Venerable Assaji and the Buddhist Concept of “Dependent Origination”
Who Was Venerable Assaji?
Before the Buddha attained enlightenment, Venerable Assaji had practiced asceticism together with Prince Siddhārtha.
In traditional Buddhist accounts, after the Buddha left home, King Śuddhodana arranged for five men to accompany and attend him. The five later practiced together, including:
· Ājñātakauṇḍinya
· Aśvajit, also known as Venerable Assaji
· Bhadrika
· Daśabala-Kāśyapa
· Mahānāman
Different scriptures may render these names differently.
Later, Prince Siddhārtha realized that merely tormenting the body could not bring ultimate liberation, so he abandoned extreme asceticism and accepted food. At first, his five companions mistakenly thought he had lost his resolve for practice, so they left him and went to the Deer Park.
After the Buddha attained enlightenment, he came to the Deer Park and taught them the Dharma, beginning the famous first turning of the wheel of the Dharma in Buddhist history. Venerable Assaji thus became one of the Buddha’s earliest disciples.
Venerable Assaji’s Most Famous Story: Meeting Śāriputra
At that time, Śāriputra had not yet become a disciple of the Buddha. He was a very intelligent practitioner, searching for a teaching that could truly explain life and the world and bring ultimate liberation.
One day in Rājagṛha, Śāriputra met Venerable Assaji, who was going on almsround.
What impressed Śāriputra first was not some miraculous power, but Venerable Assaji’s dignified demeanor, calm conduct, and composed spiritual state.
Śāriputra approached him and asked:
· Who is your teacher?
· What teaching does your teacher proclaim?
· What have you learned from your teacher?
Venerable Assaji did not boast of his learning or give a long discourse. Instead, he humbly explained that he had only recently begun studying the Buddha’s Dharma and could not fully explain his teacher’s doctrine, but could summarize its essential meaning.
Then he spoke the verse on dependent origination that is extremely famous in Buddhist history:
All phenomena arise from causes and conditions;
All phenomena cease from causes and conditions.
The Great Śramaṇa, my Buddha,
Constantly teaches thus.
The core of this verse is that all conditioned phenomena arise depending on causes and conditions, and they also change and dissolve as causes and conditions change.
What this verse expresses is not simply karmic retribution, but one of the core ideas of Buddhism: dependent origination.
It can be understood on three levels:
First, nothing exists in isolation.
A person’s character, wealth, suffering, and happiness are all related to many conditions. No single factor alone can explain the whole result.
Second, when causes and conditions change, results also change.
Since things exist depending on conditions, they are not permanently fixed and unchanging. Suffering may lessen when conditions change, and a seemingly solid state may gradually disappear.
Third, one should not cling to temporarily existing things as permanent, independent entities.
If we understand this verse more deeply, it can be connected with several important Buddhist concepts:
Impermanence: Because causes and conditions constantly change, things constantly change.
Non-self: A person is not an independent, eternal, unchanging entity, but an aggregation of various physical and mental conditions.
Causality: There is a relation of causes and conditions between actions and results, but results are usually not determined by a single cause.
Emptiness: Things lack a fixed nature that exists independently of causes and conditions; this is an important topic further developed in Mahāyāna Buddhism.
Liberation: Understanding the causes and conditions of suffering and, through practice, changing the conditions that lead to suffering.
It should be noted that dependent origination does not mean everything is predestined, nor does it mean one can change everything at will. It emphasizes the interconnectedness of conditions and the possibility of changing certain conditions through right understanding and practice.
After hearing this verse, Śāriputra became free from dust and defilement and attained the pure eye of the Dharma. Later, he and Maudgalyāyana together took refuge in the Buddha. Because Venerable Assaji was the “Dharma-gate teacher” through whom he first attained the Dharma, Venerable Śāriputra—even after later attaining arhatship and becoming the foremost great disciple in wisdom—would often join his palms and bow toward the direction where Venerable Assaji was, and even slept with his head facing that direction, as a sign of respect.
Venerable Assaji is so important in Buddhist history that his significance can be understood from three angles:
1. He indirectly brought about the conversion of the Buddha’s two great disciples.
Śāriputra was renowned for wisdom, and Maudgalyāyana for supernatural powers. The two later became among the Buddha’s most important disciples, and the important starting point of their connection with Buddhism was precisely Venerable Assaji’s teaching.
2. He shows that spiritual practice itself can also become a form of teaching.
What Śāriputra first noticed was Venerable Assaji’s demeanor, and only then did he take the initiative to ask about his teaching. This reflects the emphasis in Buddhist tradition on teaching by example: practice is expressed not only in words but also in behavior, conduct, and inner state.
3. He conveyed profound Dharma in extremely concise language.
Venerable Assaji did not rely on complex philosophical arguments to convince Śāriputra; instead, he used a brief verse to point to the core of dependent origination. This also shows that the profundity of a teaching is not proportional to the length of its expression.
