Position

Dependent Origination

Suffering arises through a conditioned sequence rooted in ignorance and craving, and ceases when those sustaining conditions cease.

Explore in the interactive map

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, through contact and feeling, 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 distress in mistaken judgments about an event — that a loss is bad, and that grief is the right response to it — correctable by withholding assent, and which leaves bodily pain outside its account. Dependent origination instead treats craving as conditioned by ignorance built up over the whole sequence, so cessation is not a pair of judgments reversed but the unwinding of that sequence, most completely by uprooting the ignorance that starts it.

Position on

Held by traditions

  • Buddhism

    Question scope: The Origin and Cessation of Suffering

References