Ignorance

by Geshe Sonam Rinchen

The Indian master Atisha used the metaphor of a pig and its activities to illustrate the chaos which confusion causes.

The pig of ignorance, because of confusion,

Roots around and digs up the nice clean grass.

It isn’t attracted to places like pure lands

But takes delight where there is dirt.

It smacks its lips in the filthy mire.

And even though its owner will surely kill it,

The pig of ignorance is deceived by him.

Without any effort to escape, it enjoys

The bait of barley beer lees and turnips.

Imagine a lovely well-kept lawn. A pig arrives and makes itself at home. It begins to root around with its snout. In no time it has ruined the lawn completely and destroyed whatever was growing there.

Atisha says that our ethical discipline is like the lawn, and the pig like our confusion regarding the connection between actions and their effects. The pig rooting around with its snout resembles the way we destroy our ethical discipline through careless, confused negative actions. This makes it impossible for good qualities to develop because they can only grow in the fertile earth of good ethics, which at the most fundamental level means restraint from the ten harmful activities.

Atisha points out that pigs don’t like clean places. Similarly, people under the influence of ignorance and confusion dislike monasteries and the kind of quiet and secluded places that are conducive to spiritual practice. Pigs make for dirty places, and people governed by confusion head straight for town because they prefer the distraction of worldly activities. Strictly speaking, these distractions include even business, farming, and other things people normally do to earn a living.

The pig’s owner fattens up the pig so that it will be ready for slaughter. But the pig is unsuspecting and lolls around, enjoying the slops it is given with no thought of escaping. The pig is content with its circumstances and quite unaware that the very person who is feeding it will one day butcher it. A benefactor gives his support to a monk, for example, and that support is valuable because without the necessities of life the monk cannot devote himself to practice. But gradually the benefactor and the monk become more intimate. They begin to consult on various matters.

One day they discuss how the monk can gather all the resources needed to support the practice he hopes to do in the future. The benefactor makes useful suggestions, and before long the monk becomes involved in the enterprise of making a livelihood. Never mind about remaining ordained, he goes to the opposite extreme. He plunges more fully into secular life than a lay person and has no scruples about doing all kinds of negative things. This is like the slaughter because it kills all chances of happiness and excellence. Such a sorry state of affairs is the result of ignorance.

To give another simile, ignorance is like the king, and clinging attachment and hostility are his ministers. To rid ourselves of the king’s minions we must get rid of the king. And so it is of greatest importance to identify ignorance properly.

The twenty-sixth chapter of the great Nagarjuna’s Treatise on the Middle Way, called Examining the Twelve Links of Existence, is based on the Buddha’s words in the Rice Seedling Sutra and other sutras, but the way in which Nagarjuna has presented the subject-matter is extremely terse and concise. If we understand these verses well, they provide us with an excellent guide to meditation on how we remain trapped in cyclic existence and how we can free ourselves. In this commentary we will attempt to unpack each verse and consider some of its ramifications in detail.

Nagarjuna begins the twenty-sixth chapter with the following words:

Obscured by ignorance, existence recurs

From performing any of the three kinds

Of formative actions through which

One goes on to another rebirth.

What is meant by ignorance in this context? There are different views about this; however, ignorance here does not mean merely a failure to understand reality nor does it mean not understanding something other than reality. Rather, it is the opposite of the understanding that the person and other phenomena lack intrinsic existence. Those who are affected by this ignorance create actions which precipitate them into further worldly existence.

Formative actions are non-virtuous, virtuous, or nonfluctuating actions. Nagarjuna’s words can also be taken to refer to physical, verbal, and mental activities. They are called formative because they form the body and mind of the next rebirth. Someone obscured by ignorance does not necessarily perform a particular action with any thought of future rebirth, but the action begins the formative process whether this was intended or not. The person is propelled into the next rebirth through the force of such actions.

All systems of Buddhist philosophical tenets hold that ignorance is incompatible with knowledge and prevents correct understanding. The word for ignorance in Tibetan is ma rig pa. Ma is a negative particle. Rig pa means knowing or understanding. In his Compendium of Knowledge Asanga says that the ignorance which is incompatible with correct understanding is a confusion with regard to the fundamental nature of the object and not a misunderstanding of it. According to him ignorance prevents a person from gaining an understanding of reality through hearing, thinking, and meditating. It is an obstacle to clear perception of reality and functions like darkness, which hides the objects in a room even from someone with good sight.

