This page describes projects I am working on at the present time. I invite involvement by others in any of these in whatever capacity you my be qualified or find interest, from suggesting what content might be included, through presenting new points of view, seeking out relevant resources or proof reading, to simply broadening your understanding of Dhamma. Please email me at bhikkhu.cintita@gmail.com to discuss such possibilities.

Dependent Coarising

Culture of Awakening

Dependent Coarising

The goal here is to produce a substantial revision of my book Dependent Coarising (Pali, paṭiccasamuppāda) and republish it, foreseeably by the end of 2026.

Bhikkhu Cintita, 2021, Dependent Coarising: meaning construction in the twelve links.

This old edition of the book will continue to be available until the revised edition is released.

Books

Since the last edition I have thought of ways in which my exposition might more strategically unfold so that it is more easily comprehensible by the reader in a step-by-step manner. This is very difficult material, and the Buddha describes it as such. I have also gained more insight into various aspects of the teaching that continued to elude me at the time of the earlier writing. Finally, I have in the meantime written a study Rethinking Satipaṭṭhāna, about the contemplative art of investigating Dhamma in terms of experience, which provides the basis of bringing the teaching of dependent coarising into practice.

The Buddha gave dependent coarising a distinguished place among his deepest teachings,

Whoever sees dependent coarising sees the Dhamma; whoever sees the Dhamma sees dependent coarising. (MN 28 i190-1)

However, he also predicted that his deepest teachings would be subject to neglect by his future disciples
Unfortunately, this seems to have become the historical norm among students of the Dhamma, not to recognize the full depth of dependent coarising, particularly with regard to those links that reveal the insubstantial basis of the human experience. In fact, this was predicted by the Buddha,

When those discourses spoken by the Tathāgata that are deep, deep in meaning, supramundane, dealing with emptiness, are being recited, they will not be eager to listen to them, nor lend an ear to them, nor apply their minds to understand them; and they will not think those teachings should be studied and mastered. … In this way, bhikkhus, those discourses spoken by the Tathāgata that are deep, deep in meaning, supramundane, dealing with emptiness, will disappear. Therefore, bhikkhus, you should train yourselves thus: “When those discourses spoken by the Tathāgata that are deep, deep in meaning, supramundane, dealing with emptiness, are being recited, we will be eager to listen to them, will lend an ear to them, will apply our minds to understand them; and we will think those teachings should be studied and mastered.” Thus should you train yourselves. (SN 20.7)

In his lecture series on dependent coarising, Venerable Ñāṇānanda—the late Sinhalese scholar-monk—spoke of “a path of Dhamma overgrown for centuries,” and states in rather critical terms with regard to the Buddha’s prediction:

This is precisely what came to pass. … At present what is called Paṭicca Samuppāda is a formula to be by-hearted and recited up and down. It has no other significance. But it is with this formula that the Buddha … solved the entire Saṁsāric puzzle. … This confusion is not of recent origin. It has gone on for quite a long time. … But what has been happening all this time? A basket was simply handed down without examining what is in it. “Our teacher has said this. We must not go beyond it. Our commentators have explained like this. We must not think beyond their explanations.” A vast delusion has gone on for a long, long period getting hold of the brains – lay and monk alike.

I was fortunate to have discovered two series of talks Venerable Ñāṇānanda gave on these topics, through which—after reading and finding unconvincing many of the many books on this topic—opened my eyes to the Buddha’s intent in teaching dependent coarising. My original intention in writing Dependent Coarising was to make Ñāṇānanda’s understanding more accessible.

The Buddha’s teaching describes the world as the untutored worldling experiences it, and the mechanics of how it is constructed cognitive layer by layer. It describes how the world is as something substantial, how sensuality emerges from what is presumed to be substantial, and how sensuality and ignorance fuel the consolidation of a personal identity within that world, subject to rebirth. Although dependent coarising is presented as a linear chain of conditionality among selected factors, the Buddha also describes it as a tangle, or even as a tangle within a tangle, suggesting a network of mutually conditioning, interdependent factors in an ever-changing flux. As is most of the Buddha’s other teachings, these factors are “directly visible, immediate, inviting one to come and see, applicable, to be personally experienced by the wise.”

