Dependent Origination

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In the texts that recount the night of the awakening, the great achievement is not a vision of a god or a flight into another world. It is an act of looking. Through the three watches of the night the seeker fathoms the past, then the passing of beings according to their deeds, and at last, in the final watch, his intellect settles on a single structure: the way one thing leans on another, the way nothing in the whole turning machine of existence stands up by itself. Charles Rockwell Lanman’s collaborator Henry Clarke Warren, rendering the old commentarial account, marks the moment plainly — “in the last watch of the night, his intellect fathomed Dependent Origination.” The earth is said to have quaked twelve times. The number is not idle. There are twelve links in the chain that was seen.

The Pali tradition calls this seeing paticcasamuppada; the Sanskrit, pratityasamutpada. The word is a compound of conditionality and arising — a coming-to-be that is always a coming-to-be in dependence on. It is the most austere of the early teachings and, by the tradition’s own account, the deepest. When the disciple Ananda once remarked that dependent origination seemed clear enough to him, the Buddha is remembered to have corrected him: it appears clear, and is not. The doctrine looks like a tidy list. It is closer to the floor beneath the floor.

The tradition guards this depth in its own way. In the discourses that recount the weeks after the awakening, the newly awakened one is shown hesitating to teach at all, judging the thing he has seen too subtle, too “against the stream,” for beings absorbed in their attachments to follow. The reluctance is not modesty. It is a claim about the object — that conditionality runs counter to the grain of ordinary perception, which everywhere reads solid selves and solid things where the doctrine finds only leaning conditions. To teach dependent origination is to ask a listener to unlearn the most basic furniture of experience. That the texts dwell on the hesitation at all is a measure of how the tradition rates the difficulty of what was seen.

Genealogy: a formula and a chain

Two things travel under the one name, and keeping them apart clarifies almost everything that follows.

The first is a bare formula, abstract as an equation, stated again and again across the discourses of the Nidana Samyutta — the connected collection on causation that forms book twelve of the Samyutta Nikaya. In Pali it runs: imasmim sati idam hoti; imass’ uppada idam uppajjati; imasmim asati idam na hoti; imassa nirodha idam nirujjhati. When this exists, that comes to be; with the arising of this, that arises; when this does not exist, that does not come to be; with the cessation of this, that ceases. Four clauses, two of them building up and two tearing down. There is no first cause in it and no agent behind it — only the lawful leaning of conditions on conditions. It is a grammar of contingency, and it applies, in principle, to anything that arises at all.

The second is the specific application of that grammar to the problem the tradition cares about most: the perpetuation of suffering across lives. Here the abstract formula is filled in with twelve named links, the nidanas, each conditioning the next:

1. avijja — ignorance, the not-knowing of how things actually stand;
2. sankhara — the volitional formations, the karmic shaping-forces;
3. vinnana — consciousness;
4. namarupa — name-and-form, the psychophysical organism;
5. salayatana — the six sense bases (the five senses and the mind);
6. phassa — contact, the meeting of sense, object, and consciousness;
7. vedana — feeling, the bare tone of pleasant, painful, or neutral;
8. tanha — craving, the thirst that reaches toward the pleasant and away from the painful;
9. upadana — clinging, craving hardened into grasping;
10. bhava — becoming, the momentum toward a renewed existence;
11. jati — birth;
12. jaramarana — aging and death, and with them “sorrow, lamentation, misery, grief, and despair.”

Run forward, the series is a genealogy of pain: on ignorance depend the formations, on the formations consciousness, and so down the line until “this entire aggregation of misery” stands assembled. Run in reverse — the nirodha or cessation order — it becomes a map of release: with the fading of ignorance the formations cease, and with them, link falling after link, the whole mass comes apart. Warren’s hosted translation preserves both directions in the cadence of the suttas, the Blessed One thinking the chain “both forward and back,” and notes that the early books present the formula as the particular discovery of the Buddha — though Warren, reading as a philologist rather than a devotee, suspects the twelve-link shape was stitched together from shorter sequences already in circulation, with the opening pair on ignorance the most likely later addition.

That scholarly suspicion is worth marking as such. The academic study of the Pali canon largely agrees that the twelve-link list is a composite, assembled and standardized over time; variant chains of ten, nine, five links survive in the discourses. What the tradition holds, from inside its own frame, is otherwise: that the full chain is the content of a single night’s seeing, and that to grasp it is to grasp the Dhamma entire. “Whoever sees dependent origination sees the Dhamma; whoever sees the Dhamma sees dependent origination” — the equation is old, and the collections of early discourses return to it as a touchstone.

