The entry describes the twelve-link chain and the dispute over how to read it. Here is the chain itself, since a reader will want the list. Each link is said to condition the next, "with this as condition, that arises", and the order runs:
1. Ignorance (avijja), not knowing things as they are, above all the four noble truths. 2. Formations (sankhara), the volitional activities that ignorance sets in motion. 3. Consciousness (vinnana), the discriminating awareness conditioned by them. 4. Name-and-form (nama-rupa), the mental and physical constituents of a being. 5. The six sense bases (salayatana), eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind. 6. Contact (phassa), the meeting of a sense, its object and consciousness. 7. Feeling (vedana), the pleasant, unpleasant or neutral tone of contact. 8. Craving (tanha), the thirst that feeling provokes. 9. Clinging (upadana), craving hardened into grasping and attachment. 10. Becoming (bhava), the process of coming-to-be that clinging drives. 11. Birth (jati), birth into a new existence. 12. Ageing-and-death (jara-marana), and with it grief, lamentation, pain and despair.
The chain is normally read forwards as the arising of suffering and backwards as its cessation: remove ignorance and the whole sequence unwinds, which is why the third and fourth noble truths, that suffering can cease, and that there is a path, follow from it.
Whether the twelve are distributed across three lifetimes (ignorance and formations belonging to a past life, birth and ageing-and-death to a future one) or completed moment by moment in present experience is the disputed question, and it is set out in the two positions on this entry rather than settled here. Both readings work with exactly this list.