Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 21.8-minute teaching, Ven Jampa Ignyen walks through the intermediate state after death and the twelve links of dependent origination. He begins with the bardo: how consciousness dissolves through white light and black attainment; what form the intermediate being takes, a subtle body that mirrors its future rebirth; and how karma magnetizes it toward conception. He then systematically traces all twelve causal links—ignorance and intention, consciousness, name and form, sense bases, contact, feeling, craving, grasping, existence, birth, and aging-death—showing how these give rise to the wheel of saṃsāra. Throughout, he stresses that these aren’t abstract doctrine but living processes unfolding moment by moment in your own mind. For practitioners with foundation in Lamrim study.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 20 2001 06 14 LR.mp3
UUID: 9a65be18-734a-409c-b1ea-7520a6523147
Teacher: Ven Jampa Ignyen
Collection: Lam Rim 2001 Month 04-06 (Ven Jampa Ignyen)
Date: 2001-06-14
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 21.8 minutes
Words: ~2,113
If the body is not moved and disturbed and so forth. And then from there, one is reborn as an intermediate being, where there’s those stages from the white light back to black near attainment, back to red increase, back to white appearance, these minds, grosser levels of mind, reestablished and one achieves the body of an intermediate being. And one it said that the form of that intermediate being will reflect one’s future rebirth. As a human, then one will look like a human. Maybe it’s said, I think in Abhidharmakośa Abhidharma, say, a young person at the age of five or six, about that size of body.
Or if one is taking the form of an animal, then it’s similar to the animal and so on. Or a divine being will have a similar physical appearance to the divine being. Pabongka Rinpoche then mentions that those that are to be reborn in hell of hot coals. I think as hungry ghosts, they have an appearance of like water. Animals sort of a grayish color.
humans have a sort of a hue of a golden hue, as do the beings who are to be reborn in the desired divine realms. Whereas the form realm beings have a white appearance. And then in the intermediate state, one lives for seven days and at the end of every seven days, one has a minor death where one’s consciousness again dissolves back down to the clear light and then reemerges again as, in a sense, a new intermediate being. Intermediate beings possess a subtle body, a body of the nature of the mind itself, which does have a subtle physical form, but it’s, very subtle. And they’re not obstructed by walls or general things that obstruct beings like ourselves with gross physical bodies.
And in fact, it’s said that they’re only obstructed in two places, either in Bodh Gaya at the point where the Buddha attained enlightenment on the throne, or they’re obstructed at the side of their mother’s womb. And an intermediate being, once they’re in that state, then tend to be attracted according to the will be attracted in accordance with the karma that they’ve awakened to the site of their future rebirth. And there, future parents plus the intermediate being need, in a sense, shared condition or common set of conditions in order to facilitate the rebirth there of that being. And then once that being is drawn to that place and they enter the union of the egg and the sperm, then they die as an intermediate being, and then they’re reborn as a human being. So that’s the moment of conception.
So the way in which a a being is reborn is really expressed by the twelve links of dependent arising. And these twelve links, there are various ways to explain them. So in brief we have We start with the first link. The first link is ignorance. Then we have compositional formation.
Then we have consciousness. Then we have name and form. The six bases. Anyway, they’re in the text. Six bases.
After the six bases, we have oh, yes. Contact, then feeling. Contact, then feeling arises, then craving, grasping, existence, then birth, and then the final one is aging and death. It’s useful if we can gain an idea of what these twelve are because they explain the progression of our entire life and our future lives. And they really represent the process by which we are currently currently evolving.
And at present, we we can locate ourselves there in the the twelve links. And we can see we can begin to see how these processes processes actually manifest within us in a moment by moment form, moment by moment way. So the first link of ignorance is not just any any type of ignorance. It’s really ignorance of the way the self exists, how we exist. In other words, it’s ignorance of the self, or ignorance of suchness, or thatness, ignorance of emptiness, So this ignorance we have at present, and it’s this ignorance which is the beginning of the twelve dependent links.
Based on that ignorance, then we have the second link, which is the link of karma, which is the link of composition. Here, composition just means composing or establishing karmic seeds. Composition here simply refers to intention. That in fact, based on the ignorance that we have, we develop all manner of intention. This intention is very potent, especially if it’s strongly positive or strongly negative.
It becomes potent. It has the capacity to, in a sense, create existence. Then the third link is the link of consciousness itself. Consciousness is not the same, of course, as intention. And in fact, here, we need to understand the difference between, main minds and mental factors.
Ignorance is a mental factor. Intention is a mental factor. Consciousness is a main mind. And even though these states coexist at the at the time how shall we say this? These twelve links are actually causally related.
They list a series of of causes that exist in serial order. And by all these causes existing serially and manifesting in order, we create this wheel of existence. We create saṃsāra. In fact, it’s really talking about saṃsāra, the twelve links. They linked causally one to the next.
So ignorance is linked to, intention. Intention then is linked to, consciousness. Is same as mind. Consciousness is neutral. Consciousness is this awareness that doesn’t really do a great deal.
