Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Pamela Lyon examines the Buddhist teaching of the twelve links of dependent origination as a scientific and practical explanation for human suffering. In this 53-minute session, she walks through the first four links: ignorance (mistaking things as permanent and independent when they are impermanent and interdependent), volitional dispositions or karma (the habitual tendencies that arise from ignorance), consciousness (the knowing quality of mind, illustrated by a striking Dhammapada image of a fish gasping on dry land), and name-and-form (the five aggregates comprising consciousness and embodied experience). She then begins exploring the fifth link, the six sense spheres, explaining how perception actually works in modern neuroscience while questioning the traditional Buddhist presentation of localized sense powers. Throughout, she addresses misconceptions about rebirth, grounds the teaching in cause-and-effect observable in all philosophy and science, and invites questions from participants already familiar with the material. The teaching is accessible to practitioners seeking philosophical depth grounded in both traditional Buddhist analysis and contemporary understanding.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2008 06 27 Pamela Lyon – 27 june 2008 Track 2.mp3
UUID: dd9fe541-8872-4fdc-ad70-ffad9b5d2ee2
Teacher: Pamela Lyon
Collection: Pamela Lyon (Pamela Lyon)
Date: 2008-06-27
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 53.4 minutes
Words: ~5,247
Shall we just bring ourselves into our bodies and center ourselves a bit here? Taking a firm, comfortable posture with the spine as straight as you can make it like a stack of coins. Each of the vertebrae stacked on top of the other. Taking a deep breath to release the tension in your body. It’s the end of another week.
The end of another block of activity. If you can leave whatever has been happening during the week or during the day or even the last hour or so outside with your shoes and bring yourself wholly into this moment. The breath flowing in and out. The movement of the body with the breath. Try and rest your mind on the movement of the body with the breath.
Take a moment to reflect that no matter what difficulties you might have had today, or this week, or this month or this year that you are incredibly fortunate. Fortunate to live in a time when the Buddha Dharma is still being taught. Fortunate to live in a country where you’re able to hear it, fortunate to live in a country where you can follow your own beliefs, whatever they may be. And fortunate that you have the pleasure to be here this evening with no other agenda, no other demand on you except to expand your mind and contemplate this wonderful life that is both gift and burden. Try and generate a thought that in making the most of this opportunity, opportunity, try to make it take something away from this, any small thing that will help to make you a better person and to make yourself happier and through that to make others happier as well.
Okay, I don’t have a bell. Oh, it’s alright. We’re up. We’re not using it again. Put it back.
Am recording? Is this all right? Yep, it looks green. Okay. Are any of you new?
You’ve all been here. I I hadn’t seen you. So, do you have any familiarity with the twelve links of dependent origination at all? You do, but you don’t. Okay.
All right. This is about halfway through right now. So, we’re going to do a summation at the beginning. But if you have any questions at any time, if something is said that you can’t, some term that you don’t understand or something like that, please stop me. But if it’s some sort of larger question, we deal with those at the end.
Okay? Okay, so this course is about the Wheel of Life, the twelve Links of Dependent Origination, which is basically the Buddhist answer to the question: How did we get here and why do we experience the things that we do? If you put this in the terms of Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it’s basically why are we born to suffer and die. And this is the reason why. This series of twelve oh my heavens, it’s the twelve steps.
I hadn’t even thought of that. My name’s Pamela and I’m a sufferer. And I’m suffering. But it’s twelve movements from cause to effect, from cause to effect, from cause to effect that gives rise to how we experience the world. Each one of these is a cause that gives rise to an effect, which then becomes a cause which gives rise to an effect, which then becomes a cause that gives rise to an effect.
In that respect, they’re linked. They all follow on from one another. And if the twelve links of dependent origination are the answer to the question, why are we born to suffer die? The first two links are basically the short answer. Link number one is ignorance.
