Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Stephen Batchelor explores how contemporary science—astrophysics and evolutionary biology—can illustrate the Buddhist principle of dependent origination or contingency in vivid, concrete terms. Rather than treating impermanence and emptiness as abstract philosophy, he shows how contemplating cosmic scales, natural selection, and the fragile chain of conditions that led to our existence can awaken a sense of wonder and aliveness. He contrasts this contingency view with our deeply embedded intuition that we are fixed, permanent selves—a perception he links to the Buddhist concept of Mara, the killer, as that which deadens us from within. The talk ultimately frames Buddhist practice not as a path to mystical enlightenment, but as a tool for becoming more fully alive by releasing our grasping at permanence and necessity.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 13 BwB.mp3
UUID: 5c3bcb59-64ab-4f33-9c4d-3f01aa7fa628
Teacher: Batchelor
Collection: Buddhism without beliefs (Batchelor)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~3,445
Dependent origination. I prefer, rather than this rather, technical circumlocution, to use the English word, contingency. We say, for example, that something is contingent upon something else. And contingency, I feel, is for many of us today, perhaps, more vividly illustrated, not in the study of ancient Buddhist philosophy, but in the study of of, say, modern biology or physics. I think the processes that we now understand to have given rise to life on this earth, both in in astrophysical terms from the the Big Bang, and for, and in organic and biological terms through natural selection, illustrates this principle in a way that is far less abstract, and is something for which there is a huge amount of concrete evidence.
And for myself, I find that in reading admittedly popular books on these subjects, since I’m not trained as a scientist, I find very often that the that the what I read and the world that is somehow revealed to me through these writings has an effect on me, which I would probably call religious. In other words, these descriptions of the natural world evoke a sense of wonder and of awe, and also have the consequence of almost bringing the mind to a stop. It’s almost mind baffling when we read these incredible numbers. For example, the number of neurons in the brain, which is about equivalent to the number of, stars in a galaxy. Billions and billions.
Just to stop for a moment and instead of just gobbling up the pages of the book, but actually to reflect on the the the awesome quantity of interrelated events occurring within our skulls at any given moment is a witness to an illustration of an extraordinary contingent process. Something that has emerged from very simple beginnings and over millions of years has developed and become what we are now capable of experiencing on our own moment to moment experience. And also going back to one of the questions yesterday afternoon, we tend to have the sense that the way things in the world now are simply the way it is. But when we consider the history of our species, of life, even of the planetary system, we realize that this is just a phase in something far, far greater. That in a million years time, in two million years time, the forms of life on this earth will very probably be largely unrecognizable from the forms that currently exist.
Apparently, the cockroaches and the ants will still be around. But many of the more complex higher forms of life either will have become extinct, or will have evolved and mutated into forms that we currently cannot even imagine. That life is constantly on the move. Nothing is staying still. As long as conditions remain more or less constant, then the forms of life that are adapted to those conditions will likewise remain more or less constant.
But once the circumstances change, and as we’re aware more and more today, so the circumstances that give rise and support life on Earth are being affected by our own human behaviors, the burnings of fossil fuels and so forth and so on, the destruction of natural environments. Then once those situate, once those circumstances shift, that too will bring into question the survivability of the forms of life that currently enjoy existence here. And all of this I feel points to precisely those elements of existence that the Buddha two and a half thousand years ago suggest that we pay attention to if we wish to free ourselves from so much that causes us suffering. We’ll go further into this in a minute. In other words, impermanence, noticing impermanence, not just saying, oh yeah, everything’s impermanent.
But actually paying, prioritizing the giving of attention to the processes of change. And again, this is something that is not it is not necessarily easy to do. And it’s also something that can seem at times to be rather boring, To watch the breath and just note the fact that it’s changing, or that the sounds of the birds are changing, or whatever it is that is changing. It it seems a rather, tiresome exercise at times. And I think this points to how we need to recognize how what we’re doing here in meditation is not some kind of quick fix solution to a certain difficulty or problem we might have.
