Out of what it arises

In one sentence

The fourth purification is reached when the question about the bearer has been replaced by insight into the conditions — and with it doubt about past and future disappears.

In today's language

The previous stage ended with a hole: no being, no person. Whoever takes that seriously has a question at once. If nobody is there who acts — who then acts? And if nobody is there whom it befalls — why does it befall anyone at all?

Chapter XVII is the answer, and it is by a long way the longest chapter of the book. It goes through the twelve links: ignorance — formations — consciousness — mental and material — the six sense bases — contact — feeling — craving — clinging — becoming — birth — ageing and death. Each link is determined, and for each it is shown in what relation it stands to the next.

The formula with which the book sums the matter up is hard: no doer is there, none whom the effect befalls — and the wheel of existence is twelvefold empty. And then the explanation follows at once, so that one does not take the sentence wrongly. It does not say that nothing happens. It says that this wheel needs no further producer — no Brahmā, no creator, no self behind the process. The conditions suffice.

Chapter XIX draws the consequence and gives it a name: purification by overcoming doubt. In one who has grasped the conditions of the mental and the material, the doubts about the three times fall away.

Why this matters

Because at this place one can go wrong in two directions, and the canon names both of them.

The one: there is a bearer who does the deeds and collects the consequences. The other: there is no bearer, so there are no consequences either. SN 12.15 is written exactly for this — the world relies on two things, on “it is” and on “it is not”, and the Buddha teaches in the middle of them, namely dependent arising.

The Visuddhimagga follows this middle. There is deed and there is effect. There is only nobody in between who administers the two.

Canonical basis

SN 12.2 is the passage in which the twelve links are determined one by one; chapter XVII works through them in order. SN 12.20 contains the sentence the manual needs again and again: conditionality stands firm whether a Perfect One appears or not — and the noble disciple then no longer asks what he was in the past or will be in the future. Precisely these questions are the doubt that chapter XIX clears away.

MN 9 goes through the links backwards and attaches four points to each: what it is, out of what it arises, what its ceasing is and which way leads there. That is the form in which the practitioner of the manual works too.

Components

• Twelve links, read as a wheel, not as a chain with a beginning.
• Three times: the links are distributed over past, present and future existence — the book names three connections and four sections.
• The sixteenfold doubt: five questions about the past, five about the future, six about the present.
• The conditions of the material: karma, consciousness, temperature, nutriment.
• Impersonal working and no transmigration of a soul — two sections of their own in chapter XIX, which take up exactly the misunderstandings that arise here.

Connection with other teachings

Dependent arising is the second truth worked out: out of what suffering arises. Read backwards it is the third: what ceases with the ceasing of the condition. And the link “craving” is the place at which the practitioner can begin — not at ignorance, which is no beginning, but between feeling and craving, where mindfulness takes hold.

Significance for practice

The practical yield of this chapter is inconspicuous: it stops feeling worthwhile to brood over one's own history. Not because that would be forbidden, but because the question loses its object as soon as one sees that conditions stand in its place.

SN 12.20 puts this without pathos: the noble disciple does not run back into the past — “what was I?” — nor forward into the future, and is not inwardly confused about the present.

Common misinterpretations

“Karma means fate.” The manual lists four conditions for the material, and karma is only one of them. Temperature, nutriment and consciousness are the others. Not everything that happens is the consequence of an earlier deed.

“Without a self there is no rebirth.” Chapter XIX has a section of its own for this: no transmigration of a soul — and nevertheless connection. What goes on is the condition, not a traveller.

“The chain begins with ignorance.” It begins nowhere. The book says expressly that a first beginning is not to be discerned; ignorance stands at the beginning of the enumeration, not at the beginning of the matter.