Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 74-minute session, Venerable Thubten Gyatso guides students through the core teachings of the Wheel of Life—the twelve links of dependent origination that explain how ignorance drives the cycle of rebirth. He begins with the first three links: ignorance (self-grasping misconception), karmic formation (intention at the moment of action), and consciousness (the stream of mind carrying karmic imprints). He then walks through name and form, the six sense sources, contact, and feeling, showing how each stage arises in utero and after birth. The crucial turning point comes with craving and grasping—our intensifying attachment to pleasure and existence—which ripen the karmic seed into the tenth link of existence, leading to rebirth and finally aging and death. Throughout, he uses vivid symbolic imagery (man in a boat, arrow through the eye, monkey gorging on fruit, pregnant woman) and draws on personal anecdotes to make abstract doctrine concrete. A Q&A segment addresses misconceptions about emptiness, karma and DNA, and bodhisattva vows, emphasizing that wisdom realizing emptiness is the only way to break the chain. Pitched at practitioners with some familiarity with Buddhist doctrine.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 07 W o L 2010.mp3
UUID: cb2c1b5a-808d-43c9-9764-afdba93b6b71
Teacher: Ven Thubten Gyatso aka Adrian Feldman
Collection: Wheel of LIfe (Ven Thubten Gyatso aka Adrian Feldman)
Date: 2010 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 74.8 minutes
Words: ~7,670
Continue on. So, we’ve discussed the first three links: the ignorance link, which refers to the self-grasping conception or the self-grasping ignorance. This can be innate or intellectually acquired. You know, an intellectual idea or philosophy we acquire in this life can be added to our innate ignorance, but we all have the innate self-grasping ignorance because we had it in previous lives and it’s always been there in our continuum. And every being has self-grasping ignorance.
It doesn’t matter whether humans, animals have it. In any of the realms of existence there is the innate self-grasping ignorance. Karmic formation specifically refers to the mental factor of intention in the mind when the throwing karma is created. So, it’s the intention at the moment that the virtuous or non-virtuous karma is established. Consciousness link refers to the stream of consciousness or the mind from the moment the karmic potential or imprint is placed upon it at the end of that action right through until the first moment of consciousness in the life that will be thrown by that particular karmic imprint and we can divide it into causal consciousness link which is from the beginning up until the last moment of the bardo before that life, and the resultant consciousness link, which is the first moment of consciousness in the new life that’s been thrown by that karma.
So that’s the first three links. So, having taken the new life, we have the fourth link which is called the link of name and form. Name refers to mind or consciousness and form refers to the body. In particular, it’s referring to the five aggregates. You know, we divide—we talk about a sentient being as having five aggregates, five collections, one of which is the body and the other four are the mental aggregates.
So this term came from a Buddha’s sūtra, where the Buddha taught in detail the body and mind, you know, the basis of a sentient being. And he began by putting a pile of rice on the table. This heap or pile or aggregate of rice indicates the physical aggregate or the body collection. So our body is not a single thing, it’s a collection of many different parts and different physical aspects. Then the next pile of rice is the feelings.
So within our mind the most dominant mental factor which determines our behavior is feelings. Remember, feelings specifically refers to the feelings of pleasure, pain, a neutral feeling, or happiness, unhappiness, an indifferent feeling, which can be either physical or mental. So feelings are important because most human behavior, most sentient behavior—if we were talking about humans, most of our behavior is directed towards enhancing our pleasant feelings and diminishing our unpleasant feelings. This is our main activity in life. The next pile of rice, still also talking about the mind, is the aggregate of discriminations.
So it’s discriminating, the mental faculty of discriminating between this and that, which is the cause of most human dispute. All our arguments and conflict arises because I think this way and the other person thinks that way and we fight each other to prove that we’re right and they’re wrong. Then the fourth pile of rice was the volitional aggregate or compositional factors. So this refers to all the other different types of mental factor that there are. All the virtuous or the non-virtuous mental factors are all lumped together in the fourth aggregate.
And finally, the fifth aggregate is the collection of different types of consciousness, like the five sense consciousnesses and mental consciousness. So, the name and form link, having taken this rebirth as a result of that specific karma, we have a new body and mind. Of course, the mind is not totally new, it’s a continuity of the previous mind, but still the mind of that life is newly established from that continuum and the body is definitely new. It’s the body determined by the chromosomes of the parents. So, we have a physical aggregate, which is form, and mental aggregates—the four mental aggregates are collectively termed name.