A Bhutanese Wheel of Life (bhavacakra); the outer ring depicts the twelve links of dependent origination, from the blind man (ignorance) to the corpse-bearer (aging and death). — Photograph by Nagarjun Kandukuru, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Teaching: the middle way that is not a compromise

The genius of the formula is what it refuses. Early Indian thought had, by the time of the discourses, sorted the big questions about existence into two camps, and the texts name them. There is sassatavada, eternalism — the conviction that something abides: a permanent self, a deathless soul, a world-ground that persists unchanged through every change. And there is ucchedavada, annihilationism — the conviction that nothing persists at all, that death is simple extinction, that there is no continuity worth the name and hence no moral weight to a deed. Eternalism makes the self too solid; annihilationism makes it too hollow. One overstates being; the other overstates non-being.

Dependent origination cuts between them, and the cutting is precise. In the Kaccanagotta Sutta the Buddha tells the monk Kaccana that the world generally leans on a duality of “it exists” and “it does not exist,” but that one who sees the arising of the world with right discernment loses the notion of sheer non-existence, and one who sees its cessation loses the notion of sheer existence. There is no thing solid enough to be eternal, because everything stands on conditions; there is no nothing final enough to be annihilation, because when the conditions are present the effect reliably arises. This is the original sense of the “middle way” — not a moderate path between asceticism and indulgence, which is the more familiar usage, but a metaphysical middle between two errors about what is. Warren’s nineteenth-century preface already reaches for the Greek to fix it, calling dependent origination the doctrine that avoids both to on, sheer being, and the denial of the reality of existence.

One traditional image holds the whole structure in a single picture. On the outermost rim of the bhavacakra, the Wheel of Becoming painted at the entrances of Tibetan temples, the twelve links appear as twelve small scenes: a blind man for ignorance, a potter at his wheel for the formations, a monkey swinging for restless consciousness, a boat with passengers for name-and-form, a house with six windows for the sense bases, an embracing couple for contact, a man with an arrow in his eye for feeling, a drinker for craving, a figure plucking fruit for clinging, a pregnant woman for becoming, a birth for birth, and a corpse borne to the charnel ground for aging and death. The whole rim is clamped in the jaws of Mara — impermanence, death — who holds the entire wheel. It is a teaching device, mnemonic and exact, and it makes visible what the prose can only state: that the sequence is a closed circuit, each link handing on to the next, the corpse feeding back into the blindness with which the round begins.

From this middle the most disorienting of the early teachings follows directly. If a person is nothing but these twelve links turning — ignorance conditioning formations, contact conditioning feeling, craving conditioning clinging — then there is no extra thing, no owner standing behind the process, no unconditioned self presiding over it. The chain runs without a runner. This is anatta, not-self, and dependent origination is its ground rather than its rival: the self dissolves not because the texts declare it unreal by fiat but because, examined link by link, it is never found apart from the conditions, and the conditions never add up to an owner. The same machinery explains continuity without a soul. What passes from life to life in the round of rebirth is not a transmigrating essence but the momentum of the chain itself — bhava, becoming, propelled by craving and clinging, lighting the next birth the way one flame lights another without anything crossing the gap. And the reverse order names the exit. Cut craving, and clinging starves; starve clinging, and becoming loses its fuel; and the whole aggregation of misery, deprived of its conditions, ceases. That cessation is the unbinding the path is for.

It is worth holding the two registers apart here. As a piece of intellectual history, this is a distinctive Indian solution to the problem of personal identity and moral continuity, recognizable alongside the atman doctrines it was framed against. As a claim made from inside the tradition, it is something more demanding: a description of how the reader is, at this moment, being assembled out of conditions, and a set of instructions for taking the assembly apart.

Nāgārjuna and Āryadeva as two great Indian Buddhist scholastics, Eastern Tibet, c. 19th century, Rubin Museum of Art. — via Wikimedia Commons / Google Art Project (public domain)

Reception: the Abhidhamma list and the Madhyamaka turn

The afterlife of the formula divides, broadly, along the great fault line of Buddhist thought, and dependent origination sits at the hinge of it.

