Leigh Brasington - Dependent Origination & Emptiness 2 of 4
RRob HammondMar 21, 2022 at 7:43 pm51min
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00:04Leigh Brasington
So, wanna take a look at a suta again, this is in the middle length discourses, this is sukha number 18, the honey balls SUTA and the page number in the PDF is page 43. If you still haven't found page numbers in the PDF, you could scroll back to the table of contents and hopefully your table of contents is live. And you can just click on I believe it's chapter 10, the honey ball SUTA
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00:53Leigh Brasington
so most people don't think of this as a dependent origination SUTA but it's very definitely a dependent origination sukha it doesn't have the 12 links. It's got a subset with some other stuff thrown in. But it made my list of top 10 suitors just like the Carlson dispute sukha did. Course my list of top 10 suitors has 11 in it. Oh, well. I enjoyed Spinal Tap too much. Okay. The SUTA opens with a lay person rudely interrupting the Buddhist solitary medic tation to ask what he teaches? What's his doctrine? The Buddha's answer is a bit cryptic. I teach in a way such that one does not quarrel with anyone in a way that concepts no more underlie one who lives detached from sensual pleasures without bewilderment. free from worry and craving. The questioner is not pleased. He's sticks out his tongue Waggles his head and leaves. Later that evening, the Buddha tells his monks what has transpired. A monk asked how does the Buddha teach in that way? And how is it that concepts no longer underlie the Buddha? And again, Buddha's replies cryptic as for the source through which concepts and mental proliferation be set one, if nothing is found to desire or cling to, this is the inter end of the underlying tendencies to unwholesome states. The end of quarrels and disputes here, evil states cease without remainder. So, rather than trying to unpack that statement, let's look at the dependent arising and I'll stick that in the chat. So, evil unwholesome states, such as quarrels and disputes, arise dependent upon desire and clinging, which arise dependent upon concepts and mental proliferation. So, this is somewhat like what we found and the SUTA odd quarrels and disputes that we discussed earlier. But, here desire in clean or not said to be dependent on pleasant and unpleasant and then contact and name and form, your desire and cleaning arise dependent upon concepts and mental proliferation. What exactly does this mean? Well, after saying this, the Buddha retired to his dwelling the monks were puzzle who can explain this to us, they decided to go to the venerable Maha Tatiana and asked him to explain it. Mahakasyapa was recognized as the one who could explain in detail what the Buddha had said in brief. Mahakasyapa says you should ask the Buddha himself but he says he'll do what he can. He says he understands the detail meaning as follows. For each of the six senses, he says dependent on the sense organ and sense objects. Since consciousness arises. The meeting of the three is contact with contact s condition, they're fading what one feels Pāli That's Figgy T it's a verb form of viññāna one conceptualises son John T, the verb form of son Yeah, what one conceptualises one thinks the V Tuckett t, which is the verb form of vitakka what one thinks about one mentally proliferates punch. We put that in the chat okay.
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05:32Leigh Brasington
So dependent on sense organ and since object since consciousness arises. So since consciousness is that aspect of your mind knows the sensory input. Like, right now, you are not aware until I say so if the pressure on your left foot, oh, and then suddenly you became conscious of the pressure on your left foot. Right? The pressure was there all along the sense organ, your sense of touch, and the object, the floor or whatever that was there, but there was no sense consciousness until I mentioned it. Or like, look back here over my shoulder, you see the Tonka? See this is white Tara, put your attention really carefully on this white circle in the middle of that Tonka look, look really carefully at it. look really carefully. Now become aware of what's in your peripheral vision. What is in your peripheral vision was there all alone, you just weren't conscious of it, you had your eyeball, it was working, the objects in your peripheral vision was there, but because you were focused on the Tonka, you weren't conscious of them. Right. So it takes the three of these. And when they come together, that's since contact dependent on contact, VEDA arise. As I said, Neuroscience tells us that within a 10th of a second, you're going to judge the sensory input is pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. Most of its neutral, you can you can see where this would be a useful sorting of the input. The pleasant Yeah, you may want to get some more of that or keep it around the unpleasant we have, maybe you got to deal with this and get rid of it. The neutral, you can probably ignore that. And so you know, vagueness is a very simple thing. amoebas seem to have, well, maybe not fading, maybe they don't find it pleasant and unpleasant. But they do respond to their environment, you put some salt into a solution where they're amoebas, they run away, you put some food in, they run towards it. So it's very basic, we could say that being alive means the capacity to respond to the environment and the most basic form of responses either towards or away. Plants been towards the sunlight. Now, I'm not going to say they find sunlight pleasant. I'm going to say that, yeah, science says that. cells growing in the dark grow faster than cells growing in the light. That's why they've been towards the light. But you can see why that's a very helpful evolutionary thing. And so Veda is a very helpful evolutionary thing. But our world is more complex than running away from unpleasant and running towards the pleasant. I mean, does seem to be that's what we do a lot. One of my fellow teachers once said, it's like, we got a, an instruction manual. When we arrived, we open it up and it says, seek pleasure avoid pain live forever. Yeah, you know, they tried that during the hippie era. You know, it feels good, do it. We wound up with a lot of drug problems. So we need to get a little more sophisticated than that. So who dependent on vedanā? conceptualization arises. conceptualization is my translation of the word Sonia. Sonia is usually translated as perception. But I don't think that fully captures it. So I want to translate it as conceptualization. For example, I'm holding up a car and on it can can you people see the bird and the flowers, nod your head if you can see the burden the flowers, you all see the bird in the flowers. There's no bird or flowers. There's just colored shapes. That's all there is is colored shapes. You make up the bird and the flowers in your mind. You take the colored shape and You make it up into bird and flowers. Or so this can it? Can you see this? Can you tell what it is? Right now cuz I'm not you see this color shape. But if I hold it still you go it's a bodhisattva. Right? The colored shapes were there, but you couldn't quite conceptualize what the colored shapes represented till I held it still.
