4  Dependent Arising: Cause and Effect

THE TEACHING OF THE BUDDHA can be called a teaching of cause and effect, since these play an important part in his expositions of the Dhamma. The word Dhamma means, literally translated, “law” or “law of nature.” So when he expounds Dhamma, he describes the law of nature, of which cause and effect form an integral part.

The Buddha did not teach Buddhism. That is a later designation. He described his teaching as Dhamma. He said, “Who sees dependent arising, sees Dhamma. Who sees Dhamma, sees dependent arising.” “Seeing” means in-seeing, within oneself, and “dependent arising” denotes cause and effect. The Buddha gave two separate teachings on cause and effect.² Both have great application to our lives, and if we not only understand them but also use them, we will find our lives flow much more harmoniously.

We also need to remember again and again that meditation taken out of context cannot succeed. It may bring some peacefulness eventually, but it will not bring the real transformation that a spiritual path provides. Meditation is a means to sharpen, strengthen, and calm the mind, and is not an end in itself. It is the one thing we can do to get our mind in shape. But then we have to make use of it for its intended purpose, which is our growth process in thoughts and emotions. Eventually, we will have a totally mature mind that has no obstructions in it.

The Buddha gave his initial explanation of dependent arising in the form of a picture that he drew in the sand for his monks as a teaching aid. The monks were so delighted with this that they asked permission to reproduce the picture. The Buddha agreed and stipulated that a copy was to be hung in every monastery, where one person was to be designated an expert in explaining it, so that any visitor could learn the meaning of dependent arising in this manner. The monasteries and most of the artifacts of the Buddha’s time were destroyed in India by the Muslim invasion, yet the knowledge of this drawing was transmitted to Tibet, where even today it is still available to us, in an artistically elaborate and detailed version. In the Buddha’s time, it would have been far more simply executed.

When we examine this picture, we find a large circle or wheel with a stylized tiger on top hanging on to the outer rim. His large tail hangs below the wheel, and on his head is a diadem of five skulls, which symbolize the five aspects of a human being, termed the five aggregates (khandhas). The tiger is depicted as a creature of some beauty; he has curls on his head and bracelets on his claws, and even rings on his toes—but he still looks as ferocious as any tiger. His mouth is wide open, apparently trying to swallow the wheel. He manifests impermanence; no matter how nicely we dress it up by beautifying ourselves, impermanence still swallows us totally anyway.

Inside the wheel there is a small circle, a centerpiece containing three animals: a snake, a cock, and a pig, which bite each other’s tails and thereby form an inner circle. The snake is symbolic of hate, because it carries poison within. The cock represents greed, because it has a whole barnyard full of hens. The pig signifies delusion, because when it throws dirt over its head, it can’t see anything at all. These three demonstrate the unwholesome roots that are our birthright—delusion being the underlying factor, and greed and hate the two resulting tendencies.

If we accept the fact that we ourselves sometimes lack wisdom and often want or reject something, we can become more tolerant and accepting of ourselves and others, no matter who they are. Some may have jurisdiction over a whole country, some may even be able to declare war; others may be just those people we live with. Everybody is beset by greed, hate, and delusion, including ourselves. Only the enlightened one has done away with these defilements. With some introspection we can easily detect them within ourselves, particularly greed and hate. Delusion is harder to recognize, because it takes wisdom to find it. Greed and hate need not be thought of as violence or passion. They arise with everything we like and dislike. Whatever we want or reject, both are greed and hate. When we see that in ourselves, we can realize it as the human dilemma. Only when we do that will we use our power of recognition and our emotional tolerance in the right way. There are grades of distinction between people, but they are only subtle differences. The real change comes when there has been liberation, freedom.

Enclosing the three animals is a bigger circle, usually divided into six parts, depicting the six realms of existence. One is the human realm, and it is entirely up to the artist what is shown there: mothers with babies, workers in the rice fields, machinery, and vehicles. Sometimes there is also a war going on in that picture. Next is the animal realm, showing many different species. Following that we usually find a representation of hell, which is a state of depraved consciousness. Whatever the artist’s imagination allows is pictured here: raging fires, tortures, floods, and famine are endured by unfortunate beings. Next is the realm of the hungry ghosts. These are portrayed as having very tiny throats and mouths but huge bellies that can never be filled. Their greed has been so great that it can never be satisfied, which is another low state of consciousness. Then there are the asuras, who are always fighting, living in a constant state of war and aggression. These are the four realms lower than the human realm. There’s also the deva realm, possibly comparable to heaven, paradise, or utopia, depicted as a beautiful abode with lovely beings surrounded by flowers and butterflies in exquisite colors. These different states of consciousness can be experienced by all of us in this one lifetime.