And here we mean we’re talking about a mistaken mode of apprehension, a mistaken way of apprehending things. It relates to two things, the way things are and the way we are. You’ve had teachings on that before. Okay. But basically, in terms of ignorance, when we’re talking about the way things exist, we’re talking about the view that they’re permanent.
They’re unchanging. At a really fine level they’re unchanging. Even though the table can be broken, we still think the table is solid and existing from its own side until it is broken. But in fact, is the product of an independent. Sorry, before I go into that.
There’s also a term called inherently existent, but we’re not going to go there right now. It’s permanent, unchanging, and independent. So we have this notion that the table and the rug and the chair and the picture and the thangka and everything else, it has its own nature. It is intrinsically a table. It could have been there for all time as far as I could have known walking the door.
But in fact, it is made out of wood which came from a tree, which itself was impermanent because it was cut down and it was milled into wood. And it was fashioned by a carpenter into an object that has particular properties that because of its parts, its legs and its top, or even just its top, we call a table. Because it is is conventionally that way and it is that way in dependence upon its parts. And it is not independent. It doesn’t have its own independent existence because of all the factors that came into existence.
And even at a very, very fine level, even though we perceive a table as being solid and reliable, at a very, very subtle molecular level, it is mostly space. We can’t perceive it that way, but that’s what it is. It’s mostly space. And the constituents of which it is comprised are moving around at an incredibly fast rate. And the whole thing is jiggling, jiggling, jiggling, jiggling, jiggling.
And how it’s held together, no one knows. So in that way, we don’t see the world the way things are. We have a tendency to think that they’re independent and they’re permanent and they’re unchanging. We view ourselves the same way, but we make an additional assumption that there is something about I, me, that even if we say that, oh yeah, I know I’m going to die. Let’s say you don’t believe in rebirth and you’re an atheist.
Even though you can say, well, I’m going to die. And at that point, everything that is me will cease to be we still have this very inflated view of how we fit into the world and the activities that happen around us. And that is we have a tendency to judge things around us in relation to this self. And in the course to this point, we have seen how biological evolution has brought us to this point because we have a system that works within parameters of value. That means can’t be too hot, can’t be too cold, need water but too much will kill me, need salt but too much will kill me, need air but pure oxygen for too long will damage me.
Need food, but too much is dangerous and can kill me. That we exist within a fairly narrow band of conditions that exist throughout the universe. We live on a very small planet. We live in a middle sized galaxy. The universe is vastly larger than anything that we apprehend in our narrow little world.
And also there is a vastly more life on, in, and around us right now than is visible in this room. There are billions and billions and billions of bacteria living in and on us. And I probably just killed several of them, perhaps millions of them. I know I did when I brushed my teeth this morning. And so we live in this fairly narrow band that all depends on self for gauging, for assessing things in the world.
And that’s not a particularly realistic way of being. So that’s ignorance. And this is sort of the ground of the twelve links. If you came back to a single cause, this is it. This is the fundamental mistake.
Now, the other part of the short answer is linked to, which is volitional dispositions, sometimes called karma. By the way, it would be interesting if you’ve kept your chart that was the handout because I’m going to completely revise it. I think made some mistakes on that that need to be revised. I had a even though some of it accords with things that I’ve read, I think I’m going to hand out a new version next week, which is a little bit more I think it’s rather better than the one that I’ve handed to you so far. But because of ignorance, because we are mistaken about the way things are, both we are and the way the world is, these predispose us.
A disposition is a tendency to act. These predispose us to act in particular ways. And actions can be physical actions. They can be mental actions. They can be verbal actions.
But they are tendencies to act based on apprehensions based on ignorance. Okay? And these volitional dispositions, which are tendencies to act because action is sorry. I’ve got some sort of a thing in my throat. Yeah, nope.
Got a little tickle back there. karma is the Sanskrit word for action. That’s all. But because we have these tendencies to act, we do act. And those actions, not because anybody’s doling out rewards and punishments, those actions have results.
