Hi discoursers, (especially @Erika_ODonnell, @Martin, @Brahmali, @Javier)
Picking up on a thread in this topic (which is now closed) where this talk was brought up (part of this course).
I took a break from here, so I apologize, my reply is a bit late. (Only by about 8 months or so!) But I wanted to clarify two things:
- on using âcauseâ in context of Dependent Origination, which I donât think is always incorrect, but can imply more than what the Buddha was literally saying,
- and on the kind of conditionality in DO, which I think is just âdependency onâ, or, to put it in modern terms, just necessary conditions.
Underneath lies a more fundamental point about the language of the suttas being much easier than the kind of language we often see when Dependent Origination is discussed (including, unfortunately, in this very post).
Iâd like to clarify that it was me, not Ajahn Brahmali, who is responsible for these slides. So all shortcomings are mine.
Yes, you have a point. But if you listen to the talk, I think youâll hear me saying that people use âcauseâ in different ways. And I think âmodern accounts of causalityâ is not what people use in daily speech, as you kind of attest when you say âonly in the last decade became mainstreamâ.
I belief the Buddha taught in simple, everyday language. Such language I find in the Pali, and I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to read it directly. When I read on Dependent Origination, I feel the Buddha tried his very best to make it as theoretically simple and clear as possible. But then I read English explanations or even just translations of DO⌠and I often find the exact opposite! I find a lot of logic which, first of all, is what Dependent Origination is not about, and secondly, confuses it for people who I belief would be perfectly capable of understanding it if it was put in simper language. This âfrustratesâ me, and led me to present the things you replied to.
I mean, just look at all the different views out there on DO! Thatâs not just because of a lack of insight in people, itâs also a tendency to proliferate beyond what the the suttas are actually saying. So in the talk I attempted to get back to the basic ideas I find in the texts, and to not go beyond that. We can always elaborate from there, but at least itâll be clear what comes from the Buddha and what comes from us.
So we are coming from different places here. You come from modern logic, I from what I think is more true to the original message of the Buddha. Thatâs doesnât mean I think you are wrong, itâs more about what I feel is pragmatic for the majority of people and what is true to the Pali.
In that case, with birth and death, I agree it can be useful to use âcauseâ. But is it useful for every link? Do feelings cause craving? I agree with @Martin who said itâs better to say ignorance causes craving. And what about consciousness causes namarupa, and namarupa causes consciousness? There it gets even more troublesome for me. These things donât really cause one another, in my understanding and daily use of the word. If they would, it sounds to me like the cycle is endless. These things come together, dependent on one another, but donât cause one another.
The Buddha does use words that could potentially be translated as âcauseâ (like hetu). But not in the core teachings on DO and definitely not in paticca/paccaya. Moreover, hetu can perhaps also be translated as âreasonâ.
But as you say, it is also a personal thing.
Thanks for listening. 
Given all the different views that exist, it may be quite rare to find two people agreeing on as much of Dependent Origination as Ajahn Brahmali and me. 
Yet we did not agree on the sufficient conditions issue. Ajahn thinks there is sufficiency and necessity in all the links, whereas I think itâs simply just necessity. I agree there is sufficiency in some links, but not in all, and moreover, I donât see this expressed in the texts. (Again, I try to get back to the most basic idea of the texts.)
First of all, necessity is what dependency is all about. If you depend on something, you need it. It doesnât imply any sufficiency. I think the conditionality behind DO is as simple as that (on the textual level, anywayâreality is always more complicated). Paccaya means âdependent onâ. So when the Buddha says âThere will be B, only if there is A. B is dependent on Aâ (like in SN12.10), I understand the two sentences to mean the exact same thing, namely necessity. Itâs just expressed in different ways.