In the Abhidhamma — the analytical literature that the southern, Theravada tradition systematized over the centuries after the Buddha — the chain became an object of meticulous dissection. The twelve links were sorted across three lifetimes (ignorance and formations belonging to the past, the next eight to the present, birth and aging-death to the future), distributed into causes and effects, and cross-tabulated with the moment-by-moment psychology of the dhammas, the irreducible mental and physical events out of which experience is built. The fifth-century master Buddhaghosa, in the Visuddhimagga, labored to justify why the formula seems to bring a person into existence twice over — once as consciousness-and-name-and-form, once again as birth — defending the doubling as a deliberate teaching device. Warren’s translation carries Buddhaghosa’s argument and his own dissenting footnote, a small documentary record of a scholar inside the tradition and a scholar outside it disagreeing across fourteen centuries about a list.

The other reception runs through the Mahayana, and it is the more radical. In the second century the philosopher Nagarjuna — by scholarly reckoning active around 150 to 250 of the common era, and credited as the founder of the Madhyamaka or “middle way” school — took the early formula and pressed it until it yielded a new word. His Mulamadhyamakakarika, the “root verses on the middle way,” argues by relentless reductio that nothing whatever possesses svabhava, own-being, an intrinsic nature it would have on its own. And the reason is dependent origination: whatever arises in dependence on conditions is, just by that fact, empty of any standalone essence. In the twenty-fourth chapter the identification is made flat and famous. The standard reading of verse 18 states that conditioned origination is emptiness — that emptiness is a dependent designation, and that this very thing is the middle way. Sunyata, emptiness, is not a void behind appearances. It is the name for the fact that nothing stands on its own, which is to say it is dependent origination heard at a higher pitch. Nagarjuna closes the same chapter by warning that for one who holds emptiness coherently, all things become possible, and for one who rejects it, nothing does — because a world of fixed essences could never move, condition, or change, while an empty world can do all three.

The wager carried a price the Abhidhamma analysts were not willing to pay. Their project had been to reach, by ever finer analysis, the irreducible atoms of experience — the dhammas, real momentary events with their own natures, out of which the apparent world was built. Nagarjuna turned the tradition’s own master principle against that conclusion. If everything arises dependently, then the dhammas arise dependently too, and a thing that depends on something else for its arising cannot be the self-existent atom the analysis was hunting for. There is no floor of irreducible substances; the analysis goes all the way down and finds emptiness at the bottom, which is to say it finds no bottom. This was felt, by those it targeted, as something close to demolition. To later Madhyamaka readers it was the opposite — the rescue of the early teaching from a subtle eternalism that had crept back in under the name of analysis.

This is not, in Nagarjuna’s hands, a retreat into mysticism. It is the eternalism-and-annihilationism middle pushed to its limit: things are empty, so they are not eternal essences; but emptiness itself is empty, a mere dependent designation, so it is not a new absolute either, and the door to annihilationism stays shut. The Stanford account of Nagarjuna underlines the move — emptiness equated with dependent origination, and both equated with the middle path the early discourses had already drawn between existence and non-existence. The whole later architecture of Mahayana metaphysics, and much of the emptiness teaching that fans out from it through East Asian and Tibetan thought, rests on this single re-reading of an old list.

The list has had a long modern life as well. Twentieth-century interpreters, reaching for an idiom outside the canon, recognized in dependent origination something like a theory of systems — a vision of reality as a web of mutually conditioning relations rather than a heap of independent things, and the doctrine has been pressed into the service of ecological thought, process philosophy, and the language of interbeing. The fit is real and the borrowing is productive, though it tends to soften the original’s sharper edge. In the discourses the chain is not, first of all, a celebration of how beautifully everything connects. It is a diagnosis of why beings suffer, and a set of cuts for making the suffering stop. The connectedness is the disease and the operating theater at once. What the night of the awakening is said to have disclosed was not a world to be admired but a mechanism to be dismantled, twelve links deep, beginning with the one called ignorance and ending with the one called death.

→ In the library: Warren, Buddhism in Translations · Rhys Davids, Buddhist Suttas (SBE 11) · Müller, The Dhammapada (SBE 10)

→ Related: Buddhism · Anatta · Samsara · Nirvana · Madhyamaka Sunyata · Nagarjuna · Karma · Buddha Nature · Bardo Thodol · Lotus Sutra · Atman