Notes from the
Bhavana Program:
Insight Into Impermanence

The Bhavana Program at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies is intended as a special way of integrating academic study and meditation practice for the investigation of the Buddha's teachings. 

The 7-day program is modeled on a traditonal vipassana retreat, with altenating sessions of sitting and walking practice throughout extenedhperiods of silenc, encluding personal interviews and a dharam talak each evening from an experienced meditation teacher.

The program also incoporates a daily two-hour study period with a scholar of he Budhhist tradition wherin the careful reading of selected passages from the classical literature and their detailed discussion, in the light of one's mediativie experieng, is encouraged.

These remarks are exceprted from the opening talks of each series of sessions held at the study center in March, 1999.

Do We Really Believe in Impermanence? Carol Wilson

The Context of Impermanence Andrew Olendzki

 

 

Do We Really Believe in Impermanence?

Carol Wilson

Two questions come into my mind when thinking about the teaching of impermanence in relation to my life.  Do we really believe that things are impermanent, that all experience is impermanent, that all arising phenomena will pass?  Do we really believe that?  The other question that arises from the first reflection is:  What is the effect, in our life day to day, of living from that truth?  Reflecting upon these questions involves looking through the more refined and subtle levels of meditation to see how we relate to impermanence on different levels.

Let’s consider the first question:  Do we truly believe that whatever arises will pass, that all arising phenomena are not going to last?  Of all the different truths that the Buddha talks about, the truth of the impermanence of existence—how things are—is the easiest to understand intellectually.  It’s an idea with which an average person on the street who doesn’t think much about philosophical issues would agree:  “Yes, things change.“

So on the conceptual level, it’s pretty reachable; we don’t have a problem with it.  But is that what we live from?  Would any of us be here if we were living at ease, dancing with the constant flux of existence?  This is really interesting to me.

I know that I have actually experienced that everything is arising and passing and there’s nowhere to rest.  And yet, using myself as an example—and I am assuming that I’m not alone in this—when something in my life that I value or that’s important to me changes, do I say, “Well, the conditions that allowed for that to exist have changed and it’s passing away?“  Maybe eventually I get there, but that certainly is not my first, spontaneous reaction to the loss of cherished things.

Do I say, “My father has Parkinson’s disease and can’t really see any more—it’s just because conditions have changed?“  No, of course not.  I experience the pain of seeing him suffer; that’s normal.  And I experience compassion for him.  But there is also an edge of panic:  What can I do to stop this from happening?  What can I do to fix it?

We respond like this to our own bodies, to people we love, to our relationships changing, to losing a job—even down to your knee starting to hurt in the middle of a sitting.  Our basic response, even though we know all conditions are subject to change, is:  “Something has gone wrong and this is changing.  If I can figure it out, I can stop it from happening.“   Isn’t that often how we end up responding?  And in that response we suffer, sometimes enormously.

And even though I’ve seen it a thousand times, it’s still not so easy for me to get the fact that the suffering is not about the change itself.  The suffering, if you get right down to it, is about my reaction to the change; it is in my denial, my lack of acceptance, my basically not wanting to feel pain or loss.

I find this paradox to be fascinating, how I can know something so clearly on one hand, and yet live my life so often as if I didn’t know it at all.  Let’s face it, on a very basic level, we want pleasant experiences to linger, to hang around; we don’t really want unpleasant things to happen.  We can explore this edge in our meditation practice and it can expand out to our whole life, and still we may find there is a level where we don’t quite get that all pleasant experiences are coming and going, that everything unpleasant is coming and going.  It’s really uncontrollable.  If we could just flow with the coming and going of both pleasant and unpleasant, our life truly would be no problem.

Why are we conditioned the way we are?  It’s a habit of mind—we crave the pleasant and can’t stand to have something we don’t like—and there we’re stuck.  It’s not the truth; but it is our habit, and it is a deep habit.