So, this link, the fourth link, exists from the moment of rebirth, you know, a moment which doesn’t refer to being born from the womb, but rebirth refers to the moment when the consciousness, with its subtle wind, joins with a fertilized egg and you have the three factors necessary for rebirth: there’s the sperm, you know, the chromosomes from the mother and the father and the consciousness. So there we have—that’s it, that’s the moment of rebirth and that’s where we already have body and mind, a very subtle body and very subtle mind, but it’s there. So that’s the fourth link which is established by the ripening of the particular karma that we’re talking about in this set of twelve links. The symbol shows a man in a boat, so often just one man steering a boat, so the boat, in that situation the boat would symbolize the form, the body aggregate, and the person steering the boat would be the consciousness, the mind. In this picture there’s, I think there’s five passengers or five people in the boat.
So this is the five aggregates which are established and they’re going to, as the embryo develops into a fetus, then the five aggregates will be fully functioning. I think it’s the five aggregates, might be the different types of sense consciousnesses. Anyway, if we stick to one man and one boat it’s easy, body and mind. So, this is the embryonic phase where the body is not developed. As the embryo develops into a fetus, then there comes a time when the six sense organs are fully developed.
So the fetus, its eyes and ears and smell and taste and touch sense organs, these mature and become ready to function. So the six sources, source or entrance, refers to the six sense bases, the physical base which is necessary for a sense consciousness to function. Specifically, that doesn’t refer to the eye organ but to subtle matter within the eye organ which is necessary for sight to occur. Maybe we can talk about the retina. And similarly, the ear and the smell and taste and touch sensors, they talk about and they describe the arrangement of this specific form which is necessary for that particular sense consciousness to function.
So, this link, the fifth link, which is called the six sources, this exists from the moment that they’re fully formed, right, so the embryo is developed and they’re fully formed, until the moment after birth when they come in contact with their external sense objects. Now, we know that the six senses are operating within the womb. We know that the fetus can experience touch and smell and taste and probably even it can have some vision and hearing. Definitely we know hearing. I think it’s been shown that mothers who have their favorite soap opera, particularly as pregnancy approaches term, they like to sit down and take a break and relax and watch the soap opera on TV.
And somebody did an experiment where they played the theme tune of various soaps and they found that the babies would relax very much when their mother’s favorite theme tune was played. So it means if the mother is sitting relaxing, the fetus in her womb is not being bumped around and is feeling a bit more relaxed. So they can hear the theme tune, they can hear what you’re saying. And actually they know what you’re saying. We don’t give our babies credit for the intelligence that they possess, but they know a lot more than we think they know.
Their mind is very clear when they wake up after about twenty-five weeks of gestation and very clear even seeing past lives and they’re conscious of noise and sound and of what’s going on even after being born. They are aware of much more, but they can’t verbalize what they know. That is backed up by today’s antenatal classes. My daughter-in-law and son have been going and they say talk to your baby and now when my son speaks to the baby that’s four weeks off being born, the baby gets very excited in the womb and they call it bonding time. Serious bonding time.
Yeah, I’m sure already they know the vibration of their parents’ voices, particularly their mothers. And yeah, they’re with it. It’s not just a blank slate in there, there’s an emotional, feeling, sensitive mind even inside the womb. When we talk about the six sources, although the sense consciousnesses are functioning inside the womb, we say that the moment when this link stops is not when they start to experience sensory input in the womb, but after they’re born they experience sensory input from the external environment directly.
So, the six sources is represented by a house with six windows, so it means that the windows are the source or the entrance through which one experiences the environment, the five senses, and the sixth sense is the mental consciousness, you know, for us the source of the realm of thought and conception. So, because we have these six sense bases when we’re born, we immediately experience the next link, which is contact. So, contact is the mental experience of contact with the outside world. And the objects of the outside world can be pleasant objects, unpleasant objects, or neutral objects.
So, as a result of the contact with the world we experience pleasure or pain or neutral feeling and that’s the next link, the seventh link of feeling. So contact is the consciousness that arises with the meeting of the sense organ, the sense object and the particular sense consciousness. And so that’s symbolized by a man and a woman in embrace symbolizing the contact between the sense base and its object. Feeling is the mental factor of feeling. Remember we began yesterday, we talked about the five ever-present mental factors, we see now here we’re meeting them again.