The outer rim of the wheel is the most important one. It is divided into twelve parts. The first picture is of an old, blind woman with a stick trying to find her way through a dense forest. This represents our ignorance. In Buddhist terminology, ignorance does not mean lack of schooling, but rather ignoring the laws of nature. Since we are ignoring the laws of nature within ourselves, we also do so in our environment. Therefore we have dying forests, contaminated rivers, polluted air, and all sorts of natural catastrophes, which we ourselves have brought about. Our surroundings are subject to the same rules as we are, namely the law of change, of impermanence, and of nonsubstantiality, “corelessness.” But since we ignore these truths, we cannot live according to them and are actually trying to defy them. This is the root of all our problems.

We can think of ignorance as a beginningless beginning. When people asked the Buddha about the beginning of the universe, he never answered. That was one of the “four imponderables”3 on which he did not wish to elaborate. He pointed to ignorance as the cause of our problems. When total liberation (nibbāna) is reached, one knows the answers to all the questions anyway, and until then it is only necessary to practice to reach that state.

That whole circle always depicts cause and effect. The next picture shows a potter making pots. He has some pretty, well-shaped pots and also some broken ones. This is symbolic of our karma-making. Because we are beset with this “me” and “mine” delusion, we make karma, good, bad, and neutral. Initially karma is mind-made, since we start everything with the thinking process. This is why it is so important to meditate, to train the mind, and also to know something about the Buddha’s teaching, to help us make enough good karma for our options to remain open. If we make enough bad karma, we can end up in prison; on the other hand, with enough good karma we can live with a consciousness where our inner being is at ease, loving, and compassionate.

So we need to remember that karma is always initiated in the mind and then followed up by speech and action. We only have these three doors: thought, speech, and action. Since all starts in the mind, that’s our first and foremost focus of attention. Meditation is the means by which the mind can be made sharp, clear, and insightful enough for us to change from the negative to the positive. We don’t have to carry on with thinking negative thoughts; it’s totally unnecessary.

Due to having created karma, rebirth consciousness arises. But we need not think of rebirth only as a future life. We are, in actual fact, reborn every moment with new thoughts and feelings, and we bring with us the karma that we made in past moments. If we were angry a moment ago, we are not going to feel good immediately. If we were loving a moment ago, we would be feeling fine now. Thus we live from moment to moment with the results of our karma.

Every morning, particularly, can be seen as a rebirth. The day is young, we are full of energy, and we have a whole day ahead of us. Every moment we get older, and are tired enough in the evening to fall asleep and die a small death. All we can do then is toss and turn in bed, with our mind dreamy and foggy. Every day can be regarded as a whole life span, since we can only live one day at a time; the past is gone and the future may or may not come; only this rebirth, this day, this moment, is important.

Rebirth consciousness contains the karma we have accumulated. What went on lifetimes ago, when we might have been a Persian dancer, an Egyptian princess, or a Viking warrior, or whatever else we think we were, is totally immaterial, isn’t it? It’s often fantasy. What is truly important is the here and now, this one day that can actually be lived. When we realize we bring our karma with us, it might induce us to use that one day to the best of our ability, not frittering the time away, or using it in useless pursuits, but paying attention to our spiritual growth.

The rebirth consciousness can be likened to a monkey hopping from tree to tree (from life to life), because an untrained mind is not capable of staying on one subject without digressing and lacks one-pointed direction. We can compare that to our states of mind during the day. There are certain things that we are probably forced to do because we have to earn a living, look after a family, or attend to other responsibilities, but a spiritual direction is often missing. If we consider our rebirth every morning with a feeling of gratitude in the heart, that here is another day during which we do not have to go hungry or be without shelter, but have the opportunity to practice, our good karma-making will stand a much better chance.

Due to rebirth consciousness, mind and body arise. If we carry our analogy of rebirth every morning a little further, we can say that when we wake up, we know that we have mind and body. While we are fast asleep, nothing really tells us who we are. Our first step into insight will necessitate the understanding that mind and body are two. The idea that this is “me,” one complete whole, and that all is happening because “I” need, want, or feel it, is erroneous. That takes personal choice away, as well as the possibility of making good karma, and negates the spiritual life. Spiritual life can only have reality when we know that we can fashion what we want in life with our minds, and that the body is our servant. Some bodies are better servants than others, and it doesn’t hurt to make our own servant into a good one by any means that we can find, such as food, exercise, or medicine. But it remains the servant; the master is the mind. Imagine for a moment having a body here in front of us that has no mind and hacking that body to pieces. It won’t object; there’s nothing there that can object. We can do what we like with it. But put a mind into the body and we have a different situation.