 Someone said in the group today, “I do notice that I never strive to be uncomfortable.  I’m always striving to be comfortable.“  That’s how we move through life.  No one tends to grieve too much when the headache goes away or when the really bad weather turns nice, “Oh shucks, the pleasant is back!“  Rather, we think:  “Now things are fine.  I can flow with that.“  So impermanence is a problem only when the pleasant changes, when the place we’re looking for rest goes away.  We cling, even though we all know rationally that the problem is not the change.  The problem is our clinging.  But that doesn’t stop us for one minute.

Our task is to look into this tendency to cling.  Why do we keep perpetuating this clinging, doing it over and over?  This question takes me into looking deeply at how I live my life.  Do I believe the Buddha when he said over and over that whatever is impermanent is inherently unsatisfying?  It is said throughout the suttas (the early  texts):  anything impermanent is inherently unsatisfying; it can not be the self.

Yeah, right!  We know that we turn around and want that other cup of tea, want that warm weather, don’t want it to be snowing.  If we stop and look, we see that underneath that wanting is a sense of clinging to the pleasant.  Somewhere underneath the wanting is the unspoken, un-conceptualized belief that there is some way to find a point of rest, of ease, of pleasantness that basically will not go away.  That’s really how we move through life—looking over and over to find this place of rest, and clinging to that sense of security.

What’s so unsettling about the inevitability and the absoluteness of impermanence is that it allows no resting place.  To us, who want a resting place (and who doesn’t?), that sounds fearful, insecure, unreliable, awful.  But it is our very grasping at the passing of any phenomenal experience—the external or the so-called internal—the looking always for a resting place, that actually provokes the suffering in our life.  And it’s very hard to see that.

Have you ever been in an earthquake, one with a lot of aftershocks?  I was once; the earthquake itself was scary, but it was also kind of neat.  There was a “Wow, look at that“ kind of feeling.  But the aftershocks that went on for the next three days were unsettling;  you could never just relax back on the earth, into the bed, at the table.  As soon as you relaxed, it would start shaking again—every five minutes.  Of course the radio was saying constantly “Twenty five percent possibility of the big one in the next three days.“  So you couldn’t even think, “Oh, it’s just an aftershock.“  You had to keep thinking,  “Is this it? Do I have to run out of the building?  Do we have to get away from the glass?  No, it’s settling down.“  Then you’d let go and relax, but the radiators would start shaking in the middle of the night and you’d jump up and have to run out, to get the flashlight, and so on.  It lasted for three days.

That to me is like the ultimate sense of insecurity.  Without ever even thinking about it, I had trusted that the earth is solid, unchanging, and here to support me.  Then I found out otherwise, and moreover that there’s absolutely nothing anyone can do about it.  The aftershocks of the earthquake have been a metaphor for me for years now.  The experience revealed the effect that insecurity of constant change can have on the mind and heart that is looking for the happiness of unchanging stability.  It is our very grasping at any phenomenal experience as it passes—the external or the so-called internal—our looking always for a resting place, that provokes the suffering in our life.  And it can be very hard to recognize.  But freedom comes, not from finding somwhere to rest, but from no longer needing to look for someplace to rest.

 There’s a wonderful quote from the Diamond Sutra which says, He abides in peace who does not abide anywhere.  That’s the trick—to give up the search for abiding or resting or stopping the flow somewhere, the search that actually keeps the sense of anguish going.  It is the search itself—for somewhere to rest, usually in the pleasant—that is profoundly unsettling.

Even when we train ourselves to be mindful, and see that all observable experience seems to be coming and going, we may not notice that “we“ are still watching it all.  “We“ (or “I“) is experienced as some unchanging entity doing the observing, and so we still don’t get it.  Our anguish then becomes:  “I really see, I see everything is changing—so how come I’m not free?  Why am I still suffering?“  This anguish is very subtle and very deep.