Contact is one of those ever-present mental factors. Feeling is one of the ever-present mental factors. So, once again, they appear again. So, contact is the awareness of the object or the cause of feelings, and feeling is the actual experience of pleasure or pain or indifference resulting from that contact. So, clearly, first comes contact, then comes feeling.
The symbol for feeling is very strong feeling. It’s an arrow piercing a man’s eye, so it’s a very powerful feeling, painful feeling arising from the contact of an unpleasant object with the sense organ. At this point, because we still have ignorance, there is still self-grasping ignorance in the mind. Whenever there is a pleasant feeling, there is inevitably the generation of attachment to that feeling and to the object causing that feeling. It arises in every pleasant experience—the disturbing emotion of attachment, not wanting to separate from that object that’s causing pleasure.
And whenever there is contact with an unpleasant object, there is unhappy painful feeling and there is aversion and aggression, anger and hatred, a dislike of that feeling and of the object causing that feeling. This is inevitable because we still have the self-grasping ignorance. So there is not a moment of pleasure or pain that passes where we are not creating karma through attachment or aversion. And so at this point you can see so many more twelve links can be established through anger and aversion. New sets of twelve links, not the same set as the one under discussion, but brand new sets of twelve links will be created throughout life, in our reaction to every pleasant and unpleasant feeling—every unskillful reaction to every pleasant and unpleasant feeling.
Then, the next link is craving. And craving is not attachment in general, it is the mental factor of attachment—it is attachment—but the specific attachment which will begin to nourish the karmic potency under discussion, right? The karmic potency or potential that was established by the ignorance link that is under discussion. So, this craving is the link which will arise towards the end of life and it begins to nourish that particular potency created by the karmic formation of this set of twelve links. So we have to realize that each life has its own set of twelve links.
So, mainly this craving is attachment to life, desiring existence and life. And it may well be desiring the continuity of life, which we may intellectually grasp—intellectually grasp the concept, the thought of rebirth or something after life. It doesn’t have to be specifically rebirth, but there is a desire anyway, it’s craving for existence, for continued existence. Not to disappear and die. The symbol shows a person who’s sitting at a table and he’s drinking wine.
Have to say that, yeah, there’s some sort of strange thing beside him, looks like a bird. Anyway, he’s drinking wine and this illustrates that one glass of wine is not enough usually. If we have one, we want two, and if we want two, we want three. So, we crave more. The more pleasure we have, the more we want.
There’s no satisfaction. So, that’s what that symbolizes. Then craving, now as we’re approaching death, this gives rise to the link of grasping. And grasping also is attachment but it’s much intensified. It’s intensified desire that continues the ripening of the particular karmic imprint that was already beginning to ripen as a result of craving.
So, grasping is strong grasping at existence. Strong, not wanting to disappear, not wanting to die. In general, we can talk about grasping at the pleasure of the sense objects, grasping at our intellectual views, you know, in particular we’re talking about wrong views here, grasping at ideas of mistaken ethics and conduct, and very strongly grasping at self—as we’re approaching death, there’s a strong sense of self and danger. Self is disappearing, self is entering the unknown and just I want to live, I don’t want to go—this intensified grasping at life, at self within that life, okay? So that intensity of the attachment to existence, that causes the final ripening of this same karmic imprint that was established way back in the second link, karmic formation, has been carried on the mind.
And now it’s nurtured by that grasping at existence. And that gives rise to the tenth link, which is called existence. It’s given the term existence because this is the ripened karma and its result will be the next existence. So therefore the result gives it its name: existence. And how does that—the karmic potential that’s been borne all this time is not a state of consciousness.
In the presentation of the world, of all things that exist, there are three types of impermanent phenomenon. The first is the physical world, for example, our bodies. The second is consciousness, for example, the six main consciousnesses and the fifty-one mental factors. The third is compositional phenomena or compounded phenomena which are neither physical nor mental. They’re not body, they’re not mind.
So, there are many things which exist but which are neither body nor mind. And the karmic seed or the karmic potency refers to this. This is what it is, it’s one of these. Now, there are other examples of things which exist but which are neither physical nor mental. For example, time.
So time is something which exists but it’s a mere designation to the state of change from past to present to future. And we can categorize time into seconds, minutes, hours, days, years, etc. But it is—and we can even incorporate time in our mathematics, in our formulas, and it has a function. But there is no thing which is time, it’s just merely designated to the observed transition from past to present to future. Other things which belong to this category are things such as life.