And that is the law of cause and effect. And that’s not particularly the interpretation of the law of cause and effect might be Buddhist. But the fact that there is causality is in every single philosophy humankind has ever devised. And I suspect that’s because there is some regularity about our existence and how we observe the world that this captures quite accurately. So cause and effect is something upon which science is based and many, many other human ways of thinking.
So because in a biological sense, if you have a disposition to act and you do act, that leaves, that strengthens the linkages in your brain, let’s say the neural networks, it strengthens the neural networks in your brain in such a way that you’re much more disposed to do it again. And if you keep doing it over and over and over again, it becomes very automatic. There’s nothing particularly mysterious about this. There’s nothing particularly even Buddhist about this. If you engage in particular types of actions, you will continue to engage and they become habits.
When things become automatic, we call them habits. Ignorance and the habits that come out of ignorance is the short answer to why are we born to suffer and die? How we get here? Why do we experience things that we do? Okay.
But the short answer is only the beginning. But the first two links are the short answer. The remaining ten links are the detailed answer. And I have recently come to think of them as being grouped in a particular way, recently being today. So it’s three, three and four, which is what we discussed last time.
The third one is consciousness. Getting ahead of myself here. Link three and four is basically the basis. This is the basis of experience. Without these things, there is no experience.
No experience at all. The basis of experience. Okay. So in the first instance, we’re talking about mind, which is clear and knowing. And that’s not a highly satisfactory definition, but it has worked really well for two and a half thousand years.
People have done a lot, have been able to plumb meditative experience using this as a guidepost. So even though it wouldn’t be easy to operationalize in a scientific sense, It has a lot of things going for it. But basically the clearness of it means that it’s non material or it can not be obstructed by things like that wall. I can imagine, I can think right now in my mind. I can visualize what the foyer of Buddha House looks like.
I can visualize the table. I can visualize the pews. I can visualize boards. And so my mind is not obstructed by that wall. I can think of my mother who is in Dallas, Texas.
I can think of times in the past. So my mind is not obstructed by materiality. And it is knowing in the sense that it can captures, it takes on an aspect of that which it knows. It is capable of mirroring that which it knows. These are all very ambiguous terms, but we’re not talking about this so much in this.
This is the engine that makes everything go. Without this, there is nothing. There is no experience at all. But basically, contaminated consciousness. We’re talking about contaminated consciousness that is acting out of ignorance and volitional dispositions.
And so when when contaminated consciousness, which is the third link, is shown as a graphic on the wheel, it’s shown as a monkey moving through a tree. And I brought this. This was a quote from the Dhammapada that came across today. Do any of you know the tricycle daily dharma wire? You’ve got a computer and you use a computer, it’s a wonderful thing to have.
It’s like you get a little something out of the dharma every day and it gets sent to you at a particular time. It’s just amazing how sometimes these dovetail with this really, really neatly. There was an analogy in this that I’d never heard before, which is why I brought it to share with you. It says: The mind is wavering and restless, difficult to guard and restrain. Like a fish which is thrown on dry land, taken from its in the waters, the mind strives and struggles to get free from the power of death.
I love that image of a fish thrown on dry land. You know what they do. They just You know, They we are like monkeys moving through a tree and grasping at things and being moved, but it is quite desperate. It’s a quite desperate how do we get comfortable here? How do we get back to whatever state we’re supposed to be in?
So this final thing is not going to happen. This final thing, death, is not going to happen. So quite like that idea. Let’s see. Consciousness here is the mind.
Without the mind, there is no anything. There is no experience. Link four is name and form. In the Sanskrit, it’s called Namarupa. And this is also known as the five aggregates.
This is the embodied basis of experience. This is what our bodies are. And this includes form, which is materiality, feeling, perception or discrimination, compositional factors, which is kind of a garbage can term. But they are the things that sort of when concepts are formed in the mind, if you tear them apart, if you engage in what philosophers do and analyze them closely, they break into parts. And so they’re generally compounded.