Thinking about it isn’t going to take us out of it, but thinking about it can take us into an exploration.  We can learn to give mindful attention to all the manifestations of “me, myself, mine.“  It may seem like there is a stable entity here from which I am observing the whole world change, but it only seems that way through lack of inquiry, lack of attention, lack of investigation.  We usually don’t think to turn our attention back on moi, the point of stability we tend to hold on to.

We can get so wrapped up in our search for a peaceful abiding, in our search for happiness, that we overlook the possibility of just letting go of the search.  And we can let go of trying to find the peace of abiding; let go of that constant to-ing and fro-ing between pleasant and unpleasant, liking and disliking; let go of the ongoing effort to manipulate experience.  We are so involved in our judgments, our reactions, our assessments, our interpretations, our cogitations about anything that is happening, that we’re often not even in touch with what’s actually happening.  We don’t see that the impediment to peace is not the experience, but the fact that we’re so involved in our reactions.  We don’t see that, as Thich Nhat Hanh says, “Happiness is available.  Please help yourself.“  It just means stop fighting, stop reaching.

Someone once told me that the reality of life is like being in jail—we are so involved in rearranging the furniture to make it as comfortable as possible that we don’t notice that the door is wide open and we can just walk out.  That’s what we’re doing in our life—constantly rearranging the furniture.  It’s amazing that we don’t recognize the secret.  Perhaps we don’t trust it.  If we can meet—with total presence, absolute connectedness, alertness, acceptance, and wakefulness—just what’s happening in this moment...everything is revealed in that.  That is the essence of non-abiding.

But this is not a place we can recognize conceptually.  It’s really hard to talk about, because it’s not a thing.  The essence of non-abiding is total immediacy of presence—headache or no headache, traffic jam or no traffic jam.  It really doesn’t matter what’s happening.  And I mean that.  It’s not a metaphor.  It really doesn’t matter what’s happening.  And not just on the pillow.  This is from an absolute standpoint.

Can you even believe that?  And not merely believe it, but trust it enough to look for yourself?  The freedom of the heart, of mind, has nothing to do with what phenomenal experience is arising or passing, and whether we like it or not.  It has everything to do with immediacy, totality, openness, vivid presence.  And that requires, in that moment, total acceptance.  Total acceptance doesn’t mean resignation.  It doesn’t mean, “Okay, whenever bad things happen, I’ll just sit here and let people walk all over me.“  It means, “In this moment, this is happening.  It cannot be changed.  It’s already happening.  Can I be totally present and alert within it, without resistance, without clinging in that moment?“

This is really the practice of mindful awareness, moment by moment.  It’s not thinking, “I will be like this for the rest of my life.“  That’s just another thought.  The mindful awareness is in this moment, as the breath comes in, as the breath goes out, it’s just there; it’s a totally accepting alert presence without discriminating, without preference.  And yes, I am all too well aware that it’s easier said than done.

I find it a huge relief to come back to this awareness in difficult situations, something like getting stuck in the traffic when going to the airport.  We all have that experience.  We can fret and we can pretend, “Oh, it doesn’t matter.“  You know, you can pretend for a while, but after a few minutes, “Why am I gritting my teeth?  How come I’m barking at my friend?“  And finally, we give up:  “It’s out of my control; I missed the plane; something will happen; I don’t know what.  It was all out of control from the beginning.“

In that moment, there is letting go.  It doesn’t sound great, does it?  It doesn’t really sound like what you might think of when the Buddha talks about the supreme state of sublime peace being liberation through non-clinging.  It may not be our idea of liberation, but that’s the start of it—stuck in the traffic jam, missing your plane, things being out of control, and yet really being at peace.  We are at peace in that moment because we are simply letting go of all our layers of how we want things to be and wish they were, and we are just opening to things as they are.  Non-abiding.  Non-abiding, because how things are now changes in the next moment.

So the most we can do is abide in this moment, just as it is, without clinging, without resistance; because in the next moment there is something else.  It is all part of the flow.

