Dependent Origination

Classification

Position level

specific

Domains

Ethics

Overview

The account traces suffering to a chain of conditions rather than to a single mistake: ignorance of how things really are gives rise to craving, craving to clinging, clinging to further becoming, and the chain closes in old age, death, and renewed suffering. No link stands as a first cause outside the chain — each depends on the one before it.

That is also where it parts from the Stoic diagnosis, which finds the origin of suffering in one mistaken judgment about an event — that a loss is bad — correctable by withholding assent. Dependent origination instead treats craving as conditioned by ignorance built up over the whole sequence, so cessation is not a single judgment reversed but the unwinding of that sequence, most completely by uprooting the ignorance that starts it.

Position on

• The Origin and Cessation of Suffering

  Suffering is sustained by a conditioned sequence rooted in ignorance and craving; when those conditions cease, suffering ceases.

Held by traditions

• Buddhism

  Question scope: The Origin and Cessation of Suffering

References

• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Buddha, section 3.f, Causality and the Principle of Dependent Arising
• Samyutta Nikaya 12.1–2 (paṭicca-samuppāda)