They’re compounded things. And these compositional factors, I think, would be safe to say are the means by which the mind makes things out of its experience. And the last one, of course, is consciousness. So in name and form, you’re talking about four mental elements elements, and one material element. Okay.
And this basis of experience, which is based on ignorance and volitional factors, volitional dispositions, Don’t go there. Never mind. Glitch. Okay. Does anybody have any questions so far?
This is pretty much a recap of where we’ve been before. Well, except that consciousness, if you’re talking about experience, none these things exist independently of one another. They’re all dependent. They’re all dependently arising. So is this consciousness a different kind of consciousness than this?
No. It’s the same. But this is a different way of presenting that. And it’s putting this consciousness in the context of the embodiment, the embodiment that volitional dispositions give rise to. Yeah.
I’m not presenting this as a rebirth. That’s right. Yes. Yes. But when they say Namarupa as a moment in a cycle of rebirth, they probably are different.
I don’t know. I’d have to look. I’m not basically presenting this as a rebirth system because I can’t cash any of that out scientifically. I basically would have to say, well, this text says this and this text says this. And there’s no independent verification of that.
What the idea of this course was is trying to see whether this can be cashed out scientifically or not. But Namarupa is technically the moment between the last previous rebirth and the beginning of the next one. So it’s very fast. Does that answer your question? What’s the basis of your question?
What are you trying to get at? But there’s still moments of consciousness. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like you know more about this than I do.
No, I’m sure. On this one. If this is previous life, sure. If this is the first moment of this life, yes. Yeah.
See, but see, basically to say, yeah, basically if we’re talking about the twelve links as the basis for our experience in this moment right now, it doesn’t matter whether we had a previous life. It doesn’t matter whether we’ve got a life coming. It’s how did we get here right this minute, right now. And consciousness has been going moment to moment to moment to moment to moment. Since when, who knows?
I have a tendency to think it’s beginningless time. But there might be other people in this room who don’t adhere to that view. But basically, the five aggregates worked no matter how you look at it. These things work. Leslie, you’re holding your hand and your face in your hand.
Are you thinking? No? Are you all right? Okay. All right.
Okay. So these two, I think, can be described as the basis of our experience. It’s our consciousness and the embodied form that we take, which is our materiality, the way that my feeling is that the five aggregates probably compositional factors. That’s not the way it’s generally said. But I think that if you’re looking in terms of generation, that’s probably more it.
These things together give rise to this, which gives rise to this, which gives rise to that. And so basically, what we’ve just looked at are the role of consciousness and form. Does that make sense? Okay. So that’s the basis of experience.
What we’re going to talk about now is how this all how connects. You want to take a tea break, or should we start on this? Make a start? Okay. What we’re going to talk about now are the next two links.
Because I think that the next two are the basis of how self we connect to the world. Connect to the world. So we have our basis. And this is the way the basis connects connects to the world. First one is link we’re on five.
Are we six? Five. Is it five? Yeah, it is. Okay.
Sorry. Link five are the six sense spheres or powers. On this iconography, it’s shown as a building with windows. This doesn’t look like an empty building. But sometimes in His Holiness’s commentary on this particular teaching, the meaning of life in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, he says that it’s often an empty house with a door and four windows, or five windows.
And that is to indicate that this is still happening within the womb. That it’s the sense powers are developing so that they can connect with external things, but they are not fully developed yet. But again, that would be in a rebirth presentation. But basically, these six sense spheres, which are eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind. Mind.
And if you notice here, whereas on the five aggregates, have four mental and one material. Here we have five material and one mental. It’s like a different presentation. And each of these powers are said to be specific to a particular type of object. Again, sorry, I’m really losing it here.
That’s on tape, I’m sure. Does anybody have any questions? Anybody going to rescue me from this? Okay. There’s a couple of things that have to be noticed here.
