A Chain of Twelve Links Explaining How Suffering Arises

Dependent origination, pratityasamutpada in Sanskrit and paticcasamuppada in Pali, is the Buddhist doctrine that nothing arises independently; every phenomenon comes into being only in dependence on causes and conditions, and ceases when those causes and conditions cease. The classical formulation traces this through a chain of twelve linked factors, running from ignorance through mental formations, consciousness, name and form, the six sense bases, contact, feeling, craving, clinging and becoming, to birth, and finally to old age and death. Each link conditions the one after it, so the chain as a whole explains how a being comes to be reborn into a life marked by suffering without needing to appeal to a fixed, independent self moving from one life to the next. The first two links are read as belonging to a previous existence and as explaining the conditions of the present one; the next eight unfold within the present life; and the last two describe a future shaped by what the present life has set in motion. Buddhist teachers have long treated the doctrine as reversible as well as descriptive: because craving and clinging condition further becoming, removing craving at its root is held to interrupt the chain and bring the whole cycle of suffering to an end, which is the theoretical basis for the entire Buddhist path toward liberation.