So life and death exist, but they’re nothing in themselves. Of course, nothing at all in the entire universe exists in itself, everything is merely designated. But in this situation there is nothing physical nor mental which is life or death. Life is the state of combination of body and mind. Death is a state of separation of body and mind.
So we can—death exists. Life exists. Other things, math exists, one exists, two exists, three exists, but there’s nothing which is one, two or three which is mental or physical. They’re just designated to, you know, the collection of items: one, two, three, four or five items. We call that three.
And so three exists but in no physical or mental way. Same with words, nouns. Nouns exist but they’re just mere terms placed upon their object and they’re neither mental nor physical. And so on. There’s a whole list of phenomena which belong in this category of neither mind nor form.
So, the karmic imprint is designated upon this potency of the mind established by our previous behavior which can bring about a result. It’s neither consciousness nor matter. Karmic imprints are not physical. They’re not mental either. I often think that maybe they’re like—if the consciousness is like sand, of course, consciousness is not physical, then karmic imprints must be like footprints in the sand.
A footprint is not sand, and it’s not air, but it’s something recognizable and it’s there. So our behavior causes footprints on our mindstream. And this is how I picture karmic imprints. And they can have a function. Footprints are pretty boring, but they can collect water or do things.
But our behavior has an effect upon our mind and induces a tendency of our mind to experience things, to do things. So, how does a karmic imprint ripen? It ripens in the—it causes the generation of the mental factor of intention. Once again, here it is. The tenth link existence is the mental factor of intention that is the fully ripened result of that karmic potency that was established way back in the second link.
Remember, when we talked about the five ever-present mental factors, intention is what leads the mind, moves the mind to connect with a particular object. So, if we go back to our discussion on death, we’re now talking about the time of the absorption of the aggregate of discrimination, when there’s still some capacity to discriminate between right and wrong, virtue and non-virtue. We’re not dead, we still have some mental capacity. When that stops, the mind will become really dull and unable to have any choice in what’s happening.
But at this time we ripen the mental factor intention. So it arises in a particular aspect. So it might be an intention which is going to attract us to a human rebirth, to an animal rebirth, to a hungry ghost or hell rebirth, or to a divine rebirth. But, of course, the next moment the mind’s going into death, isn’t it? It’s becoming very subtle, like going to sleep.
Now, I’m sure that you’ve experienced it. If you’re thinking strongly about some event or something as you go to sleep, when we go to sleep we go to deep sleep, dreamless sleep. But after some time we start to dream. And very often the dream is a reflection of what we were thinking about strongly before we fell asleep. So it means that the dream is determined by the last thoughts as we were going to sleep.
And even when we wake up, often the first conscious thought that comes to mind is the last thought that we had as we were going to sleep. So this is a natural mental function that we can experience ourselves, we can investigate. So death is exactly the same thing. The ripening of the intention, as you’re beginning to die, aggregate of discrimination absorbs, then you go into deep, subtle, you know, the levels of white light, red light, black light, clear light. And then you wake up in the bardo.
The bardo experience is influenced by that karma that ripened. So your body, your bardo experience is induced by that last strong intention that was nurtured as you were dying. And then you will be attracted to the specific type of rebirth—type of parents, which will give you an animal body or a human body, whichever karma it was—your whole bardo experience will be human-like or animal-like, and you’ll eventually meet with your future rebirth state. So this is how karma takes us through the intermediate state, this most subtle wind and mind, and connects us with the future life. You can see it’s sensible, it’s not just inventing, it’s very interesting.
So, tenth link is existence. The fully ripened result of the karmic potency established by ignorance formation of that same set of links and has been prepared for ripening by the craving and grasping links of that same set of links. Geshe Sopa, in his books in the Lamrim, he mentions that during death the third factor is—it’s not just craving and grasping, but there is the ethical tone, the term is the ethical tone of the mind as we’re dying is very important in determining the type of karma that ripens. So what he’s referring to is if as we’re dying during the absorption of the aggregates, if the ethical tone of our mind is virtue, then that will nurture a virtuous karmic imprint. If the ethical tone is non-virtue, that will ripen a non-virtuous karmic imprint.
There will also be craving and grasping at existence. So even with virtuous karmas, there is grasping at life, at existence, at me, not wanting to disappear. So when that type of grasping is associated with a virtuous mental factor, it will nurture a life which we wanted but it will be a happy life—or a divine being or an asura. So this tenth link is the mental factor of intention, which has arisen as a result of the full ripening of the karmic potency. The link of karmic formation also was intention, wasn’t it?
