Hello, I’m Cheng Qing. Welcome to Relief for Life: Forty Introductions to Buddhism.

Earlier I introduced the Four Noble Truths: the Buddha begins with suffering, teaches impermanence and no-self, and leads toward liberation. Now we turn to dependent origination.

Episode 3 described Siddhartha contemplating how aging, illness, and death arise and seeing body and mind as complex interdependent conditions. Buddhism summarizes this interdependence asthe twelve links,also calledtwelvefold dependent origination.Let us expand the explanation.

Xuanzang’s Sutra on Dependent Origination says:

It defines dependent origination as‘because this exists, that exists; because this arises, that arises.’All changing people, events, and things interact like an interdependent chain. The twelve links explain suffering’s inner logic:ignorance, formations, consciousness, name-and-form, six bases, contact, feeling, craving, grasping, becoming, birth, and aging-and-death with sorrow and distress.。

Treatises interpret them differently; here is a brief account.

The Jñānaprasthāna understands life’s flow through past, present, and future, calledthe three lives.Life begins fromignorance.Because ofmistaken cognition,we constructwholesome and unwholesome karmic actions—namely,formations.Ignorance and formations belong topast causesthat generate later results.