Buddha’s Wheel of Cyclic Existence

10 February 2002, 12:04am IST
Suresh Jindal.

What is the nature of cyclic existence? the buddha tries to explain this through teaching the 12 dependent links. cyclic existence refers to worlds such as ours where everything is unstable and transient. the 12 links are ignorance, compounded karma, consciousness, name and form, six sense spheres, contact, feeling, craving, grasping, existence, birth and death. in buddhist iconography they are shown in the form of a wheel held in the jaws of yama, the lord of death. ignorance generates the compositional actions of karma. blind to the laws of cause and effect, and rather like a potter’s hand that shapes pots of different forms and sizes, our own acts produce and shape our own joys and sorrows. compositional actions generate imprints on our consciousness. the instinct of karmic acts enters our consciousness as oil soaks sand or ink soaks paper. like a monkey swinging from branch to branch consciousness bearing karmic imprints joins past to present and present to future. until its ripening in this life or a future one, our karmic acts are stored in our consciousness as a potential for germination. consciousness acquires name and form. the form link is our body and the name link is the four aggregates of feeling, perception, compositional factors and consciousness. a man rowing a boat symbolises this. the boat being the form of the being and the person rowing it are the four aggregates. name and form in turn generate the six sense faculties: the eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind. at birth the six sense spheres have been formed but have not yet met with their objects. the sense spheres generate contact with objects. upon coming together of the sense power, consciousness and the respective objects, contact discriminates them as being attractive, unattractive or neutral. this is symbolised by the meeting of a man and a woman. on contact with the object, three types of feelings occur: happiness, suffering and indifference. feelings lead to craving. just as an alcoholic’s thirst is never quenched, a person deluded by greed is never fulfilled and craves for even more. like a monkey plucking fruit from a tree clings onto the tree for more and more, we become attached to objects of our craving. six of the links — ignorance, compounded karma, consciousness, craving, grasping and existence, are the casual links. the other six: name and form, the six sense spheres, contact, feeling, birth and death are the result or effect links. when we take rebirth due to our previous karmic acts, consciousness, name and form, six senses, contact and feeling are already present in the fetus. these have already been determined by our previous life. during our lifetime we generate the other links in the chain to set the conditions of both this life and the future one. as we are living the results of the six casual links of our previous life, we are also creating the karma that will become the cause of our future life; both now and in the next rebirth. the twelve dependent links can be grouped into four limbs — the precipitating limb, the establishing limb, the resultant precipitating limb and the manifested limb. ignorance, karma and consciousness at the time of the cause (in our previous incarnation) are the precipitating limb. craving, grasping and becoming are the establishing limb in that they precipitate the aggregates of one’s next reincarnation. rebirth and death are the manifested limbs. ignorance is like a farmer who sows the seed of karmic imprints on our consciousness at the time of the cause. just like a seed will sprout when the appropriate conditions of moisture, soil and heat are present, the imprints on our consciousness of our karmic acts germinate when craving and grasping are present. grasping takes on four forms: a desirous grasping involving strong attachment to sensory objects; of afflictive and hallucinated views that see inherent existence and permanence in all conventional phenomenon; grasping at negative acts and deeds of bad ethics and conduct and grasping at a view of an inherently existent ‘i’. at the hub of the wheel are ignorance, attachment and aversion symbolised by a pig, a chicken and a snake respectively. these are the three poisons that contaminate and fuel the delusions of our mental continuum to produce suffering and unhappiness in samsara.

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