But rather, we are seeking over time to erode and replace certain habitual perceptions of reality. And these habitual perceptions, as I mentioned yesterday, feel as though they’re almost hardwired into the system. Neuroscience nowadays speaks of a perceptual constancy. In other words, the brain itself is somehow wired to represent things in a way that is more or less constant and permanent. And presumably, this has considerable evolutionary and survival advantages.
But to pay attention to inconstancy, therefore, to pay attention to impermanence and change, in some ways, is going against the habits of our own neurobiology. And that is why I think it is is in a sense such hard work, why we constantly are reiterating this emphasis on impermanence. It doesn’t come naturally any more than turning our attention to the other characteristics the Buddha emphasizes, those of of dukkha, suffering, pain, discomfort. We tend not to want to focus on that. We’d rather avoid having to consider that aspect of our lives.
And of course when we come to ideas like of non-self or emptiness, then that seems even further away from what we would normally prefer to focus on, which is namely me and how real and how wonderful I am. So all of these exercises are going against the stream. Not just the stream of, let’s say, conventional religious belief, as I mentioned yesterday, but perhaps the very stream of our own neurobiology. The own the way in which we are wired to perceive ourselves in the world. Another way of looking at this idea of the contingency of things is to think of contingency in terms of of non necessity.
I think the opposite of contingency of something being contingent is the idea that it is somehow necessary, that human beings are somehow necessary. There’s a sense, and again, a very intuitive sense that’s hard almost to define, that that evolution as it were kind of had human beings like you and me in mind from the word go. And the fact that we’re here is somehow a necessary outcome of some divinely or even non divinely ordained process. But again, what’s I think most striking about the theory of natural selection is that it does not suggest any sense of purpose or aim or goal at all. And, again, we can illustrate this, I think, in in any number of ways.
Sixty five million years ago, there was a massive asteroid impact on the planet that is believed to have occurred probably somewhere in the region of the Yucatan Peninsula, which I think is in Mexico. And the result of that impact was such that it destroyed and wiped out the the predominant form of sentient life on Earth at that period, namely the dinosaurs. And once the dinosaurs were out of the way, that then opened up a whole range of ecological niches that enabled other forms of life to to thrive and to develop. Amongst those being the the early forms of mammalian life, mammals like us. And it was only because of that sudden opportunity caused by the impact of a large piece of rock that happened to swing into our orbit of this Earth, that mammals were able to flourish and eventually to prevail as the one of the dominant life forms on this Earth.
But that need not have happened. I don’t believe in a thoroughly deterministic universe. I think there are, even if there are distant and perhaps even necessary causes for asteroids to swing around. At the same time, the consequence of those impacts generates, opportunities, generates occasions for things to happen that otherwise would not have happened. So human beings are not, as it were therefore, necessary.
They need not have happened. And as we also know, there is no guarantee that they will continue. Another large meteor impact, which is on average likely to happen every hundred thousand or so years, could well wipe us out as well. I find all of these ways of of of considering our life somehow help to put into question this deep seated assumption we have of our own necessity. If we take it on a much more personal level, we might consider the conception of our own life, the union of our mother and our father’s cells at conception.
And again, as we know, there are there are millions of spermatozoa, seeking to impregnate a particular ovum. If the original conditions of my mother and father making love had been different, if the phone had rung at that inopportune moment, I may not have been born. That in my mother’s next ovarian cycle, another spermatozoan would have impregnated it perhaps, and that would have not given birth to me. I remember as a young teenager overhearing a conversation between my mother and her sister, my aunt, in and they were looking through a photograph album and came to picture of a man, probably in the North African desert in military uniform. And my mother just casually remarked, to myself, if things had turned out differently, dear, he would have been your father.
And I remember feeling rather undermined by that comment. And the thought occurred, well, if he had been my father, would I have been me? Would I have existed at all? No. I wouldn’t.