It’s led from object to object, by the mental factors. It’s really the mental factors in our continuum that are doing all the work, like ignorance, like our intention. And these mental factors, they lead the mind or they affect the mind. So what’s happening with the link of of ignorance is that it’s providing a basis, a motivating basis for intention to arise. So motivated by ignorance, then an intention to act in a positive or negative way develops.
This intention to act in a positive or negative way is established first on a mental level, then a verbal and physical level, that intention, whether positive or negative, stains the consciousness, imprints the consciousness with which it is associated. Although the consciousness and the mental factor of intention are in a sense completely mixed, that intention has the capacity to stain the mind with an imprint, with a seed. And that seed then remains there until in future the conditions arise or that seed or that latency to bear fruit or to bring about a result, bring about an outcome. These imprints themselves are not physical. They’re impermanent.
And they abide within awareness. In a sense, abide within the center of our mental continuum and abide on the mental consciousness itself. So they’re the first three links. First, we have ignorance, then we have intention or composition, and then we have consciousness. Consciousness is often divided in two.
There’s different ways of presenting that. There is a causal consciousness and a resultant consciousness. And the mental consciousness which is imprinted by that intention is the causal consciousness. And then that seed then remains within the mental continuum. Then the fourth link is name and form.
Name and form simply refers to the five aggregates. Name and form here represents the aggregates in the very beginning of our existence from the first moment of an embryo. Then after that, as the embryo develops, up until it’s the sixth sense powers are developed is name and form. When the sixth sense powers actually manifest, then we have the fifth link.
The link of the, the bases, the, the six bases. So in the state of the embryo, when the six bases, what are the six bases? They’re the eye base, ear base, nose, tongue, body and mental sense base. When those exist within the embryo, then the fifth link is established. So then as the embryo develops, after that, the sixth link is established, that of contact.
And contact, the link of contact is established when that fetus is able to assemble the object, the sense power and the consciousness together so that contact is established between the awareness of that embryo and an object. When that is first established, the link of contact is established. The link of feeling is established when a feeling emerges in relation to that contact. So those are the really from the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh link. They also they occur those four occur in one group.
So the first three links, one to three occur in one group. Then four, five, six and seven occur in the second group. Now we have eight, nine and ten. Eight, nine and ten are craving, grasping is the ninth, and existence is the tenth. Craving and grasping are forms of attachment, existence is actually a form of karma, is listed as karma itself.
And then those three also exist in a in a group. And then from there we have the eleventh and twelfth link. The eleventh link is birth and the twelfth link is aging and death. So in a sense, these twelve links are describing the process of life, the process of evolution of the five aggregates. Now, it’s not that they all occur in a serial order.
I think that becomes obvious when we start thinking about them. First we have ignorance, then intention, then consciousness. Certainly those three always occur in serial causal order. Then they give rise to name and form. Then name and form, then the sixth and seventh links are contact and feeling.
They always occur after those first three. Craving, grasping and existence then occur themselves necessarily in a causal order. But those three, that is eight, nine and ten, can occur either before or after four, five, six and seven. And to make it even more complicated, eleven and twelve occur at the same time as four, five, six and seven. Okay.
So these need to be contemplated at at great length. The benefit of contemplating these is that they can indicate to us just how existence actually functions, how existence come comes about, how we have come to exist in a way that we currently exist, how anybody has come to experience or exist what they currently experience. Now, putting these together is very important. Now I think, I’m not sure if we have a, does anyone have a chart of these? Actually, do we have whereabouts?
What page? Five twenty nine? Okay. That’s some symbol. Actually, we have the wheel of life diagram.
That also is very useful because that gives the twelve links. Does anyone? Exactly. We’ve got the twelve links listed there. And in fact, that gives a representation in a pictorial form of what the twelve links are.
But in order to understand what the pictures represent, we need to have an understanding of the meaning of the twelve links. Right. So what might be useful is just well, actually, can leave it there for the at present, and we’ll come back and do some further discussion on this. This is not an easy topic, this one. And in fact, this one really is the case.
No, no. There’s two there. There’s the intentional karma and the intended karma. The intentional karma is the mental factor of intention. This mental awareness that we have, that’s the actual karma.
The intended karma is the actions of speech and body that arise in dependence on them. That’s intended karma. Oh, it’s the mental mental factor of intention itself. You don’t do an action or you have your intention that an action be called in this direction? Still, it has an effect.
It might only be a slight effect if we but it depends on the type of thought. If one has a very negative thought, even for a short period, it can have quite a negative result later, even though we didn’t act on it. Whereas, you know, something that’s minor, we may even go through and do the complete action, but it doesn’t produce a very strong negative act negative result. It depends on the on you know, the objective that one’s directing one’s intention towards the intensity of the, intention and so on. There’s many factors that come to bear.
Even if it’s only on a mental level, it can produce results. It’s stronger if all four parts of the action are complete. Anyway, we’ll stop there. We’ll just have a break before we resume. Have a cup of tea.
Yep. Just for a few.