I 54 No Selfor determined effects and certain free or unpredictable causes.
If, presented with a situation, I deliberately kill another human
being, this action must lead to some unpleasant result in the future;
it may also make it easier for me to kill in the future, eventually
establishing something of a habit; and this may lead me intocircumstances-life as a bandit, say, or rebirth as a tiger-where
the only way to live is by killing; and yet in some measure the
freedom not to kill, not to act in accordance with established habits,
remains.
On the one hand, we are born with a certain mental and phys,
ical make-up, and are presented with various experiences over
which we have no control; on the other hand, we continually choose
certain courses of action in response to what is given us. We like
or do not like our experiences, ourselves, and our bodies, and
we decide to act in certain ways in order to try to change our
lives. But from the Buddhist perspective, because of the funda-
mental condition of ignorance, we fail to act effectively and lose
our way in the labyrinth of conditions that constitutes our being.
That dependent arising is indeed presented by the Buddhist tra~
dition as something profound and, in a sense, difficult and com-
plicated is aptly summed by a saying attributed to the Buddha
himself:
Profound is this dependent arising and profound too is its appearance.
It is through not knowing its nature, not penetrating its nature that beings
become like a tangled skein, like a knotted ball of thread, like a weave
of grass and rushes and fail to pass beyond sarp.sara with its descents,
unhappy destinies, and perdition.^37
While the method of taking the twelvefold formula as describ-
ing a process over three lives is common to the ancient schools,
it is also clear that it should be taken on a number of different
scales-as describing, for example, the process whereby in re-
sponse to some circumstance we determine upon and carry out
one particular course of action.^38 The Abhidharma tradition of
both the Theravadins and Sarvastivadins points out that the for-
mula should also be applied to each moment of consciousness-
that is, every thought that occurs arises in accordance with this