The Buddha said it over and over again:  The supreme state of sublime peace has been discovered by the Tathagata, namely liberation through non-clinging.  This is another way of saying non-abiding.  Just opening into this moment, with full presence, is our way into trusting.  Living in the truth of impermanence, opening to it as we experience it—whether on the grand scale of a loved one becoming sick or dying, or on the minute scale of noticing our agitation when what had felt like a pleasant sitting suddenly turns unpleasant.  The scale doesn’t matter.  Noticing those moments of resistance to change, and opening into it again—that’s what we can do.

The more deeply we really live from this truth of impermanence, the more we open to the non-agitation of heart, of mind.  But in order to really get it, we have to see through all the layers of belief, the conceptual workings of the mind.  The precision of meditation practice can be very helpful here.

In our practice, in mindful attention, we discover more and more subtle ways in which we manipulate our experience, either toward something pleasant or toward some experience that we’ve had or read about that weI somehow think is IT.  This is the one that’s going to do it.  But we are not looking too carefully, because if we really looked we would find out that  conditions are causing even this to arise.  We will also find out that we are manipulating conditions like crazy to cause this to arise.  So we need to keep investigating, to keep seeing on a more subtle level.  It’s nothing to judge ourselves about.  Rather, we might think:  “Yes, I see this one now.  It won’t fool me again.  There might be another one, but this one doesn’t fool me.“

Our mindfulness practice, simply being with the breath, being with sensations, being with sounds, and as we expand, with emotions, with feeling tones, with thoughts—just as they are—is a place where we begin to recognize the potential of freedom.  It really doesn’t matter what you are attending to; it is the quality of mindful presence itself that allows you to see the truth.  No matter what the nature of our experience, it is our willingness to bring this undiscriminating, participatory awareness to it, without preference, that opens us again and again and again and again to resonating with this peace of non-abiding.  This moment is like the situation in the traffic jam when we suddenly let go of all desire to control.  It’s a quick moment of real peace.

 And then of course our conceptual minds tries to cognize it and talk about it and say, “This is what it feels like,“ and “This is what it looks like,  and “This is IT.“  Of course, it’s long gone by then.  Then we wonder and we doubt, and we don’t really trust.  Speaking for myself, I start looking so hard for some idea of what the sheer heart’s release would look like and feel like, how the mind of non-clinging would manifest, that I overlook the reality, the potential for peace here and now.  Because actually it’s  so obvious; it’s always available.  It’s so normal that we easily get into looking for something more.

There is a story in the Pali suttas about the Buddha’s teaching to Bahiya of the Bark Cloth.  Bahiya came to the Buddha when the Buddha was on his alms-round and insisted that the Buddha address his anguish.  Part of what the Buddha said to Bahiya, in regard to the six senses, was,

When in the seen is merely what is seen, in the heard is merely what is heard, in the sensed is merely what is sensed, in the cognized is merely what is cognized, then, Bahiya,  you will not be ‘with that’; when you are not ‘with that,’ you will not be ‘in that’; when you are not ‘in that,’ then you will be neither here nor beyond nor in between the two.  Just this is the end of suffering.
                                                                                                                                                        (Udana 1.10)

This saying of the Buddha points directly to the end of suffering.  To me what he is saying is that you’re not stuck in this, you’re not stuck in that, and you’re not stuck somewhere in between the two.  As human beings we want to abide in peace, yet the Buddhas do not abide anywhere.

In other words, there’s no fixation; there’s no landing; there’s no yearning.  There’s no grasping of any experience.  When you are not in this, nor in that, then you’re not abiding anywhere.  There’s only the simplicity of experience—seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, sensing, feeling the body and mental activity.

That, to me, is the invitation of this practice of mindfulness.  It seems deceptively simple.  When we talk about bringing bare attention, beginner’s mind, to whatever experience is arising in the moment, that’s what we’re saying.  Can we bear it?  Can we live in the wisdom that that’s all there is?  Can we experience life in that way?

