This was an absolute humdinger of a class. With an incredible presentation by Mrinmoyee Bhattacharya.
Video feed broke up about half way through, but at a convenient point--I recapped and nothing was lost. You've always got the MP3 in any case. Part 2:
Live stream videos at Ustream
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Listening to causality class while on Buddhist retreat in the mountains. Very nice. Just got to the break, and the moment of the nidanas - which I came up against in my essay yesterday and just shelved for the moment, but I'll have to write another section now - and the image of Contact as the guy with the arrow in his eye.
The interesting thing about this sequence is how it goes: Ignorance, Karmic Formations, Consciousness, Name+Form, Six Sense Doors, Contact, etc. So Contact with the guest is preceded by the existence of the house, which is preceded by the condition of there being house-ness in some identifiable way. "House" is preceded by Consciousness? What about Consciousness arising WITH the object? Here it precedes it. What is this consciousness conscious OF? It's context - because it arises from Karma? This wants more thought. Essay part 4 coming up!
But why I'm commenting before going on with the mp3 is to suggest the interpretation of paticca-samuppada (the nidanas) from a panpsychism lens. Nowhere in the sutta does it SAY that only humans experience this. And the 6 Realms seems to imply that all sorts of beings (like the tree devas that regularly show up to listen to the Buddha's discourses - always being kind of shy and self-deprecating, but sweet) experience this wheel, or they wouldn't revolve around it.
If a tree deva or a hungry ghost or an angry asura is included here, then it's hardly a great step to include the tree itself, hunger itself, ambition itself?
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