Lecture Series: Consciousness and Being

Austin Words of the Buddha

The Buddha’s Twelve-fold Chain of
Dependent Co-Arising

sponsored by Words of the Buddha

with Bhikkhu Cintita

“Whoever sees Dependent Co-Arising sees the Dharma.
Whoever sees the Dharma sees Dependent Co-Arising.”

“This principle of Dependent Co-Arising is a profound teaching, hard to see. It is through not knowing, not understanding and not thoroughly realizing this teaching that beings are confused like a tangled thread, thrown together like bundles of threads, caught in a net, and cannot escape hell, the nether worlds and the wheel of samsara.”

These two quotes indicate the great importance the Buddha himself placed on Dependent Co-Arising (paṭiccasamuppāda), which is, after all, the foundation of Buddhist psychology. It is most familiarly represented by the following causally linked chain of experiential factors:

Ignorance → Notions → Consciousness → Subject and Object → Sense Bases → Contact → Feeling → Craving → Attachment → Being →Birth…

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