Tagged: Impermanence
Pages with this tag
Anālayo - Dependent Arising (2020)
1In the Buddhist concept of dependent arising, consciousness and name-and-form share a unique, reciprocal relationship, mutually conditioning each other like two bundles of reeds that can only stand by leaning together. This dynamic, where consciousness requires name-and-form for its content and name-and-form requires consciousness to be experienced, creates the continuous matrix of subjective experience. When this consciousness becomes "established" through desire, it perpetuates the cycle of rebirth, but the "unestablished consciousness" of an enlightened one (*arahant*) is no longer dependent on name-and-form, thereby ending future re-becoming. Ultimately, the text argues that consciousness is not a solution but a conditioned, impermanent, and potentially deluding part of the human predicament (*dukkha*), and its cessation is integral to achieving liberation.
Gombrich - What the Buddha Thought (2009)
2In *What the Buddha Thought*, Richard Gombrich argues that the Buddha was a brilliant and original thinker whose coherent system of thought can only be understood by placing it in its historical context as a pragmatic debate with and reaction to contemporary Brahminical and Jain ideas. Gombrich posits that the Buddha was not an essentialist philosopher but a practical teacher focused on how things function, redefining concepts like *kamma* from ritual action to ethical intention and clarifying "no-self" as the absence of an *unchanging* essence. A central thesis is that subsequent generations, failing to grasp the Buddha's use of metaphor, irony, and context-dependent arguments, took his teachings literally, thereby creating new scholastic doctrines—such as misinterpreting the *brahma-vihāras* as a path to heaven rather than nirvana. This process of misinterpretation, Gombrich contends, explains many apparent inconsistencies in the Pali Canon, which he establishes as the key evidence for understanding how the Buddha used fire as a central metaphor for non-random process and satirized Vedic cosmogony in the Chain of Dependent Origination.