Dependent origination (pratitya-samutpada)

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.

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.