First of all, without sensory systems, there is no connection to the world at all. And so even bacteria have actually quite a few sensory systems. They a particular suite of sensors for amino acids that have been likened to five to six senses. And they also sense any number of other things in the world, like the level of oxygen, the amount of pressure, the level of salt, that sort of stuff. But their primary food sources, which probably would be considered nose more than anything.
So this suite of sense powers is not found in all sentient beings. But their equivalents do and more. Okay? Now in traditional presentation of the sixth sense spheres, these are sense powers that I said resided in a particular place. But the main point is that these things are causes.
They’re conditions, and they are the dominant condition that give rise to a sense awareness. Now there are two things about this presentation traditionally. Not the fact that this link exists, because I don’t think that can be questioned, but the traditional presentation of this suite that doesn’t square with modern science. The first one is the notion of a sense power being located in you know, the center of the sense organ. Which would mean that if you were viewing the eye as the I sense power or the creator creator of the visual sense awareness that it would be the jelly like substance in the eye and maybe even a localized bit in the eye.
But we know now that you have the eye. Boy, that’s bad. I have a nose. Smile. In the back of that eye, it’s lined with particular types of cells.
Those two types of cells are rods and cones. You have to have both of them to get the full visual experience. We have three types of cells which gives us color vision. If you don’t have the three types, you don’t get the kind of color vision that we have. If you have more of heaven knows what they’re seeing, but they’re seeing something slightly different from us again.
Philosophers will tell you that there’s no intrinsic color in the world. I’m not sure that’s true. But depending upon what kind of eye power you have, it depends upon what you see in the world. This is not an intrinsically green carpet. It is green for us.
It is not green necessarily to the bacteria that are crawling over every single fiber on this carpet. It’s not necessarily green to a dog. A dog wouldn’t see that quite the way we do. Honey bee? Possibly.
Okay. So not only do we have different sorts of things back here, it’s not just the jelly in the eye. This then goes into the brain. Right? And in fact it goes from the front.
The visual centers of the brain are actually in the back. It’s all processed back here. So you have all kinds of projections from the eye here that go centers back here. Right? So where in there is the eye sense power?
You can become blind here. You can become blind here. You can become blind here. You can become blind here. Right?
Okay. So that- even though the general idea of an eye sense power or a visual sense still makes sense, it is not as localized as the traditional presentation would have it. The other thing that isn’t quite right all the time because there are counterexamples. In particular schools of Buddhist philosophy and dialectics, all you have to do is come up with one counterexample and the whole thing falls apart. But that isn’t necessarily the case either.
There’s a counterexample This is that the sense, sphere, or power has a particular sense object. Which is why this is often rendered as twelve. Because there are six sense spheres and there are six sense objects. Okay? I’m going to tell you.
While they may say there is a visual object, traditionally they might say where there is a visual object that is, you know, it doesn’t have a smell. It doesn’t have a sound like a pot, for example. You see a pot. You can feel a pot. You can’t necessarily smell a pot.
You might be able to smell what was in the pot. But you’re not smelling the pot. So you have the eye sense power and its object, which is an object which can be an object for the eye sense power. These are all kinds of circular definitions. In our view, it would be you’re seeing is light, photons.
What the ear is hearing are waves. You know, what the nose smells are molecules. What the tongue tastes are molecules kind or of the same kind in a different way because taste is mostly smell. And the tactile sense is completely different again. What that is experiencing is experiencing is pressure and that sort of stuff.
Pressure. Not entirely clear on that one. I know that it’s tactile sense like a feeling of touch and tactile. But in modern parlance there is also proprioception, which is knowing where your limbs are in space. You can shut your eyes.
Takes a while to be in a floatation tank before you actually lose a sense of where your bodily parts are. And you can get it back really fast just by moving one. And that’s proprioception. And there’s also interoception, which is the body’s sensation of its internal state, which is frequently experienced as nausea, vertigo, vertigo, that sort of stuff. That relates to your body’s placement in space.
