Our topic for class on Thursday is the idea of “Dependent Emergence” – it’s often translated as “Dependent Arising” or “Conditioned Arising”. It’s probably the single most distinctive idea in Buddhism; not a particularly easy idea to grasp, partly because it goes so very much against the stream of how we’ve been taught to understand the world, but one that, once grasped, reveals the nature of our daily experience with a persuasive clarity, and hleps us respond to that experience in ways that make things better.

The essay I’ll be basing my presentation on is one I wrote a couple of years ago and have revised only slightly since. I hope you have a chance to read that before the class.