Overcoming the Twelve Links of Dependent Arising
On the basis level, we experience not only the suffering of suffering – our unhappiness – and the suffering of change – our ordinary happiness that never lasts, never satisfies and so on, but also, more importantly, the third type of suffering – all-pervasive suffering. This refers to our uncontrollably recurring rebirth with so-called “tainted” five aggregates. The tainted five aggregates include all the changing factors that make up each moment of our experience. They are the basis for our being able to experience the first two types of suffering – our ordinary unhappiness or happiness, to put it in simple terms.
Our five aggregates are “tainted” with ignorance – in other words, our confusion about reality, our not knowing how things exist and how we exist or knowing them in an inverted way. This ignorance generates further perpetuation of these aggregates, also tainted with ignorance. The twelve links of dependent arising describe how this process occurs and it is very important to understand how they work, which means how samsara works, which is what we aim to transform with tantra.
In terms of the twelve links, our ignorance brings on disturbing emotions, which drive karmic impulses to commit actions based on them, which then imprint karmic aftermath on our mental continuum in the aspect of our networks of positive force and negative force. Some portion of this karmic aftermath later gets activated by more disturbing emotions to “throw” that continuum into a further rebirth. In that rebirth, that karmic aftermath ripens not only into our body, speech and mind, but also into our activities of body, speech and mind, our experience of our environment and the levels of happiness or unhappiness with which we experience each moment. These are the basis level phenomena that, with pathway tantra practice, we imagine to be in pure forms and which, on the resultant level, are in the pure forms of a Buddha. The entire transformation process in tantra – specifically, anuttarayoga tantra – involves transforming this repeating cycle of death, bardo and rebirth occurring through the mechanism of the twelve links.
If we understand that, then with the highest class of tantra, instead of activating this karmic aftermath that will just propel us into further rebirth with a further basis for more and more suffering, we want to focus on voidness with a blissful state of mind and not with our ordinary types of feelings. In that way, we can bring about the generation of the Form Bodies of a Buddha from the network of positive force that we have as a Buddha-nature factor, when we have dedicated it with bodhichitta to our enlightenments. It is from our network of deep awareness that we attain the Dharmakaya mind of a Buddha.