Through the influence of this confusion and lack of clarity, an object which has no existence in and of itself is seen to exist in this way. For Asanga this distorting perception is a false view of the transitory collection. He distinguishes between ignorance and this, which to him is an aspect of apprehension, albeit improper apprehension, because the mind actually engages with and examines its object, whereas ignorance does not have the ability to apprehend its object.

Asanga describes it as a process consisting of two steps: confusion and lack of clarity lead to misperception. From this come clinging attachment and hostility, which in turn lead to the kinds of actions that keep us in cyclic existence.

The following example illustrates the way Asanga describes the process. When you see a coiled mottled rope in front of you on a path at dusk, the lack of light prevents you from seeing clearly. This leads to a misapprehension of what is there as a snake and you feel frightened.

If someone is not your friend, it doesn’t necessarily mean he is your foe, but the opposite of a friend is a foe, just as the opposite of truth is falsehood and the opposite of being loving is to be unloving. Not understanding something is not the opposite of understanding it correctly. For the great Indian masters Dharmakirti, Bhavaviveka (who promulgated what came to be known as the Svantantrika-Madhyamika view), and Chandrakirti (who put forward the Prasangika-Madhyamika view), ignorance is more than a lack of understanding. They assert that it is diametrically opposed to the understanding of reality gained through hearing, thinking, and meditating, and that it is incompatible with the exalted knowledge that understands reality correctly. According to them ignorance is a distorted perception of the object and a deluded form of understanding.

We all experience times when our mind seems to be shrouded in darkness and we cannot think clearly. This is a sign that confusion is at work, but there are more subtle levels of confusion that we do not notice. Do our minds actually engage with reality? At present they do not because ignorance prevents us from perceiving the fundamental condition of things and conceals reality from us.

In his Praise for Dependent Arising Je Tsongkhapa writes:

Through what you realised and proclaimed

The foremost knower and guide. Subduer,

I bow to you who saw and taught

Dependent relativity.

Whatever troubles of this world

Their root is ignorance. You taught

The insight that reverses it,

Dependent relativity.

He extols the Buddha Shakyamuni as an authentic teacher for having understood fully and correctly how we remain implicated in cyclic existence and how we can extricate ourselves; for practising what he had understood, attaining enlightenment, and communicating his understanding to others. If we practice what the Buddha taught, we will not only be able to transcend repeated involuntary birth, sickness, ageing, and death but also go beyond the limitations associated with a state of personal peace. At the root of all our problems is the misconception that the self and other phenomena are truly existent. By understanding that nothing exists in this way and by familiarising ourselves with it, we will gradually be able to free ourselves from all these troubles.

In the Praise for Dependent Arising Je Tsongkhapa also writes:

Who turn away from what you taught

May long perform austerities,

Yet they, so fixed their view of self,

But summon faults repeatedly.

If we follow those who assert that both the physical world and the living beings in it were created by some kind of permanent self or eternal creator, perform austere practices, and perhaps even succeed in accomplishing states of profound concentration, we may be born in the highest rebirth within cyclic existence, the Peak of Existence, and remain in deep absorption for many aeons. But one day the momentum of our meditative stabilisation will come to an end and we will be forced once more to take rebirth in the desire realm, where we must experience ordinary birth, sickness, ageing, death, and the many other troubles that afflict us. We will simply have beckoned to all these problems, because despite our intensive practice our misconception of the self remained in tact and firmly in place. As long as it persists, everything that springs from it will arise automatically.

For these reasons the wise learn to distinguish between the Buddha and his teaching and other teachers and their teachings. Understanding the differences well, we should avoid those systems of thought and practice that do not enable us to address the root of our problems. When we fully understand the profundity of the Buddha’s teaching on the dependently arising nature of everything that exists, it will not fail to move us. We will get goose pimples, the tears will well up in our eyes, and we will quite naturally want to place our palms together in a gesture of respect and homage.

Expressing this awe in the Praise for Dependent Arising, Je Tsongkhapa writes:

As teacher, refuge, orator

Or guardian — how astonishing!

I bow to you who taught so well

Dependent relativity.

