There’s a difference between the idea of dependent origination and the insight into or faith in dependent origination that comes from practice. That is, in the above, I think rationalists and most people understand the idea, but I’d also claim that most don’t have insight into it or trust its truth in the way you can only come to trust it by coming to see the truth of the world that we’re trying to point at with the theory.
I don’t want people to read the above and think “oh, well, guess I don’t need to care about dependent origination”, because that would be a mistake, but it’d also be a mistake to think that the average person doesn’t have a reasonable understanding of the core idea, it’s just that they have an abstract rather than embodied understanding of it.
Coming back to add another thought:
There’s a difference between the idea of dependent origination and the insight into or faith in dependent origination that comes from practice. That is, in the above, I think rationalists and most people understand the idea, but I’d also claim that most don’t have insight into it or trust its truth in the way you can only come to trust it by coming to see the truth of the world that we’re trying to point at with the theory.
I don’t want people to read the above and think “oh, well, guess I don’t need to care about dependent origination”, because that would be a mistake, but it’d also be a mistake to think that the average person doesn’t have a reasonable understanding of the core idea, it’s just that they have an abstract rather than embodied understanding of it.