The Twelve Links - The Buddha Asked Backwards

The Question the List Leaves Open

The twelve links of dependent origination are not hard to memorize: ignorance, formations, consciousness, name and form, the six sense fields, contact, feeling, craving, grasping, becoming, birth, old age and death. The difficulty is which direction you read them in. Interpretations of the same twelve have diverged for two thousand years, and the divergence reaches all the way into what a practitioner watches while sitting.

The Picture That Became Standard

The most widely transmitted reading distributes the twelve across three lifetimes and reads two layers of cause and effect in them. Ignorance and formations are past causes; the eight from consciousness through becoming are present; birth and old age and death are future. The Theravada Visuddhimagga uses the same arrangement, taking ignorance and craving as the roots and dividing two, eight, and two across the three times to describe the wheel of existence (bhavacakka).

The picture is powerful. It fits rebirth onto a single page and makes the relation of action and result plain. It also costs something. Both ends of the explanation sit on what cannot be observed: past ignorance and formations are gone, and future birth and death have not arrived. Ñāṇavīra Thera pressed exactly here, arguing that the formula of dependent origination says "when this exists, this is," while a reading split across three lifetimes makes what is absent into the condition. The question is how many of the twelve links are actually available to observation.

Abhidharma Already Read It Four Ways

Whether the chain spans lifetimes or a single moment is not a modern dispute. The Abhidharmakosa already lays out four readings side by side.

The momentary reading (刹那) holds that all twelve are complete within a single instant. The example given is vivid: in the one moment of killing out of greed, everything from ignorance to old age and death is present.

The serial reading (連縛) holds that the twelve succeed one another without a break. The extended reading (遠續) holds that they link across many lifetimes, skipping intervals of time. The stage reading (分位) holds that each link has the five aggregates for its substance and arises and ceases moment by moment, but is named after whichever state is prominent in that moment.

The Sarvastivada took the stage reading as its settled position, and the three-lifetime picture follows from it. So the three-lifetime reading was not chosen in ignorance of the alternatives. It is one of four, deliberately chosen.

Forward, Reverse, and Cessation

Three terms name directions. Forward observation runs from ignorance down to old age and death. The cessation sequence follows the vanishing: when ignorance ceases, formations cease. Reverse observation starts at old age and death and asks backwards after its condition.

The trouble is that reverse observation and the cessation sequence have long been treated as one thing. The commentarial tradition settled on the formula that seeing arising from conditions is the forward chain and seeing vanishing from conditions is the reverse chain. Put that way, reverse observation becomes the work of watching cessation, and the backward questioning from old age and death has nowhere left to stand.

Woo Dong-pil took up the overlap directly in a 2015 paper in the Journal for Buddhist Studies. Reverse observation traces conditions upward from the position of old age and death to ignorance, while the cessation sequence observes from the position of ignorance ceasing down to old age and death ceasing: different starting points, different logical directions. Historically, too, the first belongs to the questioning that drove the Buddha to leave home and the second to what he found after awakening. The paper also notes that in the four Nikayas the Pali paṭiloma, the word rendered as reverse, is never used for the flow of dependent origination at all. It appears only where someone enters the eight liberations or the nine successive attainments in order and in reverse order.

When What Exists Is There Old Age and Death

The original question survives in the texts. In the City discourse of the Samyutta Nikaya the Buddha reports his own thinking from before the awakening.

kimhi nu kho sati jarāmaraṇaṁ hoti, kiṁpaccayā jarāmaraṇan ti

When what exists is there old age and death, and with what as its condition is there old age and death. The next line says how the answer came: through rational application of mind there was a penetration by wisdom, that when birth exists there is old age and death, and birth is the condition for old age and death. From birth he traces back to becoming, from becoming to grasping, from grasping to craving.

What stands out in this discourse is where the questioning stops. Asked what conditions consciousness, the answer is name and form.

paccudāvattati kho idaṁ viññāṇaṁ nāmarūpamhā na paraṁ gacchati

This consciousness turns back from name and form and does not go beyond it. The chain is not run out to twelve. The inquiry turns back at the point where consciousness and name and form condition each other, and neither ignorance nor formations appears in this discourse at all. Ever since Watsuji Tetsurō argued that tracing back from old age and death to ignorance is the original form, philological work has kept asking whether the links were twelve from the start.

Five Forks on the Way Back Up

Read with reverse observation restored, dependent origination joins up with the middle way. On Woo's reconstruction, the backward questioning passes in turn through the very topics Indian thinkers of the time were fighting over.

The stretch that asks about becoming, birth, and old age and death runs into existence against nonexistence. Craving and grasping raise the question of one against many. Feeling is the question of pain against pleasure; consciousness, name and form, the six sense fields, and contact are the question of what is made by oneself against what is made by another, which is to say subject against object. Ignorance and formations meet the view that things are eternal against the view that they are annihilated.

If the middle way is the place that passes beyond each of these five pairs, then dependent origination is an account of existence, value, and knowledge before it is a diagram of rebirth. Read this way, it is also clear why the first of the four noble truths is suffering in the form of aging and dying. That was where the question began.

This and That, or This and This

The formula that summarizes dependent origination came into Chinese as 此有故彼有 此起故彼起: because this exists, that exists; because this arises, that arises.

The Pali reads imasmiṁ sati idaṁ hoti, imass'uppādā idaṁ uppajjati. Both imasmiṁ and idaṁ are case forms of the same pronoun, ima. Not this and that, but this and this. Repeating a pronoun in Pali is not a way of listing two different items but a way of saying each and every one, so the line can be read as eleven sentences compressed into one.

The difference is not trivial. The interdependence reading, which rejects the three-lifetime picture and takes the twelve as things mutually conditioning one another, argues that since the words behind this and that are the same, the two can be swapped. The same fact serves the opposite conclusion: if the word is the same, there were never two terms to split into this and that in the first place. Either way, it helps to know that the most quoted sentence in all of Buddhism has passed through a layer of translation.

What You Watch While Sitting

The difference between readings does not stay on the desk.

Read across three lifetimes, the twelve links become a diagram to accept on trust, because past ignorance is a premise rather than an object of observation. Read as momentary, they become something to verify where you are sitting. The eye meets an object (contact), a feeling arises (feeling), the mind leans toward that feeling (craving), and it takes hold (grasping). The sequence runs hundreds of times a day. Asking which link can be cut becomes the practice.

Reverse observation adds one more thing: a direction. Instead of receiving the answer from above, you start from the suffering in front of you and ask what has to exist for this to exist. The question recorded as the Buddha's before his awakening is not the conclusion of someone who knows. It is the question of someone who does not yet. That much can be borrowed exactly as it stands.