Is there anything outside samsara?
If everything has a cause, does samsara have it too?
How does one first come into samsara?
Three questions here.
We'll answer them individually.
Is there anything outside samsara?
Samsara is a name for the conditioned universe.
It encompasses everything that arises and therefore everything that ceases.
It encompasses everything that is impermanent, unsatisfying, uncontrollable,
In its briefest description, it is the five aggregates or even briefer, I suppose, is just body and mind, physical and mental aspects of experience.
And so the word samsara, if I'm not mistaken, means wandering on, wandering, sarati,
as I understand I can't remember the derivation but it means wandering so it's a the circle going around in circle born getting old sick and dying without any the wandering aspect this means without any goal or any resolution without getting anywhere without without actually accomplishing anything
without any destination, most beings without any real goal, without any purpose and so on.
But that which it is comprised of are the five aggregates or simply put body and mind, physical and mental aspects of experience.
So is there anything outside of that?
Yes.
There are two things, I think you could say there are two things that are outside of that.
One, things that don't exist.
Concepts.
Concepts are not a part of samsara.
I don't think you could call them a part of samsara because they're not real.
They don't exist.
A concept, the chair doesn't exist.
Monk is not something that exists.
It's the object or it's the
A substance of a thought, of a thought, of a recognition that arises.
It's just a word.
The actual chair, the actual monk doesn't exist in reality.
So I say that would be one thing you could argue isn't a part of samsara.
But it may be, anyway, whatever.
More importantly, the one thing that they say that is outside of samsara because it's unconditioned, because it's satisfying, controllable, no, sorry, because it's permanent and satisfying.
It's still uncontrollable, but it's permanent and satisfying.
So I made a mistake there in the beginning.
I said samsara encompasses everything that is uncontrollable.
It doesn't.
There's one extra thing that is uncontrollable outside of samsara.
All dhammas including nibbana or nirvana are non-self, are uncontrollable.
So the one thing that is really and truly outside of samsara is nibbana or nirvana.
Because it's unconditioned, it doesn't arise, it doesn't cease, it isn't born, it doesn't die.
It's permanent and satisfying.
And so that's the one thing outside of samsara.
If everything has a cause,
So, okay, not everything has a cause because nibbana doesn't have a cause.
And, yeah, because nibbana doesn't have a cause.
Does samsara have a cause?
Okay, so here's where we have to say that actually samsara doesn't exist.
It's a concept.
It's the name that we have for the process.
But the process is actually made up of building blocks and those building blocks actually exist.
Those are the things that have causes.
So I think you could say concepts...
technically speaking, don't have a cause because by the word cause you mean something that causes it to arise and concepts do not arise.
A concept is something that doesn't exist.
It's an illusion.
Or you could say it exists but not in ultimate reality.
So it has a cause in a conventional sense, but in reality is uncaused, I would think.
These are all technical words and I'm probably saying, probably the technical answer is a bit different, but there is a distinction to be made.
So when you conflate these, and you don't make this distinction, you start to say, well, everything has a cause.
The samsara have as well, and you're talking about two different things.
In Buddhism, those things that have a cause are the five aggregates, the physical and mental aspects of experience.
They are causally formed.
And so that's what we focus on.
Now samsara is just a name for all of that.
So the third question, how does one first come into samsara?
The implication is that it has a cause, there was something before it, which is one of those questions not answered in Buddhism.
And you can disregard it simply because it's meaningless, purposeless, it's in the past.
But it seems also to be potentially unanswerable or improper as a question, because it relies on the idea that time is linear, the idea that the past actually somehow exists, or the idea that the past is the cause of everything and so on.
In Buddhism we don't start with the past, we start with the present.
And the present is creating the past and bringing about the future.
But we take the present as our base, kind of like ripples in a pool of water.
Everything, the past and the future, expand out from the present moment.
which actually may be supported somehow by things like quantum physics, which seems to suggest that the future can actually affect the past or seems to, not suggest, but has the potential to show, one of the answers is to show that the future can actually affect the past, which is really strange.
but would explain the ability to predict the future, see the future and that kind of thing.
Anyway, one of the questions that the Buddha declined to answer is the idea of something, how one came into, what was before samsara or so on.