Ajahn Brahmali disagrees and thinks there is also sufficiency. He said in the thread I linked to above: ââWhen there is ignorance, there will be willed actionsâ is a statement of sufficient conditionality.â Which I agree is true. But itâs true in English. I donât think it is in Pali. This comes down to the difference between âifâ and âonly ifâ (or âwhenâ and âonly whenâ) that exists only in English, not in Pali. (For the Pali nerds, see Wijesekera on Locative Absolute, which he states can âsignify a condition that exists or should existâ, i.e. is necessary.) âThere will be B if there is Aâ means something fundamentally different from âThere will be B only if there is Aâ. The former is indeed a sufficient condition, but the latter is a necessary condition. I read the Pali as the latter. For example, I read a link as âthere will be craving only if there is feelingâ (i.e. you need feelings for craving). And then this link makes sense. But the translation âthere will be craving if there is feelingâ to me doesnât make sense, because it implies youâll always have craving, whether you are enlightened or not.
For Ajahn this is resolved by assuming no single link in DO applies to the arahant. Letâs for a moment assume that to be true. Then I still donât agree, because even if you are not enlightened, you can feel, yet not crave. (An extreme example is in jhanas.) So even then feelings are not sufficient for craving.
But I think the assumption is incorrect. It implies ignorance lies behind each link of the origination sequence, so that in effect they say things like âif there is feeling and ignorance, there will be cravingâ. But I think each link is valid in and of itself, without having to imply ignorance.
To me this just makes sense, that every link should be a complete truth in its own right. You can compare it to the cessation sequence. Take any link there, it doesnât matter whether you start from ignorance or not, they work by themselves (e.g. if craving ceases, fuel (upadana) will cease). And if we drop the concept of sufficiency, all the arising links work in isolation too (e.g. there will be fuel only if there is craving). The cessation and origination sequences are just two different ways of looking at the same concept of necessity.
This can be useful also from a pragmatic point of view. Take the mutual link between namarupa and consciousness. That link works, and is useful, even if you disregard ignorance. You canât have consciousness without namarupa, whether there is ignorance or not. This is analogous to the link between contact and feeling. You canât feel without contact, whether there is ignorance or not. Or birth and death. Birth (i.e. being alive) leads to death even for an arahant; death doesnât suddenly disappear when there is no ignorance. I think these are powerful ideas that we lose if we assume no single link of DO applies to the arahant.
That ignorance doesnât need to be implied in every link is also illustrated by suttas wherein the Buddha uses the âonly if âŚâ phrases, especially those where he starts his analysis at suffering, only coming to ignorance at the very end. Take SN12.10, where before his enlightenment he asked: When is there suffering? Well, only if there is birth. You need birth for there to be suffering. How can there be birth? Only if there is continued existence (bhava)⌠and so on ⌠And how can there be willed actions? Only if there is ignorance. And only then, at the end, he had it all figured out, only then he thought of ignorance. He didnât start at ignorance and then wondered what follows from it (which would imply he could see ignorance before he could see birth and death, which is of course not the case).
This idea is also supported by suttas that start the sequence at the feeling-craving junction, not mentioning ignorance (eg SN12.57). Of course ignorance is implied here too, in a sense. But the shorter sequence should also be sound by itself, I feel, and it just isnât if we imply sufficiency in all links. Again, because it would say youâll crave if you feel anything, even if youâre enlightened. I think this shorter sequence is actually very important to consider, because it is so close to the four noble truths, where craving is also the starting point. In other words, I think you can capture the essence of what DO is about without always needing ignorance. Thatâs what the four noble truths do, and thatâs what suttas such as these do. Thereâs quite a variety of suttas that omit ignorance in the sequence, which I think quite makes the point.
Take SN12.67, which mentions the mutual dependence of namarupa and consciousness. If the dependence between these two were sufficient, it would be a never-ending cycle, where one leads to the other, leads to the other, leads to the other⌠Sure, one could assume ignorance needs to be there. But in this sutta also, ignorance is actually not in the sequence, which simply starts at this mutual dependency (after working back from suffering). The simile of the bundles of reeds also illustrates the fundamental idea is necessity, not sufficiency. The two bundles need one another to stay upright; if you put one bundle upright it is not sufficient for another to be also. The other doesnât automatically stand up by itself.