But also it’s a signal about something that’s occurring within the system as well. Like if you suddenly find yourself breathing really fast and your heart beating really fast and you actually didn’t see consciously the dog out of the corner of your eye, but you have an experience as a child. You know, you got bit by a dog and were roughed up by a dog when you were a child and were really afraid of dogs. Even if you don’t consciously see the dog, because we have peripheral vision, if you unconsciously perceive the dog, you will start getting all these conditioned responses and you may not even know why you’re doing it. And that is also kind of a it’s part of feeling by the body, but it’s not necessarily something that would have been part of the traditional presentation.
Now the problem with this is that there is a condition called synesthesia. Synesthesia. Any of you heard of this? Synesthesia is a condition in which the wiring of the various senses is crossed. And so someone experiences a particular sound as having a color or a flavor or a heat quality.
Quality. They can see a particular object like a number and it has a particular bodily sensation. It’s a very odd the things that generally get mixed around are No? No flavors. They all get mixed around actually.
Someone can hear can see a particular object and hear a sound connected with it. That sort of stuff. These patients’ population, are frequently used in cognitive research about perception. Because if you can figure out how this went wrong, then you can theoretically, it tells you something about how it works correctly. Savants are supposed to have that up?
Have I remembered so many things you can do? Don’t know. Savants do have they have well every Savant is different, number one. Does everybody know what a savant is? A savant is They’re generally called autistic, but they’re not necessarily autistic.
They have really heightened capacities for remembering numbers, drawing unbelievably, absolutely accurate drawings. Couldn’t create something like Picasso, but could draw Chartres Cathedral from like age seven. You know, that just incredible, detailed, accurate drawings. So they had these exaggerated powers. And some of them have some of this crossover effect.
But I don’t think all of them have the crossover effect. And most savants, I believe, it’s safe to say, have no idea how they remember numbers. You know, they might be able to pick apart their experience sufficiently that they can say: Well, I’ve now realized that I have this experience when this happens. Some of the Oh god, wish I could remember his name. There was a savant that in the early part of the twentieth century that actually tried to figure out why he had the powers that he did.
Tried to observe himself and he came up with some quite interesting things. But my understanding is that they really don’t know how they do what they do. And we certainly don’t know how they do what they do. Okay. Are we ready for a break?
Does anybody have any questions at all about this? Pamela, the eyes and ears seem to be, you know, the strongest senses, but they’re not really always reliable, are they? No. They’re not even the strongest senses necessarily. Actually, even though they say that our sense of smell is really attenuated, the olfactory sense is the one that is wired.
It’s like, you know, go straight to the brain. Don’t go anywhere else. Whereas you’ve got vision, your visual stuff is like processing in the retina and goes back here and stuff like that. Smell is just instantaneous. Yeah.
Well taste and smell are very closely related. But I think they are all unreliable. They are all unreliable. And classically, in Western there has been analysis upon analysis upon analysis of how, you know, why if you’re looking for a valid foundation for knowledge, that conceptual perceptual experience is not necessarily how you interpret what you’re perceiving is not necessarily going to get you there. Because there are all kinds of ways that it can be, like the classic one for Descartes was: a stick in water appears bent.
But you pull it out of the water and it’s absolutely straight. In the Buddhist tradition it’s the issue of jaundice. If you have jaundice, the world takes on a yellow tinge, but it is not yellow. The problem is with you. Another classic is, you know, how do you know whether what you’re experiencing right now is a dream or a waking state?
You know? And if it’s a dream and you’re taking it as a waking state, then all of your perceptions within it that lead you to think that you’re awake are wrong. So the perception- in the Western tradition particularly, the sense perception has been considered a serious basis for suspicion. It’s not a valid basis of knowledge. But I think it’s correct to say in the Buddhist tradition that in an unmistaken mind, perception, a fresh perception, an unclouded non conceptual perception, is the only basis, is the only valid basis for knowledge.
Well, except you can have a valid inference, too. Can’t you? Stuff like that. Can we have tea? I something warm on my throat.