Feeling
The natural result of sense contact is feeling. This is the automatic response to each object which arises. Feeling is of three kinds; pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. It is the immediate judging quality which sorts all experience into categories in relation to the perceived interests of an ego. Put simply, each object which arises is either wanted, unwanted or indifferent.
Feeling is a very primitive level of mind. It is easy to see how this response is a necessary function for beings to survive in the world. All our more complex emotions are constructed on the foundation of these three fundamental feelings.
Feelings can vary in intensity from very subtle to overwhelming. The image here is of a man with an arrow in his eye, aptly illustrating how feeling enters through the door of the senses and can pierce us to the quick.
Craving
Craving is here represented by a man enjoying the sensual pleasure of tea. Craving arises because of feeling. We may crave many things, but in the final analysis, all our craving is for pleasant feeling, or to escape unpleasant feeling. All the manifold objects we crave are but means to these ends.
There are three classes of craving. Craving for sense pleasure, craving for being and craving for non-being. That is, the desire for pleasant experience, the will to live and the death-wish.
This is a crucial link in the cycle. The process from sense-base to contact to feeling is entirely resultant, that is to say, automatic. But the movement from feeling to craving, though habitual, is not absolutely fixed. Here is the point of practise where mindfulness and discipline can break the wheel of becoming.
The Buddha singled out craving as the key cause of all suffering. This is the Second Noble Truth, the truth of the cause of suffering. The whole of the dependent origination may be read as a detailed exposition of the First and Second Noble Truths.
Clinging
The image is of a monkey grasping fruit. This is a return of the symbolism to the monkey in stage three, but here his restlessness roaming has fixed for the moment on a particularly desirable object.
Clinging is an intensification of craving. It is the more or less obsessive quality of the mind which fixates on its object. There are said to be four kinds of clinging; sensual clinging, clinging to a an ego position, clinging to superstition (rites and rituals) and clinging to views (dogmatism.)
Clinging is the stage where we create a self-position. We identify ourselves as the possessor of the desired object. The intensification of the object creates a subject as its mirror-image.
Becoming
When we cling to anything, we identify with it. We make ourselves afresh in its image; in a sense we become that object, at least momentarily. This is the process of becoming, fueled by craving and clinging by which we come into existence moment after moment.
The image here is of a pregnant woman. There could be no apter symbol of the process of becoming than this; from an act of sensual desire the process of growth inevitably unfolds.
Existence is not a state, it is a process. This coming-into-being we experience all the time, as we constantly reform ourselves in line with our desires and our actions. This is the fruition of the process we started when we made sense contact and it arose feelings which we craved and then clung to.
This stage represents the passive aspect of karma, the resultant. Here is the culmination of the active aspect of the second stage (karmic formations).
Birth
This stage represents birth, and the natural progress of the imagery is obvious. Beings come into existence in one realm or another according to their past karma. When we consider the dependent origination to this point we can see how this karma unfolds through several stages and how desire drives the engine of becoming.
Birth can be into any of the realms of existence, depending on the karma of the being. Meritorious deeds of generosity, renunciation and wisdom lead to birth in the higher realms of humans and gods. Evil deeds of hatred, cruelty, greed and lust lead to birth in the lower realms of animals, ghost and demons.
Only the supramundane paths and fruits (nibbana) lead out of the realms of birth and death altogether.
Death
The inevitable result of being born is dying. "Impermanent are all conditioned things." The plans, desires and ambitions of life always end here. But death is not the final end, things are not that easy. If one has not eradicated defilement, then one is still subject to renewed becoming and birth. The wheel continues to turn, death is a loss and a turning, but not a final conclusion.
The dependent origination is here represented as a wheel, to show that it is without beginning or end. Ignorance may be taken as a starting point only in that it is so fundamental as a root of defilement; this makes it a convenient starting point for an exposition of the teaching. But in reality, ignorance itself is like all worldly phenomena, it arises from prior causes and not otherwise.
In the case of human life, the trauma of death followed by birth causes us to forget what we have learnt in our previous lifetimes. Only a residue remains; we come into the world ignorant and mostly beings remain so, weighted down by dullness or confused by strange teachings and theories.
Everything that Happens (Dependent Origination)
HIS HOLINESS THE 14th DALAI LAMA: In Praise of Dependent Origination
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