And yet the the kind of conditions that, prevail therefore, to give rise to this person rather than to another one seem, although there may be distant calculable causes, to be entirely arbitrary and random and accidental. I can remember a time, you know, many occasions in my life when I’ve nearly gotten into an accident. I remember once in Rome. I was crossing the road, and because I’d just come from England, looked the wrong way and nearly stepped into the path of a very fast car. Now if that had happened, would we be here now together?
In a strange way, tiny little adjustments and accidents and deaths can all contribute to a very different outcome occurring, to what is in fact actually happening now. And when the Buddha says, when this is that arises, it almost sounds too simple. We think perhaps if I plant a seed of a dandelion, then it will produce a dandelion. But as soon as we think of anything rather more complex than that, for example, the fact that this particular group of people is in this room at this time listening to these words, it’s quite extraordinary to consider how how how many conditions and causes circumstances and things you’ve read and things you’ve heard and choices you’ve made, and I’ve got a free week here, so let’s go to Buddha House. Any new any number of tiny conditions which are just which if if they just turned out slightly differently, if something else had happened that have prevented your coming here, then this particular event that we’re experiencing now would not have taken place.
So there’s something extraordinarily fragile in in our experience of life. Something extraordinarily, one might even use the word miraculous, that all of this has come together at this particular point. There’s something almost very unlikely that this is happening in the way it is. And yet, counter to that perception, we have this rather kind of heavy assumption that this is just the way it is. And such an assumption also, I think, diminishes our capacity to to appreciate the extraordinariness of life itself and the miraculousness of things happening at all.
Of this, not things in general, but this particular moment. And when you sit in meditation and you simply pay attention to what is occurring sensorially, emotionally, conceptually in your in your body mind at that time. That is you’re paying attention to something that has never happened before. It’s never ever happened in that way before. And something that will likewise never happen in exactly that way again.
And yet we don’t tend to see that. In fact, we tend to often be submerged in a rather deadening consciousness of our experience. We get bored. Boredom was for Baudelaire, the contemporary manifestation of the demonic. The devil was l’ennui, boredom.
The fact that our lives can feel flat and dull and listless and rather pointless, and we open our eyes and we open our ears, and it’s the same old dreary stuff going on around us day in, day out. As says, we could it could swallow the earth in a yawn. And in that sense, I feel this this this intuitive sense that things are not contingent, that they’re not coming about almost miraculously out of myriad conditions, is also an intuition that somehow deadens our sense of life itself. And to that extent, I feel that meditation practice, this this close and, persistent paying of attention to these characteristics of life is also about somehow bringing us alive, making us come alive. And as I understand it, the idea of Buddha, the idea of awakening is not just about gaining some privileged insight into some mystical feature of reality that makes us enlightened.
That I think is a very trivial way of looking at it. But rather, this whole process is about is about teaching us or giving us tools to become more fully alive. Remember that the that the counter image in Buddhist philosophy or let’s say almost symbology to the Buddha is the image of Mara. Mara is quite similar in many aspects to the western notion of the devil or Satan. And Mara literally means, in Pali and Sanskrit, the killer.
And there’s a passage in the Digha Nikāya where the Buddha says, whenever a person grasps, Mara stands beside them. And so we’ve been talking about this grasping, this grasping itself, this grasping of permanence, this grasping at, things being somehow necessary, that that grasping is also a form of death. It is a killer in the sense that it somehow renders us inwardly dead. It confines our experience within a certain, fixed conception and view in such a way that we are somehow rendered not fully alive. It’s also striking that in some of the early texts in the Pali tradition, the Buddha doesn’t call Mara Mara, but he calls him Namuchi.
Namuchi is the name of a demon in Vedic mythology who is believed to be responsible for the failure of the monsoon. And Namuchi literally means the word literally means, the one who withholds the waters. It then takes Indra, the king of the gods to strike Namuchi with his vajra, his scepter, so that Namuchi then releases the waters. And then the monsoons fall, and then life is assured for those who are utterly dependent upon the yearly rains. It’s very curious that the early Buddhist tradition identified Mara with Namuchi, with this with something that constricts and prevents the flowing of water.