I think Geshe Sopa says that they’re both intention, but the karmic formation link, that intention is like a barley seed that’s dry. Whereas the intention, which is the tenth link of existence, is like a barley seed that’s been soaked in water and is swollen and is at the point of germinating into a seedling. And so the seedling is the next link. The symbol for grasping is a monkey eating fruit and you can just see his cheeks are swollen because he’s not satisfied with what he’s eating, he wants more. I think, if you’ve ever had the experience of feeding monkeys, a pack of monkeys, they’re so greedy that they don’t want any of the other monkeys to get the food, so they don’t have time to swallow it.
So if you’re giving, like, bread or something, they’ll stuff it in their cheeks and just grab more and more and often their cheeks can be right out here, I’ve seen them in Dharamsala, just to stop the other monkeys getting near it and only then do they go away and begin to swallow it. And that’s what this monkey is doing, his cheeks are swollen, but he’s still picking more fruit. So that’s grasping, right? Good illustration of grasping. And then the illustration for the tenth link is a pregnant woman at term.
So she’s at full term, ready to go into labor. So, that obviously gives rise to the eleventh link, which is rebirth, symbolized by a woman actually giving birth. Rebirth, the link of rebirth, refers to the karmically acquired aggregates, you know, body and mind, taken at the first moment of conception due to the previous ripening of that particular karmic imprint. Rebirth is the new body and mind in the new life. And then, because we’re born, we inevitably experience the next link: aging and death.
So aging begins the moment after conception, you know, it means approaching death. And death will be the end of that life. So that’s symbolized by a corpse being carried on the back of somebody carrying a corpse to the charnel ground or the cemetery. In Tibet they used to dismember, chop up the corpse and feed the meat and even crush bones to the vultures. When Buddha taught the twelve links, he said aging and death—or the aging and death link—you can call these other links, but death is associated with sorrow, lamentation, anguish—anguish like the dying person has great anguish of being separated from the people they love—mental unhappiness and mental disturbance, you know, oneself dying.
So these extra points occur with death. And Buddha mentioned them to remind us of the unsatisfactory nature of cyclic existence. See, we took the rebirth out of craving and grasping, right? That’s why we took rebirth, because we believed that there is happiness. There is happiness in life.
We may not have specifically thought about animal or hungry ghosts or hell life but just in this—there is—it’s important to live, to be, to exist, to continue living. So that craving and grasping at existence brought us to this life. We’ve got to remember that every life we take, even if we’re born in the deva realms, in the desire realm, devas, they experience sorrow, lamentation, anguish, mental unhappiness, and mental disturbance. So, as I said the other day, the lie that we were taught as children—how the prince and the princess met and kissed and lived happily ever after. There is no happily ever after.
It’s just the carrot on the end of the stick. A pretense and we have this fantasy that there is true happiness to be found in life but it’s not so. Because whatever we do will always—we have to separate from it or we’ll die. You mentioned, for example, life, death, mathematics, time, aren’t they just mental concepts, so aren’t they of mind?
Oh, I see. No, because they are indeed conceived by mind, but there is a basis on which we—life is not mind. Life is the situation where you have a body plus its mind. We say it’s alive. Specifically they say warmth.
I think it’s warmth and feeling indicating—like is this human body alive or dead? If it’s cold it’s dead. Anyway, you’ve got the body and mind together. So it’s not mind, it’s just a state of that human organism, it’s either alive or dead. Everything is established through mere conception, actually.
Nothing exists out there in its own right. You know, this is very important that whatever exists merely exists in dependence upon mental conception, name and concept. So there’s the idea and we give a name to something, the idea comes from something suitable to be named and we give it a name. That’s how we establish you and I to exist. The self has no existence beyond mere name and conception.
The base is not the self. Like if we’re talking about a human person, the basis of the person is a body and mind, but neither that body nor that mind can be held up to be the person in his or her own right. It is what we call a person, but it’s not a person. A person is just something established by the thought, the name person. And we all agree that this is suitable to be called a human person.
So conventionally we accept that a human person is somebody who has a body and mind like us. But if we analyze that body and mind, there’s nothing that we can find to be the person. The person is just a label. And that’s sufficient to establish existence as a person. In our state of ignorance, why does it appear so real?