The usual picture for this sequence is a boat with a prone passenger and a boatman who is paddling. The passenger is the body, and the boatman is the mind. We cannot do anything without the mind telling us to do it. If our mind hadn’t told us to meditate, our body wouldn’t be sitting down to do so. The mind is very much affected by the aches and pains of the body, but only because it is untrained. The Buddha’s and the enlightened ones’ minds are no longer affected by the unpleasant feelings in the body. In fact, unpleasantness of the body is unavoidable. Everyone has some sort of sickness once in a while, or some aches and pains. Unless we die young, we will grow old, and older bodies don’t function as well as young ones. The Buddha said, “The untrained, unenlightened disciple has two darts, two arrows that pierce him. The trained, enlightened disciple has one.” The two darts that pierce us are mind and body. Both give us unpleasant experiences. But the enlightened disciple only has the body to contend with. The mind no longer reacts. The Buddha also became sick during his lifetime and contracted an illness that led to his death, yet he was able to go into the meditative absorptions on his deathbed because his mind was not affected by bodily discomfort.

In our case, of course, the mind is affected by the body and reacts to it. But eventually we will be able to separate the two when we have gained enough skill in meditation and insight. We will understand what is mind and what is body, and realize that it is the mind that needs the most attention, although we usually act just the opposite way. Most of our time and energy are spent on the body. We look after its nourishment, wash it and clean it, exercise it, rest it in bed at night, and shelter it in our home. We clothe it for warmth and protection, and if it should become sick, we obtain medicine.

The mind needs at least as much as, or even more of this kind of attention than the body. Obviously it needs to rest. The only way it can ever do so is to stop thinking and experience calm and peace. At night when the body rests, the mind dreams, and during the day, it thinks. We are overworking the finest, most delicate, most valuable tool that exists in the universe. Then we are surprised that things don’t work out the way we thought they should, and that the world we live in is not the kind of paradise it ought to be. The minds that fashion the world we live in, including our own, cannot function at full capacity, because they are totally overworked. They have not had a rest, a cleanup, or any necessary medicine. Such minds are running downhill instead of regenerating. Meditation is our way of regenerating the mind.

One moment of concentration is one moment of purification, which constitutes the cleanup. Calm and peace give the mind its needed rest, and knowing and remembering the Dhamma is the medicine for all our fears, worries, hates, and delusions. Looking after the mind does not mean stuffing more knowledge into it, but rather understanding with wisdom, which can make us completely well, so there never needs to be any delusion again. Naturally it is a progressive and gradual pathway, but at least we can be aware of what can be done. When we realize that the mind is the one paddling the boat, with the body as a passenger, then we have a much better insight into our priorities.

The next picture shows a house with five windows and a door, symbolizing our five senses. The door, representing the capacity to think, allows entry to all and sundry if it is not guarded. This is an important point to understand and remember. Each person has six openings to the world, and when we use only those, we will always know the world in the same limited way, through seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling, and thinking. As long as we remain unaware of anything else, we shall keep looking for fulfillment in the wrong direction. Our sense contacts, including thinking, can never keep their promise to satisfy. They are doomed to constant change.

As long as we fail to realize that we have to go beyond the sensual aspect of ourselves, we will look in vain for satisfaction, not only because all our sense contacts are bound to be both pleasant and unpleasant, but also because they are necessarily short-lived. They must not last under any circumstances.

Can you imagine listening to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for three days in a row, hearing just that from morning to night? After a while it would no longer be pleasurable, and we would probably refuse ever to listen to it again. The same goes for eating. Let us imagine that we have had a very nice meal, and we tell our host that we liked it very much. Then our host says, “I’m glad you liked it. I’ve plenty of food here; please stay another two or three hours and eat some more.” If we were to do that, we would be in utter misery. A pleasurable meal can last half an hour or so at the most. The same goes for all our sense contacts. They have to be shortlived. We cannot listen, eat, touch, or look for long periods of time. If any of our sense contacts last too long, they turn into an utter disaster for us. Even the most pleasant sense contact cannot last. They are constantly disappearing, so that we have to find new ones.