The purpose of close investigation of many factors and conditional relations in dependent coarising in our own experience is that this investigation allows us to experience the world otherwise, in a less problematic way that moves us toward awakening and liberation from saṁsāra. We do by unlearning the dispositions that hold the network together. The linear chain that runs through the network represents a strategy for dissolving the network most effectively.

Culture of Awakening

This project will result in the enlargement and republication of my book Culture of Awakening: the life and times of the Buddha-Sasana (2014), and will broaden the exploration of the Buddha’s teachings in their sociocultural dimension. Foreseeably the project will be completed by the end of 2027.

Bhikkhu Cintita, 2014, A Culture of Awakening: the life and times of the Buddha-sasana.

This old edition will continue to be available, but by the end of 2026 I would recommend requesting an updated draft.

Books

The closest precedent to this project might be Trevor Ling’s 1973 book The Buddha: The social-revolutionary potential of Buddhism. This project takes to heart its central thesis that Buddhism does not really make sense until we understand its social dimension. This thesis is likely to raise many readers’ eyebrows, since modern Buddhists typically think of Buddhism as an individual, solitary project, best undertaken by sitting alone at the root of a tree in deep contemplation (in spite of a nod to the principle of the bodhisattva).

The project has been encouraged by a revolution in the last three decades or so in the social, cognitive, and evolutionary sciences with regard to our understanding of just how profoundly social the human species is. For a noted psychologist, “Human thinking is an individual improvisation enmeshed in a sociocultural matrix.” We might say the same for Buddhist practice. It has been argued that no individual human possesses the superintelligence commonly attributed to our species. Superintelligence is rather primarily a quality of the sociocultural matrix, sparked by small individual innovations. Individually we are not much smarter innovators than our chimp cousins. A noted evolutionary researcher even claims that humans are eusocial (‘truly social’), a term normally applied to hive-dwelling bees, ants and termites.

But wait! Can’t our behavior also be profoundly individualistic, self-concerned and antisocial? This is a great paradox. The normal worldling’s pervasive self-oriented, even antisocial greed and ill will, violence, theft, deceit, and limitless ways of abusing one another seems to belie our alleged prosocial nature. Evolutionarily this can be explained in terms of vestiges our evolutionary past. It is as if we each have an inner chimp crammed in there with an inner true human, and that this inner chimp often takes control. At one moment we are swindling clients, an hour later we are rescuing someone from a burning car. In fact, this is a paradox the Buddha effectively takes on directly.

Along with many others, I maintain that Dhamma practice is entirely about developing ethics, specifically about the development and cultivation of individual virtue to the benefit of others, a capacity that has evolved through life in a sociocultural matrix. Moreover, the values of the collective life of society transcend the individual life and invest it with meaning. “Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha,” for instance, is viewed as a formula for the promulgation of the Buddha way, from the Buddha as the originator, to the Dhamma as the guide to how we live our lives, and finally to the Sangha as those that preserve the integrity of Dhamma and provide others with the opportunity to encounter it. The earlier edition of Culture of Awakening centered around this process of promulgation. The current project will extend this to the practice of Dhamma more generally.

My approach here is naturalistic based in a largely scientific understanding of human nature, what we are as humans, and how we got to be this way. In particular, I will adopt as a working assumptions that Buddhist practice fits within the realm of human cognition, in particular within a sociocultural matrix, and that this explains many aspects of Buddhist understanding. I don’t expect this approach to explain all aspects (can nibbāna be explained in naturalistic terms?), but I think this will go far in bringing a valuable perspective to the teachings of the Buddha.