Why does it appear so solid? It appears to be a person in its own right because of ignorance. That’s right. This is the very ignorance that we suffer from since beginningless time. This is the self-grasping ignorance.
It’s quite confronting to oneself. That’s right. We have been in love with ourselves since we were born. We have cherished our self-image as being a real me and it’s been the source of all of our emotions, the basis of all our emotions. It doesn’t exist as we think it does.
So all very well to give up the self. The point is, there’s nothing to give up. It doesn’t exist as we think it exists. Unskillful truth? It’s an unskillful lie.
Don’t mix up ultimate and relative. Our ultimate nature and our relative nature refer to the same thing, they’re not different. Are you compelled to produce an auspicious outcome for potentially the tenets of a bodhisattva?
If I choose to take bodhisattva vows, what obligations do I have in enlightenment? Well, one takes bodhisattva vows out of great compassion, of the intention to achieve enlightenment as quickly as possible in order to be fully qualified to rescue others from suffering. Well, no you don’t. You stop the one sentient being hurt by another according to your capacity.
You might have to shoot them but if you can do that with pure compassion then do it. If it’s not pure compassion, you’re in trouble. You can’t rationalize. It has to be pure compassion. Anyway.
Look, everybody can realize, everybody has the capacity to realize the illusory nature of the self that we think exists. I’d add that we think exists. And in fact what we think is an illusion—an illusion is something which appears but doesn’t exist in the way it appears. So that’s the false—this appearance is the false appearance of self. There is a self.
I was trying to say before that the self that exists is the mere I merely established through name and concept. We have the name, whatever name we bear, and just the thought. I as a different, as an individual. But beyond that, the basis is the body and mind. So you have the—it’s not just—you can’t just think of something and it comes into existence, there has to be a basis.
So here we have the body and mind, but there is no I anywhere here. I is just established to exist by thought and that’s valid. That is clear. Whatever exists is merely established to exist through name and concept and the base. Now we talked the other night, yeah, there’s danger in meditating on emptiness—you’re gonna fall into the extreme of nihilism and negation of everything.
Big danger. So don’t do it. I’m asking how do you prevent the psychological—because it seems to me in the way—You don’t teach people. Well, first of all you explain the trap. You explain the danger of falling into nihilism and say don’t fall into this trap.
That’s okay if you’re aware of the teachings but as ignorant Westerners—Well, they will never approach emptiness. Why is it then a lot of people are always comfortable with this psychological crisis? That’s not understanding emptiness. That’s not a psychological crisis induced by nihilism induced by reflecting on emptiness. The danger is we won’t come across emptiness without being taught about emptiness.
Otherwise we would have done it. Since beginning of time we’ve been trying to escape suffering and look for the cause of suffering. So if it were findable, independent of a teacher, we would have done it. But we haven’t. So this is one of the main purposes of bodhisattvas is to teach emptiness because that is the solution to suffering because the self-grasping ignorance is the cause that as we’ve emphatically seen today is the root cause of all suffering.
What about giving and receiving love? I don’t know, I’m getting lost. Emptiness does not mean we have to give everything up, in fact emptiness gives us a good—yeah, don’t fall into nihilism, I warn you. Well, you can’t teach a child about emptiness, are you? No, we’re not, we’re just discussing words, we’re not actually meditating on emptiness, that’s a whole other subject.
So there’s no great danger in this context of people falling into a nihilistic extreme. It’s only when people really meditate on emptiness that they get very scared that nothing exists. That doesn’t occur in an intellectual discussion. It’s a deep meditative terror. Okay.
Yeah. The third suffering is suffering of compounded phenomenon. It’s not suffering of compounded phenomena, it’s all-pervasive compounding suffering. And it’s called compounding, right, in the three types of suffering there’s the gross suffering of suffering, pain, physical mental pain. Then there’s the suffering of change which refers to what we call happiness.
Happiness is actually a type of suffering because the happy situation is inevitably associated with change of conditions and will feel miserable when it stops and we become attached, etc, etc. All-pervasive compounding suffering is the suffering of being under the control of karma and mental afflictions. And it’s called compounding because through karma and mental afflictions we compound rebirth after rebirth, right? Compounded phenomena refers to things such as physical things, mental things, which are compounded through parts, causes and conditions and so on. So, you had a question about this third type of suffering?
The terminology? I have an ignorance at all. So what—so I have the—I look at the other person as truly existing in its own right. Yeah. That it runs.