Our economy runs on that principle. We can’t sell people anything that doesn’t provide pleasant feelings, so everything is geared toward that single purpose. Since pleasure has a very short life span, we spend time, energy, thought, and attention on its recurrence. But fulfillment cannot come about in that way. It is all just momentary pleasure, and whether we admit that or not, we know it as an underlying truth. Often that becomes the reason for wanting to try meditation. Yet we need a fair bit of determination and absolute steadiness in the practice.

The next picture in this sequence shows the sense contact, depicted as a man and woman embracing. The symbolism is that as long as our senses are functioning, they make contact, and our preference is for the pleasant ones, which we constantly desire. If we have eyes that function, we see; if we have ears that function, we hear; if we have taste buds, we taste; if we have a body, we touch; and if we have a mind, ideas arise and thinking starts, all of it happening automatically. There’s nothing to say that it shouldn’t be that way. But we need a little more insight into what makes us tick so that we can gain some control over our lives.

As long as there are senses, we make contact. This becomes very apparent in the sitting position in meditation. From our continual touch contact an unpleasant feeling eventually arises. This is a natural sequence of human events. But there is a step in this progression that doesn’t have to be automatically preprogrammed.

The next picture shows a man who is having arrows shot into his eyes, a very unpleasant feeling, to say the least. But there is no way we can avoid the arising of feeling after a sense contact; even an enlightened person makes sense contacts and has feelings. However, the next step can be the doorway out of the wheel of birth and death.

We move from feeling to craving, and the next picture usually shows a person sitting at a laden banquet table, shoveling food into himself. Craving does not only mean wanting to get something, it can also mean wanting to get rid of something. In the case of our own touch contact in sitting, we want to get rid of unpleasant feelings by moving the body. That is the craving that keeps us in the ever-recurring cycle of trying to escape from unpleasant feelings and wanting only pleasant ones, a cycle that we have all been repeating for years on end.

The cyclic nature of our existence can only be interrupted at this point, when feeling is understood to be just feeling, without our owning it. If it were our own, why would we be getting unpleasant feelings? It would be utterly foolish to choose unpleasant ones. If we had any say in the matter, we would naturally have only pleasant feelings. If feelings really belonged to us, we would of course throw the unpleasant ones away and keep only the pleasant ones. But nobody is capable of doing that. Everybody has both pleasant and unpleasant feelings. In this case, feelings encompass physical sensations and emotions.

This doorway leading out of our preprogrammed round of birth and death is accessible to us when insight arises to the degree where we no longer reject and resist, when we have understood and experienced that things are as they are, namely a constant flow and nothing more. We need only be aware of this perpetual movement, to watch it, know it, but not to put ourselves in the middle of it by wanting what is pleasant or getting rid of what is unpleasant. In other words, we practice equanimity, even-mindedness.

Equanimity is one of the seven factors of enlightenment,4 and we all have the capacity to practice it, especially when we realize that unpleasant feelings just exist. We believe we have some jurisdiction over them because of their arising and ceasing. Naturally we wish to hasten their departure, sometimes even with aspirin or by stronger means. In meditation we do it by moving our sitting position. All this gives rise to the illusion that we are in control of our feelings, but we are actually only disguising the law of nature. We are putting a cover over it so that we don’t have to look at it too closely. One day when we take an honest look at the law of nature as it really is, we will see that all our beliefs are fantasies. Hopefully we will at least smile at ourselves, if not laugh. Since there is so much to cover up all the time, our energy is dissipated and fulfillment evades us. However, what is real and true will be reflected in our lives again and again, so that we will continually find ourselves trying to cover up and disguise what we don’t like, unless we are willing to accept reality.

By practicing letting go of our reactions we can find the doorway out. Each time we fail to respond to something, we have taken a big step toward freedom. Until we have done that, we are constant victims of our feelings, which is not pleasant at all. Because we can run away, we are deluded into thinking we are in charge, but unpleasant feelings always resurface. When we are still the victim of our pleasant and unpleasant feelings, wanting the one and rejecting the other, we are not master of our own lives. When we learn to let go of unpleasant feelings, paying no attention to them, accepting them as just feelings, we become master of the situation for that moment. We gain confidence that it is possible to be unaffected and nonreacting. Inner power arises from that certitude. This is not power over others but power over oneself, which helps us to see clearly into absolute reality.

