The Pali text tells us that as he listened to the Buddha’s sermon, Kondanna, one of the five bhikkhus, began to experience his teaching “directly.” It “rose up” in him, as if from the depths of his own being. It was as though he recognized it- had always known it. This is the way the scriptures always describe a new disciple’s conversion to the Dhamma. This was no mere notional assent to a creed. The Buddha was really holding an initiation ceremony in the Deer Park. Like a midwife, he was assisting at the birth of an enlightened human being, or, to use his own metaphor, he was drawing the sword from the scabbard and the snake from its slough. When the gods, who had gathered in the Deer Park to listen to this First Sermon, saw what was happening to Kondanna, they cried out joyfully: “The Lord has set the Wheel of the Dhamma in motion in the Deer Park of Varanasi!” The cry was taken up by the gods in one heaven after another, until it reached the abode of Brahma himself. The earth shook and was filled with a light more radiant than any of the gods. “Kondanna knows! Kondanna knows!” the Buddha exclaimed in delight. Kondanna had become what later Buddhist tradition would call a “stream-enterer” (sotapanna). He had not yet been fully enlightened, but his doubts had disappeared, he was no longer interested in any other dhamma, and he was ready to immerse himself in the Buddha’s method, confident that it would carry him forward to Nibbana. He asked to be admitted to the Buddha’s Sangha. “Come, bhikkhu,” the Buddha replied. “The Dhamma has been preached to good effect. Live the holy life that will end your suffering once and for all.”

But the Pali texts include another version of this first teaching session in the Deer Park. This describes a much longer and quite different process. The Buddha instructed the bhikkhus in pairs, while the other three went off to Varanasi to beg enough food for all six of them. It has been suggested that in these more intimate tutorials, the Buddha was initiating the bhikkhus in his special yoga, introducing them to the practice of “mindfulness” and the “immeasurables.” Certainly meditation was indispensable to enlightenment. The Dhamma could not become a reality or understood “directly” unless the aspirants were also sinking deeply into themselves and learning to put their minds and bodies under the Buddha’s yogic microscope. Kondanna could not have become a “stream-enterer” and gained his special “direct knowledge” of the Dhamma simply by listening to a sermon and accepting its truths on hearsay. The truths of Suffering and Craving could not be properly understood until the bhikkhus had become aware of them within the minutiae of their own experience; the Eightfold Path, which he preached, included the discipline of meditation. The instruction of these five bhikkhus almost certainly took longer than a single morning; even if they were already accomplished yogins and versed in the ethic of ahimsa, the Dhamma needed time to take effect. At all events, the Pali texts tell us, not long after the Dhamma “rose up” in Kondanna, Vappa, Bhaddiya, Mahanama and Assaji became “stream-enterers” too.

The reasoned formulation of the Dhamma was complementary to the practice of meditation, which enabled aspirants to “realize” it. Through yoga, the bhikkhus could identify with the truths that the doctrine tried to express. One of the most frequent subjects of Buddhist meditation was what was called the Chain of Dependent Causation (Paticcasamuppada), which the Buddha probably developed at a later stage as a supplement to the Truth of Suffering, even though the Pali texts say that he was contemplating this Chain immediately before and after his enlightenment. The Chain traces the life cycle of a sentient being through twelve conditioned and conditioning links, illustrating the transitory nature of our lives and showing how each person is perpetually becoming something else.

On [1] ignorance depends [2] kamma; on kamma depends [3] consciousness; on consciousness depends [4] name and form; on name and form depends [5] the sense organs; on the sense organs depends [6] contact; on contact depends [7] sensation; on sensation depends [8] desire; on desire depends [9] attachment; on attachment depends [10] existence; on existence depends [11] birth; on birth depends [12] dukkha; old age and death, sorrow, lamentation, misery, grief and despair.

This Chain became central to Buddhist teaching, but it is not easy to understand. Those who find it somewhat daunting can draw comfort from the fact that the Buddha once rebuked a bhikkhu who claimed to find it easy. It should be regarded as a metaphor, which seeks to explain how a person can be reborn when, as the Buddha was beginning to conclude, there was no Self to persist from one life to another. What was it that was born again? Is there a law which links rebirth with dukkha?

The terms used in the Chain are rather obscure. “Name and form,” for example, was simply a Pali idiom for a “person”; “consciousness” (vinnana) is not the totality of a person’s thoughts and feelings, but a sort of ethereal substance, the last idea or impulse of a dying human being, which has been conditioned by all the kamma of his or her life. This “consciousness” becomes the germ of a new “name and form” in the womb of its mother. The personality of this embryo is conditioned by the quality of the dying “consciousness” of its predecessor. Once the fetus is linked with this “consciousness,” a new life cycle can begin. The embryo develops sense organs and, after its birth, these make “contact” with the external world. This sensual contact gives rise to “sensations” or feelings, which lead to “desire,” the most powerful cause of dukkha. Desire leads to “attachments” which prevent our liberation and enlightenment, and which doom us to a new “existence,” a new birth and further sorrow, sickness, grief and death.

The Chain begins with ignorance, which thus becomes the ultimate if not the most powerful cause of suffering. Most of the monks in the Ganges region believed that desire was the first cause of dukkha, while the Upanisads and Samkhya thought that ignorance of the nature of reality was the main bar to liberation. The Buddha was able to combine these two causes. He believed that each person is alive because he or she was preceded in a former existence by beings who did not know the Four Truths and could not, therefore, extricate themselves from Craving and Suffering. A person who was not correctly informed could make serious practical mistakes. A yogin might imagine, for example, that one of the higher states of trance was Nibbana and would not make the extra effort to achieve complete release. In most versions of the Chain given in the Pali texts, the second link is not kamma but the more difficult term sankhara (formation). But the two words both derive from the same verbal root: kr (to do). Sankhara has been somewhat clumsily translated: “states or things being formed or prepared.” Thus our deeds (kamma) are preparing the “consciousness” for a future existence; they are forming and conditioning it. Since the Buddha saw our intentions as mental kamma, the Chain points out that those emotions which motivate our external actions will have future consequences; a lifetime of greedy, deluded choices will affect the quality of our last, dying thought (vinnana) and this will affect the kind of life we have next time. Was this final, dying “consciousness” that passes into a new “name and form” an eternal, constant entity? Would the same person live again and again? Yes and no. The Buddha did not believe that “consciousness” was the kind of permanent, eternal Self sought by the yogins, but saw it as a last flickering energy, like a flame that leaps from one wick to another. A flame is never constant; a fire which is lit at nightfall both is and is not the fire that is still burning at daybreak.