THE BUDDHA'S AWAKENING 25Thus the early texts are quite clear on the point that the conditioned and
unconditioned are radically separate. One early passage depicts the Buddha as
strongly criticizing a group of monks who tried to develop a theory whereby
the conditioned was derived out of the unconditioned or somehow lay within
it (M.1). Dulfkha (suffering), he said, is inherent in the stressful nature of con-
ditioned phenomena, whereas the unconditioned is totally free from suffering.
Suffering could not possibly be produced by absolute freedom from suffering;
because the nature of conditioning is such that causes are in turn influenced
by their effects, the unconditioned could not itself function as a condition.
The only way the unconditioned could be experienced would be by unravel-
ing the conditioned from within and bringing it to cessation. To do so, one
would need to know the pattern in which the various categories of condi-
tioned experience depended on one another. This pattern the Buddha called
"dependent co-arising," which is best understood as an analysis of how the
various sense fields and aggregates in the sphere of the conditioned go about
grouping, disbanding, and regrouping in various configurations as they influ-
ence one another in giving rise to suffering and to the conditioned world as a
whole. This last point is one of the most distinctive insights of the Buddha's
Awakening: the realization that personal experience and the entire condi-
tioned universe all boil down to this single pattern, whose factors work over
time but can also be directly experienced at the mind in the present.
Dependent co-arising is most commoniy expressed as nidana (12 precon-
ditions). These are (1) ignorance, (2) formatibns, (3) consciousness, (4) name-
and-form, (5) the six sense fields, (6) contact, (7) feeling, (8) craving, (9)
sustenance, (10) becoming, (11) birth (that is, rebirth), and (12) aging and
dying, with their attendant suffering. The pictures ringing the Wheel of Life
(see figure on p. 27) represent each of these preconditions with a scene (start-
ing from bottom left and continuing counterclockwise): (1) a blind old
woman, (2) a potter making pots, (3) a monkey picking fruit, (4) a man on a
journey, (5) a many-windowed house, (6) lovers touching, (7) arrows piercing
the eyes, (8) eating and drinking, (9) a person picking fruit, (10) a pregnant
woman, (11) a woman delivering a child, and (12) a corpse being carried away.
The interlocking chain of conditions can be analyzed in two directions:
from precondition to condition, or from condition back to precondition. On
the last watch of the night of his Awakening, Gautama began with the most
blatant conditions and worked backward to their underlying preconditions, as
follows:
- Aging and dying depend on birth (that is, rebirth). If there were no birth, there
would be no process exhibiting aging and death. It is important to note
here, and in the following causal links, that "birth," "aging," and "dying"
refer not only to the arising, decay, and passing away of the body, but also
to the repeated arising, decay, and passing away of mental states, moment
by moment. In fact, during the third watch on the night of his Awaken-
ing, Gautama was probably most concerned with analyzing mental states