But if we bypass that doorway by reacting once again to our feelings, we reenter the automatic progression of cause and effect. The next step is clinging, usually depicted by a person picking fruit off a tree and throwing it into baskets that are already full to overflowing. It’s actually not a bad symbol for the kind of agricultural mess we encounter these days in the affluent countries, where tons of butter are going to waste, and surplus coffee is being dumped in the ocean. But the intended meaning of the picture is that our grasping is so strong that we don’t even notice when we already have enough. As soon as we crave anything, we are already clinging to our desires, thereby undermining our peace of mind. Subconsciously we realize that whatever we crave—person or object—is impermanent, about to change, and subject to deterioration, theft, or loss. Although we know all that, we don’t want to acknowledge these facts. However, because we do know, a feeling of fear accompanies all clinging: the fear of loss.

We can recognize this clearly with belongings. Rich people often have burglar alarms, double locks, ferocious dogs, huge fences, and large insurance policies. They are afraid their belongings will be stolen, burned in a fire, or claimed by outsiders. Fears about losing beloved people often result in jealousy, a most unpleasant emotion.

When we have missed our chance of releasing ourselves from suffering because we have reacted once again to feelings, we are already committed to clinging to whatever it may be that we either desire or reject. No matter how trivial that may be, a certain anxiety will arise.

The Buddha said, “The way to liberation is the way of letting go of clinging.” “Letting go” is our spiritual growth process. There’s nothing to gain, nothing to get. In order to meditate we have to let go of all sensual desires, no matter how subtle. If we don’t let go of hopes, ideas, thoughts, worries, and problems during our meditation periods, we can’t concentrate. “Letting go” is the key phrase for the spiritual path. Knowing that all is impermanent, cannot last, and is moving toward dissolution helps us to let go. Wanting always results in anxiety, because we don’t know whether we will get what we desire, and even if we do, we don’t know whether we can keep it.

From clinging arises the idea of “becoming.” We could relate the whole circle to this one lifetime. We don’t have to think of future and past lives at all, although this progression is often explained as occurring over three lifetimes. In this case, the past life encompasses ignorance and the karma formations, which are the first two steps of cause and effect shown in the Buddha’s explanation of our cyclic involvement with life and death. The arising of rebirth consciousness in the womb in this lifetime results in future becoming, unless we find the doorway leading out. But we can experience the whole cycle in this one lifetime, which is even more useful, because we are concerned with what is happening to us right now. Past lives are gone and there is little, if anything, we can do about them; they have disappeared down the ages. Future ones are conjecture. So we had better attend to essentials now.

Becoming, which results from clinging, involves the idea of having or being something more satisfying than at present. We want to become a very good meditator, or we want to become spiritual, or more learned. We have all sorts of ideas but all are bound up with wanting to become, because we are not satisfied with what we are. Often we do not even pay attention to what we are now but just know that something is lacking. Instead of trying to realize what we are and investigating where the difficulty actually lies, we just dream of becoming something else. When we have become something or someone else, we can be just as dissatisfied as before. If we have lived in the city, for example, we might move to the country and take up farming. For a while we are delighted. When the novelty wears off, we move back to the city and get a job in an office, and again dissatisfaction sets in. Becoming is never going to satisfy us.

Investigation and insight into who we really are is the answer. When we get down to rock bottom, we will see that it doesn’t matter what we become; we are essentially always the same. We will understand that what we really are will never change because it is something entirely different from what we think we are.

Becoming is fraught with difficulty, because it is a reaching out toward something we may or may not accomplish. It is concerned with getting away from what we are now and going toward something we want in the future. There’s no peace to be found in this; rather it is full of restlessness. The symbolic picture for becoming usually shows a pregnant woman with a baby growing in her, because that is the ultimate becoming. Because we don’t see the futility and the emptiness of what we have been doing and what life is all about, we want to become again.

We want to be here. We do not wish to give it all up. We want to be somebody, and this wanting results in our being born. We could again use the analogy of being born each morning to good advantage. The related picture is of a baby at birth, or in a baby carriage, or being carried on someone’s back.

The following picture is often of an old man with a sack of bones on his back, symbolizing death. We find written under the picture, “And this is how this whole mass of suffering arises.” From ignorance, through craving and clinging, to becoming. This can give us a good indication also why things happen in our lives the way they do. Our own wanting or our own rejections are the triggers. The stronger our desires, the stronger our experiences.

QUESTIONS

STUDENT: How does ego delusion apply to our wanting to make good karma?

AYYA KHEMA: As long as we have ego delusion, there is always wanting. There’s no possibility of not having it. So when there is the ego delusion, the only way is to make wise choices, even though all choices are “wanting.” Only the fully enlightened one has fully realized emptiness and therefore doesn’t make any more karma. But for us, it is essential that we discriminate between wise and unwise choices, so that we make good karma. It certainly concerns our own wanting, which is our direction in life. The step out of the whole of our suffering is nonreaction. Not necessarily the actions we take, but rather letting go of our preprogrammed reactions.

