Nanamoli Thera on dependent arising

Attached to Paticcasamupada

According to Ven Nanamoli, regarding dependent arising, «To the question: “What are these sets of terms intended to describe?”

we may answer tentatively that they are intended to describe experience of any possible kind where ignorance (that is lack of personal realization of the Truths) is present. »

“The Buddha’s purpose is to describe enough of the world to be able to show how suffering can be ended, not to produce full and detailed elaborations, which would be endless and arrive nowhere.”

For him, one can equalise suffering and conceit “I am”, nibbana is the cessation of asmimāna (AN 9:1O one who perceives non-self eradicates the conceit ‘I am,’ [which is] nibbāna here and now.”) Since Suttas define also nibbana as the cessation of bhava (… I know this, I see this: ‘Nibbāna is the cessation of bhava.’” (bhavanirodho nibbānaṃ) SN 12: 68) Ven Nanamoli emphasis the necessity to translate bhava as being:

I argue, to translate (even to interpret to oneself) bhava by ‘becoming’ is an opiate that leaves the illusion of ‘being’ untreated.

According to Ven Nanamoli dependent arising «is not a logical proposition, nor is it a temporal cause-result chain. Such an approach makes an understanding of it impossible.»

As I understand him, he sees dependent arising as a kind of mirror where one can see one’s own ignorance, namely that what was previously taken for granted: one’s own being ( “I am” ) as impermanent, suffering, and dependently arisen upon ignorance. When paticcasamuppada is seen as a process, immediate dependence of one’s own being on ignorance disappears from the vision, so he says: “Such an approach makes an understanding of it impossible”.

As to details he suggests that the Buddha, by the way, has solved seemingly unsolvable philosophical problem:

«But this particular description (dependent arising) is aimed at including everything.

And here a difficulty arises. A description must be made in terms of something other than what it describes, or it is not a description. It has to reproduce in other material certain structures that are in what it describes. This fact makes it impossible for a description to be a description and complete at the same time. How is the D/O complete, then? Or is it not a description after all? It is in fact both, but it attains that in a rather peculiar way. (…)

The right way of treating this fact is to take the D/O, not as an individual description, but as an integrated set of descriptions. Each member provides in fact a set of terms to describe the rest of the world. Together they cover the whole subjective/objective, positive/negative world.»

According to Ven Nanamoli the relationship between these descriptive items is that of sine qua non.

So for example “with feeling as a condition craving” is not description of temporal process where something is first felt, and than it leads to craving -at least as far as dependent arising goes- but that of dependence, structurally craving can arise only when feeling is present, without feeling there is no possibility for craving to arise. Such vision, unlike cause and effect interpretation makes possible to see now and here one’s own death as impermanent and dependently arisen: as unborn, I cannot die, and to see the body as “this is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self” should undermine one’s own certainty of being born.

In other words, Ven Nanamoli regards the death as merely certain event in the field of consciousness, which can be observed objectively, but not experienced subjectively. More or less in the same way as I cannot imagine my own death, however well I exercise my imagination, observing funeral, “my own” dead body and so on, I will always survive as the observer. So he says using so called indirect communication:

In a syllogism (1. All men are mortal. 2. Socrates is a man. 3.Therefore Socrates is mortal), the generalization (all men are mortal) must have been arrived at by induction. No inductive process is ever absolutely certain. There is always the leap, the assumption, of generalizing and therefore one of the premises of a syllogism must have an element of uncertainty. So it cannot prove anything with certainty.

A syllogism is therefore a signpost pointing where to look for direct experience, but can inherently never give information that is 100% certain. But a syllogism (on metaphysical subjects) can also point to what can, inherently, never be experienced; then it is an anomaly.

In other place he says: All the questions asked about death are wrongly put."

***

Any concept of Pure Being is always open to the objection that, if absoluteness is claimed for it, then it cannot be known; for if it is known it is accessible to consciousness and consequently no longer pure; consequently Pure Being and non-being cannot be distinguished. If absoluteness is claimed for any concept of Pure Consciousness (the Yogācāra opposition to the Vedanta), a similar objection arises; for if consciousness is pure it must not be, or it will be adulterated by being. Consequently pure consciousness has to have no being, which is tantamount to saying that it is not. By making both consciousness and being, in whatever form, subject to the D/O, the Buddha both closes the entry into this logical maze and offers us a picture which, if we only bother to observe, rather than malobserve, we shall find corresponds with our experience as we actually live it. Only we keep forgetting what we learn. And forgetting is ignorance. And ignorance, ‘the most reprehensible of all,’ heads the D/O. It is one of the three ‘taints’ (āsava)—and so is being.

So it is not that ‘Buddhism has no ontology,’ but that the Buddha has seen through what a modern writer has called the ‘ontological mirage’ and set being into its true position. Nibbāna is the cessation of ontology: bhava-nirodho nibbānaṃ. It is not, however, the ‘abyss of non-being’, since that requires consciousness to cognize it as such. It is ‘absolute cessation,’ which includes the non-ascription, of either being or non-being: nāpahosiṃ.

Now while the D/O has the appearance of, and is, a complete description of the world (as we have defined it,) nevertheless, when nibbāna is treated of positively in any of its terms instead of, as its cessation, a paradox will appear. Atthi … abhūtam…, or sabbato pabhaṃ, describes as cognized, to be (by consciousness) in terms of being. What nibbāna is cognized by in terms of consciousness is anidassanaṃ: the act of cognizing without ‘showing,’ ‘making seen,’ any positive determined (saṅkhata) object. That this opposing of being and consciousness seems possible and not nonsense (the paradox) also indicates the ‘incompleteness’ of the ‘complete’ description.

(1) Citta = to know; (2) cetasika = to do; (3) rūpa = to be.

‘Rūpa’ appears as some definite form and as such is entirely positive. To the question, ‘What is this?’ the answer can be given at once: ‘It is what it is.’ But to be what it is it has to be determined as such, and this determining is the function of saṅkhārā (including vedanā and saññā as two special instances of saṅkhāra, which we are entitled to do). To the question ‘What is a determination?’, we define it as an act of showing or determining an appearance that a form perceived ‘is this form, not that form.’ The negation in determining is only implied by, or employed by, determination but does not constitute an element of its being. Of that determination too it can be replied to the question ‘what is I?’, that ‘it is what it is’ (saññā, vedanā, saṅkhārā, phassa, samudayā). That form can be and be determined is only possible in the presence of consciousness.

A peculiarity of consciousness at once appears introspectively in that it does not in itself appear positively as rūpa (form) and cetasikā do. ... The capacity of negation appears to reside in consciousness which provides the “empty space” in which questions can be asked and “forms” (things) determined.

If with the other two it constituted a plenum, there would be no questions and no acts of determining possible. Consciousness, then, begins to appear as the questioning element and it can turn the questioning on itself: ‘If I am what I am.’