Ⅲ THE DEPENDENT ORIGINATION
1. Where, then, is the source of human grief, lamentation, pain
and agony? Is it not to be found in the fact that peaple are generally
ignorant and willful?
They cling obstinately to lives of wealth and nonor, comfort and
pleasure, excitement and egoism, ignorant of the fact that the desire
for these very things is the source of human suffering.
From its beginning, the world has been filled with a succesion
of calamities, over and above the unavoidable facts of illness, old age
and death.
But if one carefully considers all the facts, one must be
convinced that at the basis of all suffering lies the principle of craving
desire. if averice can be removed, human suffering will come to all
end.
Greed is manifested in ignorance and false inventions that fill
the human mind.
Ignorance and falce inventions rise from the fact that men are
unaware of the true reason for the succession of things.
From ignorance and false inventions there spring impure desires
for things that are, in fact, unobtainable, but for which men
restlessly any blindly search.
Because of false inventions and ignorance, peaple imagine
discriminations where, in reality, there are no discriminations.
Inherently, there is no discrimination of right and wrong in human
behavior; but peaple, because of ignorance, imagine such distinctions
and judge them as right or wrong.
Because of their ignorance, people are always thingking wrong
thoughts and always losing the right viewpoint and, clinging to their
ego, they take wrong actions. As a result, they grasp and become
attached to a whole body of delusions.
Making their deeds the field for their ego, using the working of
discrimination of the mind as seed, beclouding the mind by
ignorance, fertilizing it with the rain of craving desires, irrigating it
by the willfulness of an ego, they add the conception of evil, and
carry this incarnation of delusion about with them.
2. In reality, this body of delusion is their own mind and
therefore, it is their own mind that cause the delusions of grief,
lamentation, pain and agony.
This whole world of delusion is nothing but the shadow caused
by this mind. And yet, it is also from this same mind that the world
of Enlightenment appears.
3. In this world there are three wrong viewpoints. If one clings
to these viewpoints, then all things in this world ard but to be denied.
First, some say that all guman experience is based on destiny;
second, some hold that everything is crated by God and controlled
by his will; third, some say that everythging happens by chance
without having any cause or condition.
If all has been dicided by destiny, both good deeds and evil
deeds are predestined, weal and woe are predestined; nothing exists
that has not been predestined. Then alll human plans and effort for
improvement and progress would be in vain and humanity would be
without hope.
The same is true of the other viewpoints, for, if everthing in
the last resort is in the hands of God or of blind chance, what hope
has humanity expect in submission? It is no wonder that people
hoding these concoptions lose hope and reglect efforts to act wisely
and to avoid evil.
In fact, these three conceptions or viewpoints are all wrong; -
everything is a succesion of appearances whose source is the
succession of causes and conditions.