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10:26Leigh Brasington
This is conceptualization. You hear a sound, and you conceptualize it as bird. You didn't hear the bird, you heard a sound and you conceptualize it as bird. You smell a smell, and you smell roses? Well, no, you smelled a smell and you conceptualize it as roses. We do this with all of our senses, we get the input. Alright, we sorted into pleasant, unpleasant neutral. And then we identify what it is by conceptualize and we give it a name. This is usually perception, but I don't think conceptualization is more accurate word to use in this case. And we do it all the time. I mean, you're looking at me on the screen, I assume. And you can see that I'm wearing glasses, right? Now you see pixels, you don't see glasses, you see pixels, and you interpret those pixels as the guys wearing glasses. Right? It's easier to see it, you know, with a painting like this, where it's just colored shapes, and I'm making up the bird and the flowers. But it's that way for everything. Anything you see. All you eyeball sees his colored shapes. And then you interpret it to be what you think it is. Your interpretation hopefully is correct, but sometimes it's not. That we do have the word misperception. Yeah, that's Miss Sanya II. Okay, once we've conceptualized and thinking arises. So I hold this up, say, you see the burden the flowers, you conceptualize the burden the flowers, and you think, Oh, I gotta get a card for my niece, her birthdays tomorrow. So you've taken what this is, and then you've run off into something else, you start thinking or you think that's a really nice painting. I wonder who painted that painting? Or you think he just really likes that he's holding it up for the third time? Some weird thing going on? I mean, whatever comes to your mind, right? So there was the sensory input, and then there's the downstream processing of the sensory input. That's the thinking. And if the thinking gets out of hand, that's mental proliferation, which in Pāli, is puncher puncher is one of the best words in Pāli. I mean, we do punch out all the time. You hear something, you see something and you start thinking about it. And then you run off into who knows what. This is a story about a man whose wife asked him to go to the market and get some potatoes. Yes, dear. So it's self together. And just as he goes out the door, she says, and be sure and get a good price. Yes, dear. So he's walking to the market. And he's thinking, yeah, she wants me to get a good price. But she also wants me to get good potatoes. You know, you can get bad potatoes for a good price. And you can get good potatoes for a bad price. But it's really hard to get good potatoes for good price. You kind of watch those potato sellers. Now, put them put bad potatoes on the bottom and good potatoes on the top. Sometimes they put in a rotten potato, I hate the smell of rotten potatoes. But that moment he walks up to the potato cellar and screams in his face. You can keep your rotten potatoes and walks away. This is a poncho. We do this sort of silliness all the time. We get some idea and we just spin out on it. And because we're thinking it, we think it must be true. I mean, when I say it like that, just because I think it it must be true. You can see how absurd it is. But this is how we operate. We have a whole political party that operates that way. You know, sorry. Anyhow. The poll, mental proliferation is what gets us into trouble. Okay.
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14:58Leigh Brasington
We now have the basics. sensory input. There's an object and a sense organ. These two come together with since consciousness to generate contact. Contact is invariably followed by fading. And then we conceptualize that input Sanya. The conceptualization step doesn't always occur if you are well concentrated in meditation or on a task. There might be a sound, but you don't bother to conceptualize what it is. I mean, you're working on your computer writing this really important email and truck goes by outside you hear the sound, but you don't bother to even think truck. Somebody interrupts you and say, Did you hear that truck and you're like, I guess so. Right. Or if you're deep in meditation, there's a sound, and you just don't bother to decide what the sound was, it just went in one ear and out the other. But for the most part, we do conceptualize our sensory input. And then we start stringing concepts together. That's thinking, the, the usual way is explained is in terms of the five contests, the five aggregates. So there's form aggregate, that's the external, whatever Sight Sound and your sense organ. And then the fifth aggregate is consciousness, right? So the to form and consciousness come together. That's followed by VEDA, Sonia and sankhāra, or your categorization of the sensory input is pleasant or unpleasant, your conceptualization of the sensory input, and then your thinking and emoting and remembering based on the sensory input. There remember, sunkara literally isn't making together. So when we're thinking we're making together concepts, right now, I have a thought in my mind, and I bust it up into concepts called words. And I make the words come out of my mouth and hit the microphone in my computer, which digitizes into the internet gets to your computer, and digitize, it makes a sound, and it comes out to you, you hear the sound, you conceptualize it as a word and you string those words together, make together those concepts, to have a thought that hopefully is pretty close to the thought I had that I was trying to communicate. When we communicate, basically we're taking thoughts, busting them into concepts, throwing those concepts wanted another form of words at someone else, and hoping they reassemble the concepts into the same sort of felt as what we had.
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18:09Leigh Brasington
This understanding of the mechanism of sensory input, sensory processing, it's very useful information, we can make a chart of it which I will put in the chat Okay, so Oregon, an object and consciousness equals contact, which leads to Vaikunta which leads to Sanya conceptualization, which leads to sankhāra as thinking emoting. So the first two organ, an object that's Rupa, and then consciousnesses consciousness, and then the other three are the other three aggregates, Tegna, Sanya, and sankhāra. This insight into understanding how we interface with the world of our sensory input is very helpful and exploring many Asik aspects of the Buddhist teaching, as well as our own direct experience.
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