What’s interesting is how much of the time, with all our best intentions, we’re not able to do that.  And we don’t even have a clue what it is that’s arising, because so much gets added to it in the realm of perception and thought.  At Bahiya’s funeral, the Buddha uttered a phrase:

When a sage...has come to know this for himself,
Through his own experience,
Then he is freed from form and formless.
Freed from pleasure and from pain.

Freed from pleasure and from pain?  Not too many people come to the teaching because they want to be freed from pleasure.  But that’s the real freedom the Buddha is pointing to.  Freed from all of our attachments.  And that’s all.  That really is all.  But it’s very, very, difficult to bring that beginner’s attention to meet experience with no assumptions, no preconceptions, no preferred opinions.  That is what training in mindfulness is all about.

The invitation is to the simplicity.  But it’s not easy.  It’s radical.  Actually it is the greatest renunciation, because every time you’re willing to let go of “me,“ the whole story collapses.  And you can just let it be.  You don’t have to “end“ it;  you don’t have to talk your way out of it; you can just let it be, and return your attention to the simplicity of hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling, sensing, thinking, imagining.

It’s that basic.  It’s the renunciation in a moment—the renunciation of clinging and identification—that allows us to see through this whole round of saüsàra, allows us to stop running in circles forever.                

 

The Context of Impermanence

Andrew Olendzki

Some of the best dharma talks I have ever heard are the ones given by the Buddha.  Fortunately, much of what he said was recorded and transcribed, and though there are numerous historical questions we are unable to fully answer about their transmission, I have found that, by and large, what is published in the Pali Canon is an immeasurably valuable source for trying to understand--in some detail--what the Buddha taught regarding the nature of my own experience.

  I like to look very closely at what is recorded in these texts, and use scholarly tools such as linguistic analysis, cross-referencing and comparative translation schemes to clarify, as much as possible, what exactly the Buddha might have been trying to communicate.  Also very important to this process is the use of common sense and one’s own present experience.  So I invite you this week to share in such an exploration of the central Buddhist notion of impermanence, anicca.

Let’s start by recognizing the roots of this word, anicca.  Like many other important words in the Buddhist vocabulary, it’s constructed as a negative.  The prefix  “a-“ reverses its meaning, and what is negated is the term nitya in Sanskrit or nicca in the Pali spelling (the two languages are very similar).  This word nicca means everlasting, eternal, unchanging.  In what sense was the word “permanent“ being used in ancient India?  What exactly were the Buddhists negating?

In the intellectual environment in which Buddhism evolved, the concept of something being stable and lasting was very important.  Many religious traditions of the world take this view:  clearly the world of human experiences is constantly changing, the data of the senses and all they reveal is in constant flux, but underlying all this change surely there must be something stable, something that it all rests upon.

In the pre-Buddhist Indian world, the word nitya was often used to designate that foundation, that stability.  The view put forward in the Upanishads, for example, suggests that within all the changes of the individual being there is a deep part of one’s psyche, called the àtman or the self, that in some way either underlies or transcends (these are just different perspectives on the same model) all of the changes that go on moment to moment.  If we could only discover this subtle self in our experience and dwell in it moment to moment, we would manage to overcome the transience of the world and become established upon something eternal and everlasting.

This idea works on both the microcosmic and the macrocosmic level.  There is a sense that all the way out there, at the very limit of this world or world system, there is something permanent (nitya) from which this world emerged—Brahman or God.  And all the way in here, deep in the inner-most world, there is also something stable—the soul or Self.  In the profound mystical intuition of the Upanishads these two are not separate, but are two manifestations of the same reality.