The oft-mentioned four nutriments (e.g. SN12.11) are another clear image. Nutriments (say food for the body) are necessities, not a sufficiency.
Let me approach it from yet a different angle. Suppose you had ignorance your whole life but get enlightened tomorrow, so you wonât get reborn. That means somewhere in the chain between ignorance and birth sufficiency didnât applyâand not just tomorrow when you get enlightened, but even today when you arenât. After all, the ignorance that exists now, before your enlightenment, wonât lead to birth, so it isnât sufficient for birth. This illustrates not all links can be sufficient conditions, because not all ignorance leads inevitably to birth.
So I think the links are not about sufficiency, and instead just say, in effect, that you need A for there to be B. Thatâs the necessary conditionality, thatâs the dependency. There is nothing much more to it than that, on the linguistic and logical level, anyway. Itâs simple, and easy to understand, just one single concept. Why infer more if we donât have to?
That brings me back to my view that the Buddha tried to make things a theoretically simple and obvious as possible. When he presents the four statements on dependency (imasmiáš sati idaáš hoti, etc e.g. SN12.37), I read them as clarifications of a single underlying principle (dependency/necessity), whereas some others read in them various elaborations. They disagree on what these elaborations are, and how they work out exactly (which illustrates they may not actually be there). There are distinctions made such as: present moment vs future, causality vs dependency, and, in this case, sufficiency vs necessity. What I see happening here, is reading too much of modern logic back into the suttas, or else relying too much on translations. The only essential distinction I see in the four statements is origination vs cessation. But that is agreed upon by all, because itâs obvious.
If you have a certain idea of the Pali (or English), it can take quite some reevaluating and rereading to get a feel for how another idea may work. So I hope readers will consider the idea of necessity, and that translators will consider âonly when/ifâ instead of âwhenâ.
In short, I think the simplest possible interpretation is to be preferred, which is that the DO links are all just dependencies (i.e. necessary conditions). Sure, some links are also sufficient conditions, as is clear from their nature (i.e. birth is sufficient for death) though not for all (i.e. feelings for craving). But I donât see this explicitly in the Pali. And if itâs not obviously there in the Pali, perhaps itâs best left out of the basic explanations, especially if it confuses things, which in my experience it does.
So if Iâm right, and the Buddha didnât make this distinction between sufficiency and necessity, then should we? I personally donât think itâs all that helpful. But if we do talk about it, it should not be with reference to the Pali.
Anyway, Iâm starting to repeat myself, and perhaps Iâm just exacerbating the problem Iâm trying to solve⌠So if this is all more confusing than helpful, Iâm sorry. But itâs exactly this kind of discussion I think people in the Buddhaâs time didnât have. Either because they didnât have, or otherwise didnât care about, the kind of logical constructs Iâm arguing against.
Please let me know if these ideas resonate with you, or if you think Iâm off track and why. I may one day turn the slides of the talk into a more worked-out writing, less rambling than this. Let me know if that interests anybody, and Iâll consider it, after the vassa, and probably after at least another 8 months! 
(Sorry, I wonât be here to reply until November, after the vassa. Please somebody defend my case on my behalf while Iâm meditating. )
) , rather than as a factor/ cause, the inherent tendency to attribute âthingnessâ is much reduced. It is then easy to conceptualize Ignorance as a process going on over many lifetimes, with no discernable beginning - yet being sustained by further underlying processes such as the hindrances, wrong attention, bad friends, etc. It is also easy to see how certain processes such as feeling must not only run, but also reach a certain level of maturity before the next level process of craving can get started. If either of contact.exe and feeling.exe fail to initialize, craving.exe cannot complete bootup⌠
