Buddhism: Pratityasamutpāda in short

The enlightenment (Bodhi) of the Buddha Gautama was simultaneously his liberation from suffering and his insight into the nature of the universe – particularly the nature of the lives of ‘sentient beings’ (principally humans and animals). What the Buddha awakened to (Bodhi means ‘to awaken’) was the truth of dependent origination. This is the understanding that any phenomenon ‘exists’ only because of the ‘existence’ of other phenomena in an incredibly complex web of cause and effect covering time past, time present and time future. Because all things are thus conditioned and transient (anicca), they have no real independent identity (anatta) so do not truly ‘exist’, though to ordinary deluded minds this appears to be the case.

All phenomena are thus fundamentally insubstantial and ‘empty’ (sunya). Wise human beings, who ‘see things as they are’ (yatha-bhuta-ñana-dassana), renounce attachment and clinging, transform the energy of desire into awareness and understanding, and eventually transcend the conditioned realm of form becoming Buddhas or Arahants.

The abiding of an awakened sage is not ‘in the world’ as such but has its root and ground in the ‘unconditioned element’, ie. Nibbana (cf. ‘The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head’. Matt 8:20). After his enlightenment, the Buddha Gautama referred to himself as the Tathāgata meaning 'one who comes from "thusness"' or 'the one thus gone' highlighting the ambiguous ontological status of one whose center of being is in the unconditioned realm. The Buddha called it Amarāvatī or ‘the abode of the deathless’.(cf. the expression ‘eternal life’ or ‘everlasting life’ used in the gospels).

There are twelve links in this causal chain:

1.      Ignorance (avidya)

2.      Impressions (samskara)

3.      The initial consciousness of the embryo (vijñāna)

4.      Mind and body, the embryonic organism (nama-rrupa)

5.      Six organs of knowledge (sada yatana)

6.      Sense contact (saparsa)

7.      Sense-experience (vedana)

8.      Thirst (trsna)

9.      Clinging (upadana)

10.  Tendency to be born (bhava)

11.  Rebirth (jati)

12.  Old age, death, etc. (jara-marana)