This is the background against which Buddhism was working.  And the Buddha, with his several excursions into the nature of human experience, basically came to the conclusion that this is an entirely constructed concept.  The claim of stability articulated in these traditions is really just an idea that we project on to our world; it is not to be found in actual experience.  So one of the principle insights of the whole Buddhist tradition is that the entire world of our experience—whether the macrocosmic material world or the microcosmic world of our personal, inner experience—is fundamentally not permanent, not unchanging.  Everything is in flux. 

So that’s a place to start.  Let’s begin by looking at this issue from its broadest perspective, as an idea of change or non-change.  Then gradually, as the week goes on, we’re going to move away from the level of concept to the level of experience, becoming intimate with the details of  looking at change in our experience, moment after moment after moment.

One of the widest views we can begin with is I think fairly well expressed in a series of passages of the Samyutta Nikàya called the Anamatagga Samyutta.  This volume is a collection of discourses organized around certain themes, and one of these themes is the application of this word anamatagga.

The construction of this word is again negative:  ana + mata + agga, all of which together is taken to be “incalculable“ or “unthinkable.“  The ana is a negative prefix; mata is from a root (man) which means “to think, to conceive;“ and agga means an end, the tip, or the extreme of something; when applied to time, as it is here, it means the very beginning point.  So literally the word means something like “unthinkable beginning point.“

These texts represent a whole section of discourses about what is fundamentally inconceivable to human beings, fundamentally unimaginable or inaccessible to the mind.  And one of the things inaccessible to us is the immense scope of the drama we find ourselves in.  Not only does this vast history go back over our long personal history, beyond this life to innumerable rebirths, but even this entire world system we inhabit can be  seen to be just one episode in a much larger cyclic order of the creation and destruction of cosmos after cosmos. 

Let’s look at the first line of this text:

Incalculable is the beginning, brethren, of this faring on.  The earliest point is not revealed of the running-on, the faring-on, of beings cloaked in ignorance, tied to craving.  (Samyutta 15.1&2)

     It’s a small phrase, and yet it includes a lot of important things.  First of all, the beginning is what’s incalculable.  In other contexts we’ll also find that the end is incalculable.  One of the interesting themes of Buddhist cosmology, which is now drawing the attention of modern cosmologists, is its approach to time in general.  It’s largely non-historical; everything is cyclic, and, in a way, timeless. 

And because these cycles go on and on and on, it really doesn’t make any sense, conceptually, to even think about or talk about the beginning or the end of something.  In fact, beginnings and endings are entirely constructions of the mind.  Yet we seem to have inherited from our Greek philosopher ancestors the notion that there had to be something that started it all--an unmoved mover, perhaps?  It is just conceptually necessary.

But the Buddhist critique of this view would be simply to say that “beginning“ and “end“ are just ideas that have been created by our minds to serve a useful purpose.  They are helpful in defining our world:  the beginning and end of the planting season; the end of my field and the beginning of yours.  There are various ways in which the mind carves reality up into spatial categories that we call things—where this thing ends and that thing begins merely indicates a transition between things.

And we do the same thing with time:  where this day ends and the next day begins; this hour ends, the next hour begins.  But these are all entirely constructed concepts.  The notions of  “beginning“ and “end“ by definition can never be fixed, because they are always defined by, and are placed beyond, any other concept (kind of like the New Hampshire presidential primary).  The problem is that when we take a concept derived from a limited context, one

that functions to help us keep the days, seasons, objects and  fields straight, for example, and then try to project it back into imaginary beginnings and ends, the usefulness and even the meaning of the concept breaks down.

So the Buddhist critique of conventional cosmology is less a metaphysical insight than a psychological one.  Absolute beginnings and endings are concepts that  by nature express much more about the structure of our minds than they reveal of the world.  This is a theme we will find ourselves returning to again and again throughout our experience with meditation practice.  