And I also do the same to myself. Yeah. So, what does the karmic imprint—Right, well, I mentioned that if we talk about the karmic path, there’s the initial motivation or the initial intention and the initial thought and that’s when the link of ignorance manifests and that’s the self-grasping ignorance. We have self-grasping ignorance with respect to everything that we experience, not only self but other.
So that’s the preliminary part of the motivation. Then there’s the motivation at the time of the act. So, initially we’ve seen ourselves as inherently existing, the object as inherently existing. Then we’ve generated compassion for that person. We still see them as inherently existing but we have compassion.
Compassion is a virtuous mind. We give them something to help alleviate their suffering through that. That’s the motivation at the time of the act. And that is what creates a virtuous karma. So, now this sequence is the order in which the twelve links are taught but they’re not the sequence in which they occur.
And the occurrence, any one set of twelve links, can occur in either two lives or three lives. Those are the only two ways in which a complete set of links, twelve links of one karma action, can occur. So if we look at the first—if the set of twelve links occurring in two lives. So, in the first life you have the ignorance link. You create the karma, you create the throwing karma in that life.
So you have the consciousness link, right? So you’ve got the three links there of ignorance, karmic formation and consciousness. Now, at the end of that life you have craving and grasping associated with that specific karmic imprint. So the craving and grasping links, two more, they nurture that specific karma that was created in that first life. So already we’ve got five links in one life.
So those two, craving and grasping, nurture that particular karmic imprint up to the point of its ripening. So you’ve got the existence link. So you’ve got six links all happening in one life. Then, as a result of dying with the existence manifesting, you then have the other links. You have rebirth, which includes name and form, six sources, contact and feeling.
And then at the end of that life you’ve got death, you know, aging and death. So you’ve got the six all occur in the very next life. So that’s twelve links of one particular karma all occurring in two lives. Follow that? The other alternative is that these particular twelve will manifest over three lives.
So, in the first life you have ignorance, you have karmic formation, then you have the consciousness link are established. Now, at the end of that life, you have craving and grasping for another specific karma. So that’s craving and grasping of another set of twelve links. Not this set of twelve links. So that craving and grasping will ripen another karmic seed and you get the rebirth result of that karmic seed, which is not the one under consideration.
And then you’ll experience the name and form, six sources, contact, feeling, etc, associated with that karma. And this might go on for many lives where different karmic imprints are nurtured and give rebirth. Eventually, in a second life associated with this karma, at the end of that life you’ll get craving and grasping which will nurture that imprint you created many lifetimes ago, the one that we’re talking about. So that craving and grasping are the two links associated with this karma. So they will give rise to the tenth link of existence.
So you’ve got three links occurring in this middle life: craving, grasping, and existence. And then the third life you get the rest: rebirth, name and form, six sources, contact, feeling, aging and death. So that particular set of twelve links has been completed over three lifetimes. Or there were three lifetimes in which that set of twelve links manifested. So, our particular rebirth, when we were born—well that doesn’t matter.
Our body is the, you know, the evolved name and form, six sources, etcetera. And we received this body, it’s called an uncontrolled result. Once our mind ripened the karma when we died in our previous life, so we had craving and grasping and existence—the karma of this life all occurred in our previous life, then our body, our sense organs, our experience of sense objects and our feelings of happiness and unhappiness are uncontrolled results. Like we have no choice but to have this body and to experience sense objects. And because we still have ignorance, we have no choice but to become attached to pleasure and have aversion to pain.
And because we have no wisdom, we have no choice but to create negative karma through attachment and aversion and set up whole new sets of twelve links. And we’re going to die. Death is the result of being born. Birth is the cause of death. But we don’t really accept that or we don’t really think about it.
And so as this life will reach an end, we’re going to crave existence and we’re going to nurture another karma and so on. So, our only hope is wisdom understanding the reality of cause and effect—that’s the wisdom of relative reality—and the wisdom understanding ultimate reality of emptiness which is the only weak link. Like of all twelve links, a chain that goes around, which link can be broken? So, you know, we think about how do we stop death and anguish, mental unhappiness, sorrow, lamentation? We stop rebirth.
That’s the only way to avoid death, is stop being born. The only way we can avoid rebirth is stop the tenth link of existence. The only way we can stop existence is to stop craving and grasping. The only way we can stop craving and grasping is to stop feeling—the link of feeling—and to stop feeling we stop the link of contact. To stop contact we’ve got to not have these sense organs, the six sources.