We must identify clearly what kind of ignorance acts as a cause for further cyclic existence and what kind does not. We must also examine how other disturbing emotions develop from ignorance, which serves as their basis, and how this influences our physical and verbal activities and affects our experience of happiness and suffering. Once we are fully convinced that everything unwanted happens because of ignorance, we will examine whether or not it is possible to get rid of this ignorance, and if so, how.

The true reason why the Buddha’s teachings are passed on and why it is worth considering this matter of the twelve links is in order to get rid of suffering. When we listen to the teachings, we should not be intent on hearing something new and interesting. Our attention should be firmly directed inwards and we should take the teachings very personally, constantly relating them to ourselves and to the search to discover the real cause of our difficulties.

There are many forms of negative physical and verbal behaviour that most societies legislate against because they consider them detrimental. They come from our turbulent emotions, but usually only people involved in spiritual practice recognise the need to curtail the emotions that motivate undesirable actions. If we want to get rid of them, we must learn to recognise them and understand how they function and how they affect us. We must know their immediate and long-term effects, how we can deal with them quickly when emergency measures need to be taken, and how we can rid ourselves of them completely by stopping the ignorance from which they stem.

Just as non-attachment counters attachment and benevolence counters hostility, only the correct understanding of reality can counter ignorance, its antithesis. These three basic disturbing states of mind — attachment, hostility, and confusion — spawn all other disturbing emotions and negativity.

Their opposites engender all virtue and everything positive. To rid ourselves of attachment we must develop a sincere wish for freedom from cyclic existence, and to overcome anger we must become more loving. To rid ourselves of ignorance we have to understand the dependently arising nature of things and their emptiness of intrinsic existence.

Mental activity is classified as primary mental activity, which consists of the different kinds of consciousness, and secondary mental activities. Ignorance, which is the opposite of a correct understanding of things, is not one of the six kinds of consciousness but a secondary mental activity.

Ignorance can be of two types: afflicted ignorance, which is a disturbing attitude, and non-afflicted ignorance. The former may be either a misconception of the self or that which is not a misconception of the self. There is afflicted ignorance which is a disturbing attitude but not a misconception of the self. Examples of this are confusion with regard to the connection between actions and their effects; ignorance that regards what is impermanent as permanent or what is painful as pleasurable; ignorance with respect to the four noble truths; and ignorance accompanying clinging attachment, desire, anger, doubt, or any other disturbing emotion. All disturbing emotions are accompanied by ignorance which, as it were, eggs them on and lends them support. When we become foe destroyers we have rid ourselves of these diverse forms of ignorance.

However, foe destroyers still have non-afflicted ignorance. For instance, although they have understanding of the connection between actions and their effects, they do not perceive the most subtle aspects of karma, such as which specific actions have produced a particular result. Only a fully enlightened one has complete knowledge of this. Foe destroyers know that enlightened beings possess extraordinary qualities, without fully understanding what those qualities are. Believing that there is no connection between actions and their effects, such as is postulated in the Buddha’s teachings, or believing that enlightened beings do not possess the qualities ascribed to them constitutes a wrong view. In the case of foe destroyers, however, there is no lack of conviction but a lack of full understanding.

We have spoken about ignorance in general and have also considered the particular kind of ignorance which forms the first of the twelve links. We have a very strong feeling of an “I” and we cling to this. As long as we have not understood that this self, which appears so vividly, is something nonexistent, the ignorance which is the first of the twelve links — the misconception of our own self — will continue to arise and cause us to act.

The misconception of our own self is referred to as the false view of the transitory collection as a real “I” and “mine.” It springs from a misconception of the aggregates, which constitute body and mind. This is referred to as the misconception of a self of phenomena. These two underlie our cyclic existence and are the source of our suffering.

There are forms of ignorance that act as the root of cyclic existence which do not constitute the first link of this twelve part process. There is also ignorance which is the first link but does not act as a root of cyclic existence and there are forms of ignorance that are both, and others which are neither.

An example of ignorance that acts as a root of cyclic existence but which is not the first link of this twelve-part process is the innate misconception of the aggregates that constitute body and mind as truly existent. An example of the second kind of ignorance mentioned is an intellectually formed conception of a truly existent self, namely one acquired through philosophical speculation or through misleading instruction.

The first of the twelve links, which also acts as a root of cyclic existence, is a misconception of the self that is present in all living beings and must therefore be the instinctive or innate kind. Ignorance accompanying desire, anger, and so forth is neither the first link nor does it act as the root of cyclic existence.