The One Teaching Every Buddhist School Shares

Of all the doctrines that distinguish one Buddhist tradition from another, dependent origination is the one virtually all of them hold in common, described by scholars of Buddhism as the closest thing the tradition has to a common denominator across Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana schools that otherwise diverge sharply in practice and metaphysics. Its influence runs through teachings that look, on the surface, unrelated to the twelve-link chain itself. The doctrine of no permanent self, anatta, follows directly from it: if a person is only a series of dependently arising and passing conditions, there is no fixed, independent self to be found anywhere in that series. Centuries later, the philosopher Nagarjuna took dependent origination as the foundation for his teaching on emptiness, arguing that because everything arises dependently, nothing possesses a fixed, independent essence of its own, a reading that became central to Mahayana philosophy across East Asia and Tibet. Within the earliest layer of the tradition the doctrine already carried a strongly practical purpose: the Buddha is recorded as presenting it not as abstract metaphysics but as the account of suffering's origin whose reversal, through the extinguishing of ignorance and craving at the chain's root, constitutes the escape from suffering that the whole of Buddhist practice exists to bring about.