To not have them we’re not to have this contaminated body and mind produced by karma. To stop that, we’ve got to stop the consciousness link with the creating of imprints and to stop creating imprints we’ve got to stop the ignorance link. So, the only hope, the weak link is the ignorance link. The others, stopping the others depends upon stopping their causes, the prior one. And so it all brings us back to ignorance.
That can be extinguished. By extinguishing ignorance through wisdom realizing emptiness we destroy karma. That’s our only hope—to generate that wisdom realizing emptiness. As you’re doing that don’t fall into nihilism. It’s so important.
And there is no other way, there’s nobody who can rescue us, there’s nobody who can protect us and stop rebirth other than ourselves by stopping the cause which is in our mind. When we talk about realizing emptiness extinguishes all throwing karmas. You cannot experience rebirth under the control of throwing karma once you’ve realized emptiness. And you cannot create new throwing karmas once you’ve realized emptiness because your wisdom is so powerful that although there’s the appearance of inherent existence, you don’t get sucked in. So you won’t have anger and attachment, you won’t create karma.
So that’s the ultimate way of purifying negative karma. But to realize, have the wisdom realizing emptiness, that depends upon single-pointed concentration. Single-pointed concentration, śamatha, depends upon living in pure morality. It also depends upon—to be able to meditate, one needs to have a great accumulation of merit and one needs to be free of karmic obstacles which ripen and prevent meditative attainment. So, in order—we can’t jump to the realization of emptiness.
First we have to work on our power of concentration and we can’t jump to that. First we have to cleanse our mind and accumulate the merit. If you want to grow a beautiful garden, the first thing you have to do is remove the weeds and the rocks and then secondly you have to add moisture and fertilizer and sunshine and then you’ll grow beautiful flowers. It’s exactly the same with our mind. If we try to realize emptiness now without purification, we’ve got no hope.
We can’t even get concentration. So we need to engage in the many practices of purification of karma by applying the four opponent powers and accumulation of merit through the many practices taught. So that will lead us to the final eradication of ignorance through the wisdom directly realizing emptiness. So I guess what I’m asking is purification practices, do they link directly—They don’t link directly to this cycle because we’ve obviously got, not infinite, but lots and lots of different kind of imprints from all sorts of things. So when we purify, are we holding it off?
Are we weakening the links? Well we said yesterday, we said that there are two types of karma: karma which is definite to ripen and karma which is not definite to ripen. Karma which is not definite to ripen is weaker karma and is extinguished by purification practices. The karma which is definite to ripen can be modified whereby a throwing karma to be born, say in the hell realms, can ripen as a headache or a fever whilst we’re doing a purification practice.
So, indeed, we can at least modify the throwing karmas. But the purification without the wisdom realizing emptiness, the purification practices only go so far. They can’t purify all the throwing karmas. Is there a link between DNA and karmic—I doubt it. Well you’re implying that our actions can actually change our DNA.
No, no, no. I just wonder because when they talk about DNA—that you develop breast cancer. You know what I mean? That’s why I wonder if it’s your karma to develop breast cancer and at the same time you have your mind to develop breast—it’s our karma that we have these bodies and if we have a genetic tendency to some type of cancer that you can say that there’s a karmic cause behind that inheritance. You know, meeting parents who carry those—Whether the cancer materializes or not may well be due to the way we live our life.
The more and more we maintain a life of virtue and positive actions, probably less chance of suffering from the manifestation of cancer as a result of that gene. But it’s getting very subtle. The pimple on our nose is a result because this body is a karmic result and this body has a tendency to have human sickness, you know—sickness, old age and death are inevitable, inseparable associations with human bodies. To guess at why this person has that karmic makeup and that, why, I don’t know. But there’s some underlying cause.
Oh, of course. The whole thing is one giving rise to the other and so on and so on. There are two actions, aren’t there? There’s the intentions. There are two karmas.
The karmic formation link. The second link is karma because that’s intention. And existence is karma, because that’s intention. So, from those two causes, those two karmic causes, there are the actions—of, sorry, from the ignorance, three afflictions. There’s ignorance, craving, and grasping.
So from those you get the two actions, second link and tenth link. And from those two actions you get the results, the seven uncontrolled results. Consciousness link, name and form, six sources, contact, feeling, rebirth, aging and death. They’re the resultant side. Alright, I think, look, let’s have a tea break.
Maybe just twenty minutes, come back at three and then we’ll just conclude this.