chain of dependent co-arising, he saw how if the conditions cease, all the others cease, and there is a cessation of suffering. This is a twelve-fold chain of dependent cessation, as opposed to the twelve-fold chain of dependent arising. When he saw this, he said similar words of exclamation, of celebration almost, that now he had an insight, but he made it even more important—more penetrating into how valuable this next insight was.

In seeing the cessation of things, he said the same thing: "Cessation, cessation. Regarding things unheard before, there arose in me vision, knowledge, wisdom, true knowledge, and light."

But then he went on and added that this was a breakthrough through wisdom. Breakthrough means that he experienced the first insight of awakening, of liberation. He didn't experience that with just seeing arising; only with seeing cessation did he have what he called the breakthrough.

Even more significantly, he claimed that with this breakthrough that showed him cessation, he understood that this is the path to awakening. This is the path of awakening that he taught for all his years. He taught that the path of awakening is not seeing conditionality by itself, but how seeing things arise conditionally allowed him to break the trance, the enchantment of the idea that anything is permanent—including our suffering. He was then able to begin having insight into how suffering arises and passes, how our psychophysical experiences come and go, arise and pass.

The Practice of Direct Observation

When we do this in meditation, we are not looking at mountains and seeing them arise and pass, but rather we are seeing the arising and passing of experience moment by moment in our moment-to-moment living as we meditate. The opportunity of meditation is that we don't have to think about the past and the future. We don't have to think about abstractions and big ideas when we meditate. It is possible to settle enough to go to what are called the building blocks of our experience, the most basic ways in which we experience.

Part of the reason why we relax deeply in meditation and have a very peaceful, quiet mind is not only to have a peaceful mind, but because that quiet mind is very much in touch with the moment-to-moment flow of experience as it's happening.

Not so many years ago, I was hiking nearby in the hills here, and there are a lot of tree roots that come out into the trails. It is a regular thing for me to be going along, maybe thinking about something or not knowing what I'm doing, and out of the corner of my eye I notice there's a snake in the trail. My body kind of reacts to the snake. But then I look down and I see that it's just a snake-like root poking out of the ground, winding itself across the trail.

There is a seeing in direct experience of something that has a long and narrow, snake-like shape, and then my mind constructs it as a snake, and it's not really accurate.

Once in Thailand, I did the opposite. It was dusk and so I didn't see so well. I was walking in a jungle where they have very poisonous snakes, but I wasn't thinking about snakes. There was a wide dirt road in the jungle, wide enough for a car, and there was a large tree branch lying across the road. I don't know why, I just wasn't thinking about it too much, but as I was walking, I stepped on the branch. It turned out the branch was a six-foot or longer snake, and the snake immediately started moving. Boy, did I move fast after that!

There, I saw what was a snake and took it for a branch. It turns out that our mind constructs and reconstructs reality, and occasionally it is not so accurate. But even when it is accurate, it still makes a concept and an idea of what is.

The deeper dimension of insight meditation is to let the conceiving part of the mind get quieter and quieter. When we see the branch on the trail, for example, we just see the shape, the texture, the color. We just see the building blocks from which we then construct snake or branch.

Sitting in meditation, we start seeing the immediacy of our feelings of pleasant and unpleasant, sadness and joy, before they are constructed into "I'm having an unpleasant experience," or "This is going to be a bad day," or "I'm a bad person because I'm experiencing sadness," or "I'm a great person because I am happy." We build all these edifices of all kinds of things based on what originally was very simple data.

When we can come down to that level, we see that in fact everything is coming and going, arising and passing. It is not solid and fixed. This includes the concepts we tend to get lost in, where we assume that things are more permanent. Concepts have a kind of filter, giving some permanence to experience, because ideas are unchanging in a certain way. But they are not; they also just come and go in the mind.

It is this experience of the flow of our experience, the dynamism of moment-to-moment living, that we can experience when the mind gets focused, unified, quiet, and clear. Then we see things arising, and more importantly, we see them ceasing.

The Freedom in Cessation

To get a little sense of how this is a possibility of freedom—that cessation—when things cease before they arise again, in that gap, who are you? When you have no thoughts to tell you who you are, when for a moment thoughts have ceased and before the next thought arises, and you can't use thoughts to tell yourself who you are, who are you?

When for a moment something ceases that has been bothering you, and before it reappears in the next moment, in the moment in between, in the changing flow of experience, there is a kind of freedom, a kind of peace, a kind of powerful teaching. There we can see the hints, the evidence of what it is like to have the cessation of the causes, conditions, and experiences that have to do with suffering.

For the Buddha, really seeing for the first time how thoroughly and completely his experience was a flow—an arising and passing of phenomena—led him to exclaim, combining these two: arising and cessation.

"Regarding things unheard before, there arose in me vision, knowledge, wisdom, true knowledge, and light. This was a breakthrough through wisdom. And I realized the path to awakening."

So, arising and passing, and cessation. This is one of the fundamental insights of the Buddha, and I will talk more about that tomorrow.

Thank you for today, and thank you for this chance to do some teaching. I hope your day is good, and that you spread your goodwill wherever it is possible. Thank you.