St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology (Mar 2024)
Dependent Arising
Abstract
This article takes a broadly historical approach, discussing aspects of a topic that is important in each and every phase of the Buddhist tradition. Dependent arising (pratītya-samutpāda) is a key conceptual formulation of the truth (dharma) to which the Buddha is said to have awakened, and the Buddha is said to have gained Awakening by discovering it. This discovery is recounted in the form of a standard formula, which continues to be the prevalent expression of dependent arising, with a short abstract summary of conditionality, followed by twelve causal factors (nidānas) from ignorance to ageing-and-death, in natural and contrary order of arising and ceasing. ‘The Discourse on the Analysis of Dependent Arising’ gives important definitions of each of the nidānas, and though early Buddhist texts do not preserve an unambiguous explanation of the standard formula as a whole, a close look at discourses about dependent arising show it taught by the Buddha as a method of meditative investigation for the sake of gaining liberating insight, and also as a doctrine communicating a ‘middle way’ between existence and non-existence, as well as ‘great emptiness’ – the absence of an essential self in experience. The article then turns, via the image of the Wheel of Life, to the later three-life interpretation of dependent arising as a response to the teaching needs of the tradition as it developed in the centuries after the Buddha’s parinirvāṇa. It is anachronistic to read this three-life interpretation back into the early discourses. There are in fact competing versions of this interpretation, in Theravāda and Sarvāstivāda traditions. There are also a range of interpretations of dependent arising among contemporary Theravādins, suggesting that, although it has become the orthodox view, the three-life interpretation has always been disputed. An alternative interpretation of the twelve nidānas, made in various ways by exegetes old and new, applies the teaching specifically to the working of the mind in the present moment. I consider how the principle of conditionality is not a quasi-scientific theory that applies to everything, but a philosophical principle that applies primarily to experience. This leads to the interpretation of conditionality in the philosophy of Nāgārjuna, which rediscovers features of the early teaching. The article ends with a section on ‘transcendental dependent arising’, concerning the conditionality of stages of the path to Awakening, and a section weighing up how contemporary interpretations of dependent arising as an ecological principle of interdependence might relate to the original meaning of dependent arising.