The perspective that is emerging in modern social psychology, anthropology, cognitive science, and evolutionary science, is of a hyper-social, highly cooperative, cultural human race. Consider the use of human language, the role of other aspects of shared culture, the energy devoted to teaching and acquiring shared knowledge and acquiring skills in culturally accumulated know-how. We are adept in reading each others’ minds in order to stay on the same page in cooperative activities. Within a cultural context we share intersubjectively a common sense of reality (“common sense”), much of which we fabricate together, symbolically. Within a particular cooperative activity we immediately share intentionality and goals intersubjectively. In brief, in communing with others we regularly, substantially but effortlessly seem to think as one. Even when alone, our own minds work within the parameters of the prevailing culture. The absence of cultural and moral standards to guide us is pathological; it results in anomie, that is, social instability, which is experienced by individuals as alienation and meaninglessness.

Most of the evolutionary process that separated the true human from the ape occurred in small hunter-gatherer communities, in which our inner chimps were restrained by cultural/moral standards. Such communities exist marginally today. Moral standards are subject to deliberation about community needs, and as a result such communities are typical egalitarian, with status and leadership typically based on cultural wisdom or know-how, rather than on the coercive power of dominant chimps. Typical small communities bear a resemblance to welfare states in that they have mechanisms for redistribution of resources in case a family has bad luck in procuring food or in suffering a loss. Antisocial behavior is punished, but the policing of clandestine antisocial behavior requires little effort in small communities, since it is easily detected when everyone knows everyone else.

Biological evolution is interleaved with cultural evolution, whereby cultural adaptation (e.g., throwing rocks and spears at prey) would over a long period of time induce biological change (e.g., improvement of upper-body strength). As a result, we’ve been going through a process of domestication similar to that of the animals at the periphery of our cultures. Unfortunately, as societies have become larger, more complex and more impersonal, particularly with the development of agriculture and trade, moral control of our inner chimps has become more difficult. Buddhism arose at a time of rapid social change, with increased urbanization and trade, and with growth of large kingdoms at the expense of smaller kingdoms and republics. The Buddha introduced Dhamma as a guide to practice that adapts cultures to these changing social circumstances.

The Buddha sought effectively to dissipate the influence of our inner chimps, whose intentions are unwholesome (akusala), and to develop and cultivate our inner true-human intentions, which are wholesome (kusala). He emphasized the practices of generosity, adherence to ethical precepts and purification of mind by learning to read our own intentions as wholesome and unwholesome, which are identified by psychological characteristics. But the core of the Buddha’s ethical system was in the development and cultivation of virtue as a matter of character, an internalized skill effectively as a refinement in our own true humanity. A significant part of this acquired skill was wisdom, seeing and knowing things as they are, so that effectively we no longer apprehend the world with self-concerned chimp eyes. This system of ethics is comparable to the versions of virtue ethics, primarily associated with Aristotle, who also recognized the affect of eudaimonia experienced by the virtuous. Eudaimonia is commonly translated as ‘flourishing.’ It has to do with finding satisfaction or meaning in life, and seems to correspond to the Buddha’s term lokuttara (‘supramundane’).

Finally, the Buddha personally designed a new subculture, establishing strong moral standards and founded a distinguished community of dedicated disciples who committed themselves to living within its parameters 24-7. This he called the Sangha, and its standards the Vinaya (‘leading away’). Living within these parameters provided the optimal sociocultural conditions for individual progress on the Buddha’s path, insulated from competition or any worldly opportunity for self-advantage. It was to be egalitarian, inclusive, non-hierarchical, decentralized, and democratic. It was also to be celibate, alcohol- and entertainment-free. Careful attention was given to harmony within the Sangha. Policing of egregiously anti-Dhammic behavior was to result in punishments, but none of them physical, and the worst of them expulsion. Otherwise coercive authority is absent within the Sangha.

The Sangha is designed to take a leadership role in exemplifying virtue, and in teaching Dhamma to the wider community. It is totally dependent for its material needs on the generosity of the broader householder community. This is critical in insulating the Sangha from the competitive marketplace, and creates an economy of gifts at the center of the Buddhist community. The Sangha has no coercive power over householders, but rather their authority and status is based on their knowledge and know-how of Dhamma, which they promulgate freely through example and through teaching.