S: When we do the contemplation acknowledging that we are going to die, you said we also have to live accordingly. Could you elaborate on that?

AK: The contemplation we undertook earlier is called the five daily recollections. The Buddha recommended that every person should remember every single day that we are not here forever. This is a guest performance, which can be finished any time. We have no idea when. We always think that we may have seventy-five or eighty years to live, but who knows? If we remember our vulnerability every single day, our lives will be imbued with the understanding that each moment counts, and we will not be so concerned with the future. Now is the time to grow on the spiritual path. If we remember that, we will also have a different relationship to the people around us. They too can die at any moment, and we certainly wouldn’t like that to happen at a time when we are not loving toward them. When we remember that, our practice connects to this moment, and meditation improves because there is urgency behind it. We need to act now. We can only watch this one breath, not the next one.

S: I often find it difficult to live an ordinary life and relate to my friends while practicing at the same time.

AK: Actually, practicing is quite ordinary. The Zen people have a lovely saying: “Nothing special.” As one continues to meditate and tries to purify one’s emotions and reactions, one finds it simpler to relate to people and often feels that every confrontation is a welcome challenge to exercise love and compassion. The more one recognizes the suffering in one’s own heart, and has compassion for one’s own struggle, the easier it becomes to recognize the same in everyone else and respond with compassion.

Our ordinary, everyday activities offer us unlimited opportunities for mindfulness, and they are therefore our base for practice (in Pali, kammaṭṭhāna—our spheres of action or subjects of mental training).

When our inner life changes, the outer life often follows suit. At first this may be imperceptible, but eventually both become harmonious and integrated.

S: How can one actually let go of pain in the sitting position?

AK: Letting go is a state of mind that makes it possible to let go of all resistance in the body, eliminating pain. In the beginning that will naturally be only momentary. Pain and aversion will then arise again, and one should not allow aversion to take a hold. It doesn’t help our practice. All that remains then is to change the sitting position. One has to assess one’s own capacity and just go a little further than one has been able to do before. It’s impossible to jump over our own shadow, but it is very helpful to experience what it feels like to let go of an unpleasant feeling by having our attention riveted to something else. The unpleasant feeling doesn’t exist in our consciousness at that time. That’s an occasion for meaningful insight, because it becomes clear that we only know whatever direction our consciousness takes.

S: Is it easier to be a spiritual person when living as a nun or a monk, with more time for meditation, than when leading an ordinary life?

AK: It’s impossible to say, because some meditators may have already practiced much in past lives. If one wants to lead a spiritual life, it does not depend on meditation alone, sitting quietly on a pillow, secluded from everything else. A spiritual life is lived in the world. It isn’t only what one does, it’s mainly how one does it. One can be totally removed from spirituality in a nunnery, I can assure you, and yet meditate every morning and evening. It is a matter of how we approach every action, every experience—whether we can actually use difficulties as challenges and not get angry, worried, fearful, or envious, but accept situations as our own learning experiences, every day, every moment in our lives. The more we are in the world, the more confrontations we have, and these are often the causes of negative reactions. To learn to change our negative reactions to loving-kindness and compassion is the great purifier in daily life. It doesn’t matter where we are; we can do that anywhere. Much better in the middle of the biggest crowd than sitting all alone in a cave.

S: How does one decide to become a monk or nun?

AK: It usually decides itself. If it doesn’t do that, it could easily be wrong. It isn’t like a big turnabout. I think you can compare it with the decision to get married or not. How do people decide? I don’t know. It’s just a progressive step that one takes when that appears to be the right thing in one’s life.

S: Is the experience of oneness comparable to enlightenment?

AK: No, absolutely not. A totality experience can be a meditative stage, but it is certainly not enlightenment. To become one with something else one still has to be there, and that is not the final act. Liberation is also a law of nature. I don’t know whether it’s useful to discuss something that is still nebulous at this moment, but we could say one thing: both the enlightened and the unenlightened states are in our own mind. There’s nothing else to become enlightened except the mind. Because both states are available to us, they are both laws of nature. The unenlightened state is a state of consciousness in which latent desires cover up our inherent purity. When we are able to let go of all impurities completely, then the enlightened state becomes evident in the mind. Both states can be found in exactly the same spot, except for the fact that we are lacking the awareness to realize this.