And water, particularly in India, but of course, in all societies, is that which is crucial, which is the very vitality that allows life to happen at all. So if we think of Mara or Namuchi as that which locks us into a kind of deadness, then quite naturally, it follows that awakening or being Buddha, letting go of grasping this freedom of clinging is a way of speaking about the waters allowing the waters of our own life to flow unimpeded and freely. The traditional Buddhism doesn’t usually draw that kind of conclusion. But I think the the both the symbology in this mythic language of Buddha and Mara as well as the underlying philosophy, this contrast between experiencing contingency as opposed to necessity, this experiencing of self as opposed to non-self. All of this points, I think, in a very similar direction.
And I think it’s therefore, to put aside whatever fantasies we have about one day becoming enlightened. And to think of our practice that we’re doing here, this relentless and sometimes rather tiresome paying of attention to these features of existence, as really a strategy or a means to bring ourselves more alive. It’s about life primarily. Now this idea of contingency is also, as as Buddhist philosophy developed, equated with the idea of emptiness or. You don’t find this equivalence in the early text, in the Pali tradition, but it becomes very much the keynote of probably the most important interpreter of Buddhism after the Buddha, an Indian philosopher called Nāgārjuna.
And for Nāgārjuna, contingency, the fact that things arise dependently one upon the other is synonymous effectively with the idea that things are empty. Now again, we hear this word emptiness when we read anything on Buddhism, and I think it’s also an idea that is rather difficult to grasp. I mean, I’ve been, you know, thinking about and trying to meditate on emptiness for many years now, and I still don’t find that I can use the word empty or emptiness in an idiomatic sense. It’s very difficult to incorporate that word into ordinary English without it sounding terribly negative. My life’s very empty.
You poor thing. But so what I what what is this actually about? And why is it that it’s equated with this idea of contingency? In in the Tibetan tradition in which I trained, the Gelukpa, there’s an enormous amount of emphasis placed on understanding what it is that emptiness is empty of. In other words, to get around the idea that emptiness is some kind of mystical state or some kind of cosmic reality that’s hidden behind the veil of appearances, which is sometimes reinforced by you I mean, you probably many of you might have come on across this image that that that all things arise from emptiness and then return to emptiness.
Now that’s a nice poetic trope, but philosophically, it’s a disaster. It suggests that there is a kind of, you know, some some sort of trans transcendent ultimate ground of being, which Buddhists call emptiness, out of which things spring and into which they fall back a bit like the Tao or something. But this totally fails. In fact, it it it it it severely misrepresents what in fact this term emptiness refers to. Emptiness is empty of according to Tsongkhapa, and I’m sorry if the language is a bit technical, but it’s empty of what they call, inherent existence.
That things exist somehow utterly in terms of their own self sufficiency. And I think this is very close in fact to what, I’ve been speaking of as a sense of our necessity. For something to inherently exist means that it doesn’t actually have to depend upon anything other than its own being to be there. Now, again, intellectually, we probably don’t have any difficulty with that idea. Of course, everything that comes into being comes out of causes and conditions and circumstances and so on is contingent in that way and will become a cause or a condition for something else.
Even though we know that intellectually, intuitively, instinctively, and particularly in relation to myself, that’s not how I feel at all. I have the sense that there is some little homunculus Stephen inside here somewhere, peering out at you lot, and has been doing this ever since Stephen has had his first memory, probably around the age of three. And that is a very deeply embedded perception, one that is almost certainly hard hardwired is the wrong word, but built into our neurobiology. And probably for very good reasons. It’s not there just by accident, but because it conferred upon our earlier ancestors certain survival advantages.
But it’s become something that’s almost impossible to see through. It’s a fixed thing. And it’s now rather than giving us survival advantages, it’s arguably become a kind of cancerous growth. It has become for the Buddha at least, the very thing that actually prevents us from being fully alive. The sense that deep down inside ourselves somewhere, we are a fixed permanent thing.
That is, in Buddhism, the core grasping or clinging that is again identified with Mara, the killer. That is a kind of inner death. In modern, parlance, we might call this, a sense a deep sense of alienation.