प्रतीत्यसमुत्पाद
Pratityasamutpada
pratītyasamutpāda
In simple words
Dependent origination means nothing exists on its own: everything comes into being because of other things. Buddhism uses this to explain how suffering arises and how it can stop.
What is it?
Pratityasamutpada ('arising in dependence') is the Buddhist account of causality. In its classic form it is a chain of twelve links, from ignorance through formations, consciousness, name-and-form, the senses, contact, feeling, craving, clinging, becoming and birth to ageing and death. Seeing this chain explains the arising of suffering without positing a permanent self, and reversing it describes the path to cessation. Later schools interpret it differently.
Scholar’s note
Early texts state the principle as: when this is, that is; from the arising of this, that arises. Abhidharma schools analyse it in terms of momentary dharmas. Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika identifies dependent origination with emptiness (shunyata): because things arise dependently they lack svabhava (own-being). Yogacara reads it through consciousness and its seeds. Hindu critics, especially Nyaya and Vedanta, argue that such a chain requires a lasting subject or ground.How its meaning differs
Theravada presents the twelve links as a description of how rebirth and suffering continue across lives and moment to moment, and meditative insight into it as liberating.
For Nagarjuna, whatever arises dependently is empty of own-being; dependent origination and emptiness are two ways of saying the same thing.
Yogacara explains the chain through the storehouse consciousness (alaya-vijnana), in which karmic seeds ripen as experience.
Where else it appears
Texts
Traditions that use it
Follow this idea
Trace the idea from one source to the next.
- 1Thinkerगौतम बुद्धSiddhartha Gautama, the BuddhaThe Buddha's teaching on the conditioned arising of suffering.
- 2ConceptदुःखDukkha — suffering, unsatisfactorinessThe chain explains how dukkha arises and ceases.
- 3Conceptअनात्मन्Anatta (Anatman)Dependent origination explains continuity without a permanent self.
- 4Thinkerनागार्जुनNagarjunaNagarjuna equates dependent origination with emptiness.
- 5Textमूलमध्यमककारिकाMulamadhyamakakarikaThe foundational Madhyamaka text on this equation.
- 6Traditionन्यायNyayaContrast: Nyaya argues for an enduring self as the substrate of experience.
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