In this issue:
In 1980, I was precipitated into my first naturally-arising, extended intense meditation retreat. At this point in my monastic life, I had been a monk for almost seven years. Early in that retreat, I got a strong intuitive sense that I needed to understand the teaching of “dependent origination.”
I had read a little about this teaching. Now I read more about it, and I meditated on it—and I came up with a complete zero: no comprehension whatsoever. So I dropped it and just got on with my retreat.
Clearly, I was not yet ready to comprehend this teaching. And yet, while the name “dependent origination” makes the teaching sound very abstruse, this teaching is actually simple and solidly based in experience. And the spiritual experience required in order to penetrate this teaching was already my own experience.
Why was I so oblivious to a teaching that had already been confirmed in my own experience?–Because I had a big spiritual block of doubt, and this was blinding me. And, in fact, it took another seven years of training—the most difficult and spiritually perilous years of my life—for this block to dissolve.
After the spiritual block finally dissolved, I found that the teaching of dependent origination began to come on my intuitive screen again, and I returned to it. I found that this time the difficulty in comprehending the teaching, like the block that had caused the difficulty, had dissolved. The teaching was clear, and as I ruminated on it, I wrote a series of articles about it. These articles were published as a book in 1999.
Our confusion and suffering have their roots in lifetimes of struggling in spiritual darkness. So it should not be surprising that there are layers upon layers of spiritual ignorance awaiting, and longing for, the saving Light of the Eternal. And, interestingly enough, this is in fact what the teaching of dependent origination is really about.
We are not stuck forever with the ignorance. But neither can we just will it away. We have to patiently work through its layers, and this begets gratitude, humility, and acceptance of the humanity of ourselves and others. And thus we learn that ignorance is the raw material of enlightenment, and our gratitude extends even to ignorance itself.