Dependent origination

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.

The classical Abhidharma commentarial tradition, systematized in Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakosa and in the Theravada commentary literature, distributes the twelve links across three lifetimes to explain how rebirth works mechanically: ignorance and formations belong to a past life; consciousness through becoming unfold within the present life, as the being is conceived, grows, experiences the world and forms new craving and clinging; and birth and ageing-and-death belong to a future life set in motion by the present one's clinging and becoming. On this reading dependent origination explains the mechanics of rebirth without a transmigrating self, exactly the problem Buddhism's denial of a permanent soul creates.

An alternative reading, associated with some modern Theravada meditation teachers and with strands of academic Buddhology skeptical of over-literal Abhidharma systematization, treats the twelve links as unfolding within a single moment of experience, repeated constantly: contact gives rise to feeling, feeling to craving, craving to clinging, and clinging to a momentary "becoming" and "birth" of a reactive self-sense, which subsides, ages and dies within that same span, only for the sequence to begin again with the next contact. On this reading the chain describes the arising and passing of suffering moment to moment, observable directly in meditative attention, rather than a doctrine about literal reincarnation spanning multiple births.

The two readings are not simply rival theories competing for a single correct answer; both have serious canonical and commentarial support, and different lineages within contemporary Buddhism continue to teach one, the other, or both together as complementary levels of the same analysis.