The central teaching of the Buddha, drawn from the context of the society he lived in, and explained in terms of modern life.

Dependent arising is the backbone of the Buddha's doctrine -- all the other lessons he taught relate to it, or refer to it in some way -- yet it is the least understood. There is a confusion of theories as to its meaning: is it about three lives, or one? about rebirth or moment-to-moment creation of the ego? Yet when dependent arising is seen in the light of the central myth of the Buddha's day (the creation of First Man and how that relates to our creation of self) the whole structure becomes much clearer, and many of the points of confusion are straightened out. People have long asked, for example, how the 'actions' of the second step precede consciousness in the third, or why we seem to be told that we would want to completely stop consciousness, and contact with the world, and feeling. All these questions are easily answered when we see where the structure came from, and what the lesson is really about.


Dependent Arising In Context, Linda S. Blanchard, Narada Publications, Paperback, 118 pages, $9.99

Linda Blanchard quit her job in 2009 to study and write about Buddhism full time. Since that time she has had three papers on dependent arising published in the Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies (JOCBS), has taken Professor Gombrich's Pali Intensive Course when it was held in Berkeley, and has become the technical flunky for the OCBS's Pali Reading Group, which meets weekly. She has one book in print, and is working on another two, both of which will look at Buddhism from the somewhat different perspective that results from seeing the structure of dependent arising as built on the Prajapati myth . She lives in West Texas