Sylvester wrote:I continue to have some difficulty with your "double levelled vocabulary" analysis, insofar as it suggests that either the self or the conceptualisation of self needs to be transcended. I hope I have not misunderstood you?
My concern is largely driven by the anusaya model in the suttas, those pre-verbal defilements that are craving at its most basic. MN 64 suggests that when craving operates at this level, it seems to be on a "subconscious" or "pre-verbal" stage (where even the thought/idea of "personality" does not exist - sakkāyotipi na hoti.) And yet, this type of defilement, according to SN 12.38, is a support for the establishment of consciousness ( ārammaṇametaṃ ... viññāṇassa ṭhitiyā).
Won't the double entendre reading of DN 15's saṃsāraṃ nātivattati be unduly restrictive, to the extent that it may not account for the subconscious anusayas that drive the establishment of consciousness/rebirth?
Well, no, but it's understandable that you'd not see that since so far I'm describing a significantly different way of looking at DA in just bits and pieces -- hard to see the big picture this way.
MN 64 says that we are born with an underlying tendency to develop identity view, and I agree because, in a sense at least, that's what sankhara is: that underlying tendency. At the moment my preferred translation of sankhara is as a drive (a particular kind of drive, not all drives) or as what is created as a result of that drive (i.e. "that which is driven"). It is the drive that fosters in us an over-the-top craving for existence -- a desire to have a self, see that self, know that self, which results in us ultimately creating the sense that we have a certain kind of self (whatever kind we end up believing in). That's not something we are doing on a conscious level, but it does cause the creation of a certain kind of consciousness (see below).
Could you expand a bit on the distinction you draw between the field/"where" and the "what"? I certainly follow the position that the grammatical structure of the DO formula leads one to think of it as a principle of necessary conditions; I was just curious to see how that would differ in terms of a "where" versus a "what".
If each link is taken as a "what", then consciousness is, pretty much, consciousness as we define it nowadays with the popular element of "a soul" thrown in; name-and-form is our body and mind (or the way we think), contact is just contact, feeling is just feeling (and so on), birth is just birth, aging-and-death is just aging and death. In that case, to break the cycle, we have to end consciousness, end the body-mind, end all contact, end all feeling -- which makes a kind of sense if DA is describing rebirth and the escape from its cycle. If each link is a definition of "what" then it does seem fairly clear we're talking about at least two lives because we have a birth represented with consciousness and name-and-form, and then we get another birth with jati.
But if, instead, what's being defined is "where" (to look) then we are looking for a particular sort of consciousness that is "in what goes on in our awareness and perception". It is not the whole of consciousness, but something contained in consciousness (or -- as they seemed to see it back then -- a particular sort of consciousness, a subset of total consciousness). In this way of looking at it, the senses are not simply there as the passively used equipment that came along with birth into name-and-form, but are an active field being driven by what came before, a field we can study to see how they are driven, and what sort of use they are being put to (not all uses are problems). Contact is a field we can study to try to identify *which* contacts are a problem -- and this is true of all of them really -- because if we're talking "where" not "what" then it's not that we have to do away with all consciousness to interrupt the process, it's only a certain kind of consciousness.
This is why we have to look at the field: to see whether what's growing at any given moment is weeds or something good for us.
Feelings, too: if feelings are defined as "what" then *all* feelings are the problem (even equanimity? compassion?) but if we're looking at a field of feelings to identify the problem, then it's only certain feelings, and we need to try to see which are causing the problems out of the larger field of "all feelings" (the where).
This is actually the nature of causal chains (DA is, of course, one). The field narrows at each step, so it can't be all consciousness, only consciousness driven by sankhara; not all contacts, not all feelings. Out of any given field, *which* bit of what's growing in the field is the problem is defined by the limitation of all the causes in earlier links.