Everything that has been experienced is just the flow of the five aggregates. In the end, what remains in the mind is only impermanence itself as the most profound thing; everything else is forgotten.
The five aggregates—form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness—all arise and cease in an instant. While experiencing them, one thinks one “possesses” something; looking back, all that remains are some marks of the perception aggregate, habitual tendencies of the mental formations aggregate, and shadows of the consciousness aggregate. Even these shadows fade. If anything remains in the end, it is often not some event, some person, or some scene, but the fact itself that “everything is changing.”
Taking one step further: if one feels that “only impermanence is most profound,” this is still subtle clinging—turning impermanence into a graspable conclusion, a state of mind, or even an identity. Impermanence is not an answer to be remembered, but something to observe in the present: the body, feelings, thoughts, and cognitions of this moment. In observing, let go even of this “profoundness.”
Experience is like a river: it cannot be held, yet it carves out a riverbed. That which is aware of all this flow is not within the five aggregates, nor is it carried away by them.
Two pieces of wood rubbed together produce fire; the fire then burns the wood, and when the wood is gone, the fire goes out. When causes and conditions come together, fire arises; when causes and conditions disperse, the fire goes out.
Five hundred merchants traveled together on business, bringing along a white dog to keep watch at night. The dog stole and ate the merchants’ meat, so the merchants broke its four legs and abandoned it in the wilderness. Venerable Śāriputra saw it from afar with his divine eye, took food and went to offer it, and expounded the Dharma for the dog. After hearing the Dharma, the dog died and was reborn in a brahmin family in Śrāvastī. Later he went forth under Śāriputra, was named the novice Junti, and ultimately attained the fruit of arhatship.
The Buddha told Ānanda: “The white dog at that time is now the novice Junti. Because in a past life he slandered and reviled the noble and holy, he received this dog body; because he had once gone forth and planted good causes, he now meets me and is liberated.” A single verbal fault in a past life brought the retribution of five hundred lifetimes as a dog; yet it was precisely the good causes planted by having gone forth in a past life that led to the karmic connection in this life to meet Śāriputra and the Dharma. The karmic connections between people are deeply rooted in the karma of life after life. What appears to be a chance meeting is in fact the convergence of good and evil causes and conditions from distant kalpas.
In the affinities between people, where there is gathering, there must be scattering; where there is meeting, there must be parting. All dharmas are also like this: they arise when causes and conditions gather, and cease when causes and conditions disperse; they come from nowhere and go nowhere.
The “White Dog Story” comes from Fascicle 13, “The Chapter on the Novice Junti,” in the Xianyu Jing (Sūtra of the Wise and Foolish), translated by Hui Jue and others of the Northern Wei.
A wise person does not cling to things formed by the coming together of causes and conditions.
Whatever has been born and whatever will be born must in the end abandon the physical body and depart. The wise know that what is born is bound to decay and perish, and therefore they practice diligently.
The story of “the blind men and the elephant” originated in ancient India. One of its earliest records appears in the Pali Canon, in the Udāna, Chapter 6, Sutta 4; its transmission can be traced back to the first century BCE and to earlier periods of oral tradition. The Buddha used the story of several blind men each touching a part of the elephant and arguing from their own views to show that if people have not seen the whole picture yet take their own understanding to be the whole truth, they easily fall into attachment and contention.
Modern people often understand “the blind men and the elephant” as “taking a part for the whole.” The original Pali sutta also emphasizes the harm of clinging to one-sided views. The Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra further uses the elephant as a metaphor for Buddha-nature, bringing out the profound meaning of “neither identical nor separate”: a part cannot be equated with the whole, but apart from these concrete parts there is no other whole to be found.
The Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra uses the elephant as a metaphor for Buddha-nature and says, “It is neither identical with the six dharmas nor separate from the six dharmas.” The six dharmas here refer to the five aggregates—form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness—and the person conventionally designated in dependence on the five aggregates. “Neither identical” means that one cannot directly take the body, feelings, thoughts, volitional activities, or consciousness—any one of them—as Buddha-nature, just as one cannot point to the elephant’s ear and say that this is the whole elephant. “Neither separate” means that one also cannot leave the five aggregates and body-mind of sentient beings to seek elsewhere for a Buddha-nature wholly unrelated to them, just as apart from the elephant’s parts there is no other elephant to find. Buddha-nature can neither be reduced to any one item among the five aggregates, nor explained by simply adding the five aggregates together; yet the realization of Buddha-nature cannot be separated from one’s present body-mind and actual practice. What this metaphor reminds us is that we should neither cling to one side of body-mind as ultimate nor abandon the actual body-mind and seek outwardly—this is the profound meaning of “neither identical nor separate.”