conditioned in buddhism refers to the fact that anything that exists, originates from something else.
so any one thing you examine will be “conditioned” on the previous things that cause it to appear
cause and effect basically
this has some philosophical implications, since all you are as a person is a bundle of emotions, mental patterns, etc that are ultimately conditioned
this leads to the buddhist view of no self, where there isn’t something that makes you “you”. just a bunch of responses to stimuli. some of those responses are thoughts of a self.
the diamond sutra's point aiui is that what we call a self isnt a self in that a true self does not exist independently (from the causes, such as its essential nature, its foundation, and its environment)
i might even say a self has an essential nature defined by an origin which is composed of relationships. you can find all examples in nature if you look a little.
Dependent origination (Skt: pratityasamutpada, Pali: paticca-samuppada) is also known as conditioned co-arising and several other terms. Buddhism teaches that everything that exists is conditioned—dependent on something else. This applies to thoughts as well as objects, to the individual as well as the entire universe. Nothing exists independently. Everything is conditioned.
This concept is illustrated in the Buddhist teachings of the chain of dependent origination, which describes the factors that perpetuate the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. The twelve links in the chain are sequential, each factor causing the following one: Because of this, that arises. When this ceases, that also ceases.
The links form a never-ending cycle that binds us to suffering, and the goal of Buddhist practice is to escape from this vicious cycle. Though there is more than one version of the sequence of links, they commonly run this way:
- Ignorance
- Mental formations
- Consciousness
- Name and form
- The senses: sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste, and mind
- Contact
- Feeling
- Craving
- Clinging
- Becoming
- Birth
- Aging and death
One thing I got wrong about this for a long long time was that this chain isn't linear and it's not (necessarily always) local.
Many people will argue that it's either:
- a cosmological system (which largely contradicts the intentions of Buddhism, where most cosmological questions are waved away as being irrelevant to the goal of eliminating suffering)
- an immedate series of one-after-the-other events describing the overall process of mind (which doesn't hold up to basic observational scrutiny).
In reality it's more of a graph of influencing factors that depend on each other. Tuning one's handling of each factor leads to the reduction of suffering in the whole system.
In reality it's more of a graph of influencing factors that depend on each other. Tuning one's handling of each factor leads to the reduction of suffering in the whole system.
Thich Nhat Hahn also wrote a lot about interdependence in an accessible way (I read a lot of his books when I was 18 or 19).
Indra's net is a vast, cosmic lattice that contains precious jewels wherever the threads cross. There are millions of jewels strung together to make the net, and each jewel has many facets. When you look at any facet of any jewels, you can see all the other jewels reflected in it. In the world of the Avatamsaka, in Indra's net, the one is present in the all, and the all in the one. This wonderful image was used in Buddhism to illustrate the principle of interdepedence and interpenetration.
