The twelve links

The doctrine of dependent origination (or conditioned co-production) is often believed to be the most basic doctrine of Buddhism, putting forward a truth realised by the Buddha from which all other Buddhist teachings derive. There are two ways in which this doctrine is presented: as the twelve links (nidanas) which are illustrated by the outer ring of the Wheel of Samsara or “Wheel of Life”, or as an underlying metaphysical principle. In both cases, the doctrine is intended to explain the workings of karma and of the second noble truth, to show how unenlightened existence is maintained and thus how it might be changed into enlightened existence. I will look at both of these ways of presenting dependent origination, starting with the twelve links. 

The twelve links are intended to illustrate the conditioning process whereby delusion gives rise to unenlightened experience, unenlightened experience gives rise to greed, and greed gives rise to karmic effects, which in turn create the conditions for ignorance. Each of the twelve links represents a stage of conditioning, which then influences the next, and each is represented traditionally by a picture on the Wheel of Samsara. I am not going to go through a detailed explanation of all of the links here. Instead, any readers unfamiliar with them should refer to any of a number of introductions to Buddhism that explain them[1]. On the web, this could include the wikipedia article on the twelve nidanas and the Buddhanet summary. 

In brief, the twelve links can be divided into three phases, sometimes known as “past life”, “present life” and “future life”. The past life phase shows the process by which delusion produces karmic formations, karmic formations produce consciousness, the mind and body, and the five senses. In other words, it is only due to our lack of true understanding of reality that we act in such a way as to produce karma, and it is only due to karma that we have a body with the capacity for experience. The present life phase includes four stages: contact, feeling, craving and grasping. It illustrates how due to having bodies we come into contact with things around us and find them pleasant or unpleasant. If we react to pleasant things by wanting them and unpleasant things by rejecting them (craving) then we are led to grasp them, thus fixing them in a particular form in relation to ourselves. In the future life (which consists of becoming, birth and death) the results of this are seen. By grasping the world, we lead ourselves to be reborn in it after death, and by joining another life condemn ourselves to another round of birth and death and the perpetuation of delusion.

These twelve links map out the classic Buddhist vision of human conditioning. The exact form that they take is a matter of convention and is in some ways confusing: for each phase actually goes around the cycle in itself, so we have mentally gone through three revolutions of the cycle of unenlightened existence by the time we get to the end. Each phase includes prior conditions giving rise to karma, which then gives rise to more undesirable conditions. Alternatively they may be seen as re-explaining the same process from three different points of view. Whatever the drawbacks of explaining the conditioning process in exactly this form, this is the one sanctioned by tradition because it is believed to have come from the Buddha. It thus seems unthinkable for most Buddhists to reform the twelve links so as to make them a bit clearer to the uninitiated: another example of the effects of belief in revelation from the Buddha.

One way of seeing the twelve links is as a teaching aid to explain karma and rebirth, which we have already discussed in the previous chapter. However, it also puts both karma and rebirth into the bigger context of a Buddhist metaphysical theory of the phenomenal universe, known as pratityasamutpada or dependent origination. Pratityasamutpada is the doctrine that all the unenlightened universe is conditioned (which I will discuss more later in this chapter), and the twelve links then go on to describe the exact form of conditioning we are subject to.

The “present life” phase of the twelve links also gives a more specific explanation of what might be seen as the biting point of the conditioning process. It is at the point of the link between feeling and craving that the next round of the conditioning process can arise again, unless we can alternatively avoid this next round through a spiritual effort. Craving (or greed) consists in the desire for more of something pleasant, or the desire to avoid something painful, and it is the experience of things as pleasant or painful which is referred to here as feeling. If we can simply experience a pleasant feeling as pleasant or a painful feeling as painful, and do so with awareness rather than with craving or aversion, it is claimed that we are able to shake ourselves free of this process. If we avoid the response of craving, we also avoid the ensuing link of grasping, where we try to possess something or push it away, and subsequently, if we go through this process sufficiently in our whole lives, we might also be able to avoid the next link, re-becoming, and hence the cycle of birth and death.

As in much of Buddhism, there seem to be genuine insights here that have then been over-extended and over-hyped. To experience pleasant, painful or neutral sensations and then just observe them without hanging onto them is an extremely useful technique constantly used in Buddhist meditation practice. It certainly does seem likely that, through effort, we can stop a process of addiction or obsession through this method. Craving (whether for food, another cigarette, to hit back at an offending person, or whatever) is a nervous response from an over-stimulated organism, and if we can relax our minds and bodies sufficiently and objectify our observation sufficiently, it often seems possible to stop that process. In this sense, the present phase of the twelve links identifies a psychological process that it is very valuable for all of us to know and work with.

The difficulties with this doctrine arise with its over-extension and the universal claims made for it. The traditional Buddhist account is that liberation is only possible between feeling and craving. Buddhist practice, then, consists of continually feeling the feeling but letting it go, until this becomes a matter of habit and we are re-programmed not to crave. But why should liberation not be possible at other points? And does it follow from the practical usefulness of this technique that we can give up craving altogether?

The first of these questions was asked by the off-beat English Theravadin monk, Ñanavira Thera[2]. Influenced by Existentialist philosophy, Ñanavira objected to the apparent determinism of the remainder of the cycle – for it seems that, once you have allowed craving to creep in, you are stuck with the whole ensuing cycle of karmic effects from it and can do nothing about it. Human freedom does seem to make it possible that we could break the links at other points: for example, we could avoid contact with pleasant or painful things in the first place, or we could avoid grasping them once we have craved them.

Traditional Buddhism denies that these actions would have any spiritual efficacy, as they would not change our underlying tendencies. However, this seems to condemn the merely self-controlled to a life of unfulfilled craving. For example, if a habitual shoplifter gets the craving to steal something, but succeeds in resisting it and does not actually do so, has he not contributed towards future improvement of his habits at all? It seems that traditional Buddhism should at least be less dogmatic on this point.

The bigger issue here, though, is the second one. From the fact that craving can be prevented from arising, it does not follow either that it is always desirable to stop it, or that to be completely purified of craving would be the ideal human state. This has already been discussed to some extent in chapter 1. It may be that the most desirable state is not a complete purification of all craving, but a state of balance in which the worst effects of craving are contained.

After the discussion of rebirth in the previous chapter, it should also be clear that the move from craving objects in our normal experience in the present life phase to craving a new life in the future life phase is a gross over-extension of the psychological insights to be found in the present life phase. From the fact that we shape our lives through craving and determine many (though not all) conditions that subsequently affect us, it does not follow that craving makes our lives occur in the first place. Rather than being drawn to live again because of attachment to living, it seems just as likely that we are thrust into the world without prior motives.