The next phrase to look closely at is the expression:  faring-on; the running on, the faring on of beings.  There is another foreign concept imbedded in this wording that needs to be carefully looked at.  Can anybody guess what Sanskrit or Pali word is being translated by this phrase?  It is such a common word, it’s almost an official member of the English language now:  samsàra.  We often we hear samsàra contrasted with nirvàna:  samsàra is this fallen, changing world of suffering, while nirvàna is a perfect, transcendent world.  But that’s not really the way the term is used in the Pali texts at all.  Samsàra is a word based on the verb sarati, which means “to flow.“  It is used of water, as with the flowing of water through streams and rivers.  As such what is here translated as “faring on“ might more literally be called “flowing on“ or “on-flowing.“ 

So the word samsàra, though constructed as a noun, is not refering to a thing as much as to a process.  As soon as this life is over, the momentum of existence—whether conceived as consciousness or as karmic formations or dispositions—somehow flows into a whole other life.  And at the end of that life, if certain important factors are unresolved, the momentum abides and flows on to another life, and another.  The texts use the analogy of water over-flowing one pot to fill and eventually overflow another and another.

We are also going to find this to be a very useful concept for describing the nature of conscious experience, flowing on from one moment on to the next.  In Buddhist understanding, the dynamic of what happens between lifetimes is not very dissimilar from the explanation of what happens between moments.  So when we get more focused in our practice on the microcosm of experience, we’re going to see that conditioned experience flows on from one moment to another in the same way it flows on from one lifetime to another.  In both senses of the word, then, we are living our whole existence as an on-flowing:  samsàra.

We should also look at the final part of this first quotation, at the important expression:  cloaked in ignorance, tied to craving.  Ignorance and craving are the two fundamental factors keeping us in the world of suffering—they are keeping us from seeing things as they are, from accepting the impermanence of our experience.  They significantly prevent us from discerning the impermanence of our experience.  Each works in a specific way to prevent us from seeing clearly:  Ignorance obscures reality, while craving distorts it.

The Pali phrase for cloaked in ignorance is avijjà-nivarana, the latter being a word having to do with one thing covering, obscuring, or hindering something else.  It suggests something hidden underneath a cloth, for example, or, in a popular poetic expression, the moon obscured by dark clouds.  You might recognize the word nivarana, for it is the technical term for the hindrances.  The five hindrances—sense desire, ill will, sleepiness, restlessness, and doubt—obscure or prevent access to concentration meditation in much the same way that ignorance in general hinders us from accurately perceiving the changeable nature of our experience.

Ignorance, of course, is used in a very technical sense in Buddhism.  It does not mean unintelligent or uneducated.  It means not being able to see the truth of change, of unsatisfactoriness, and selflessness (the three characteristics), or the inability to discern the truth of suffering, the causes of its arising, its passing away, and the means used to achieve that passing away (the four noble truths).  There seems to be a trust that the mind, being inherently capable of true knowledge, would naturally understand the nature of its situation if it weren’t for this covering of ignorance.  So sometimes we meet with metaphors of uncovering the mind’s ability to understand by removing obstacles (e.g., delusion), and sometimes we find metaphors of bringing a lamp (of wisdom) into the darkness so that one can see more clearly what is present.

Another common symbol of ignorance in Buddhist art is a blind man  fumbling around.  But this man is not in total blindness, and this is half of the problem.  It’s not so much that we cannot see at all; it is that we see badly.  In this sense ignorance is not only a passive lack of clarity; it also involves actively mis-knowing, misperceiving, and misunderstanding the nature of our situation, which leads us very much astray. 

Finally we come to the phrase tied to craving, which is a rendering of the Pali expression, tanhà-samyojana.  Again, you might recognize the word samyojana, for this too has an independent life in the technical vocabulary of early Buddhism.  Officially there is a list of ten “fetters“ or “bonds“ or “attachments,“ but here the word is used more generally to refer to the binding process itself.  What is really binding us to samsàra, what is fueling this craving, is an underlying tendency in each of us as human beings to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. 

A natural feature of all our experience is that it’s accompanied by an affect tone or feeling tone.  Everything we experience generally feels pleasant or unpleasant.  Sometimes we can’t tell whether it’s one or the other, but that too is a natural part of our sensory apparatus.  Unfortunately, because we have this underlying tendency for gratification, we want—we crave—for the pleasurable aspects of our experience to continue.  We also have an underlying tendency to avoid pain, and so we yearn for the painful aspects of our experience to stop or to remain unacknowledged.  So this force of craving, in both positive (attachment) and negative (aversion) manifestations, arises naturally (though, as we shall see, not necessarily) from the apparatus of our sensory experience. 

The problem is that when this craving is present in experience, it prevents us from being authentically in the moment.  For one thing, this craving impels us to act, and in acting we fuel the process of flowing on.  It also prevents us from seeing our experience “as it is,“ and inclines us to view it “as we want it to be.“  This, of course, contributes to a significant distortion of reality.  The wanting itself is the fetter, the tie, the attachment.  Because of our wanting to hold on to the pleasure, and our wanting to push away the pain, we are both tied to craving and tied by craving.

You might think of it as a ball and chain that we’re dragging around with us.  As long as we’re encumbered by this burden, it is going to influence how we confront each moment’s experience.  The intriguing thing about this ball and chain, however, is that it’s not shackled to us—we clutch it voluntarily.  We just don’t know any better. 

It is imortant to recognize the way in which these two factors—ignorance and craving—support and reinforce one another.  If we understood that the objects we cling to or push away are inherently insubstantial, unsatisfying, and unstable, we would know better than to hang on to them.  But we cannot get a clear enough view of these three characteristics, because our perception of the objects is distorted by the force of our wanting them to be the source of security, satisfaction and substance.  If we could let go of wanting experience to be one way or another, we could see its essentially empty nature; but we cannot stop wanting, because we don’t understand these things we want so much are ephemeral.

And so we are cloaked in ignorance and tied to craving; and we are also incapable of discerning a begining or an end to the flowing-on known as samsàra.  Taken as a whole, this passage is laying out the nature of the human condition and the limitations of our ability to see the impermanence of our own experience.  It shows how, from one moment to the next and from one lifetime to the next, we are compelled to move on and on and on, continuing to construct and inhabit our world.  And both the beginning and end of the entire process are entirely beyond the capacity of our minds to conceive.

So this passage sets the stage for us:  this is the starting point of our week’s investigation.  No story is going to help us much in figuring out what we’re doing here.  All we have is what is right in front of us, and that is obscured by the ignorance and craving we continue to manifest.

But this is by no means an insignificant starting point.  The beginning and end of the process might be unknowable, but we can know what is present to our immediate experience.  Since there is no point in wasting energy on speculation about origins or destinies, our attention is best placed on investigating the present and unpacking the forces that keep it all flowing onward.  This is really where Buddhism starts and where it thrives—in the present moment.  We have no idea how many moments have gone before or how many will yet unfold—either cosmically or individually—but each moment that lies before our gaze is, potentially, infinitely deep.

     The critical factor is the quality of our attention.  If a moment goes by un-noticed, then it is so short it might not even have occurred.  But if we can attend very carefully to its passage, then we can begin to see its nature.  The closer we look, the more we see.  The more mindful we can be, the more depth reality holds for us.

The Buddhist tradition points out some of the dynamics of the present moment—its arising and passing away, its interrelatedness to other moments, its constructed qualities, the interdependence of its factors—and then we have to work with it from there.  The only place to start is the only place to finish—in this very moment.  And that of course is why the experiential dimension to Buddhism—the practice of mindful awareness—is so crucial.  You can’t think your way out of this.  You just have to be with the arising and passing of experience, and gain as much understanding from the unfolding of the moments as you can. 

     Step by step, investigated moment by investigated moment, the illusions that obscure things and the desires that distort things will receed as they yield to the advance of insight and understanding.  In this direction lies greater clarity and freedom.