Paṭiccasamuppāda in Context:

the Buddha in debate with Brahmanical thinking

––––––––––––––––
DHIVAN THOMAS JONES
Wolfson College Cambridge

This Dissertation is submitted for the degree of Master of Philosophy

Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge
August 2009
table of contents

preface and acknowledgements 2

introduction: paṭiccasamuppāda as parody? 4

Jurewicz’s proposal 6
reactions and precedents to Jurewicz’s proposal 10
evidence in the main nikāyas for Jurewicz’s proposal 12

part 1: paṭiccasamuppāda in early Buddhism 17

the three-life interpretation of paṭiccasamuppāda 20
limit-conditions to Jurewicz’s proposal 27
origins of the twelve-fold chain 29
development of the twelve-fold chain 37
cosmogony and meditation 41

part 2: the Buddha’s intellectual context 43

common topics of debate (i): ādeśa, ‘substitute’ 46
common topics of debate (ii): a story about Prajāpati and Indra 48
common topics of debate (iii) upaniṣad / upanisā 53
the Buddha’s ‘secret teaching’ 65

conclusion: paṭiccasamuppāda as parody and doctrine 68

possibilities for future research 70

abbreviations 75

bibliography 77

1
preface and acknowledgements

This study has its origin in 1993, when an English Theravādin bhikkhu, Ajahn
Vipassi, put me onto Ñāṇavīra Thera, another English bhikkhu (who claimed to be a stream-
entrant and later killed himself) who wrote a book, Clearing the Path, which presented the
Buddha’s teaching of paṭiccasamuppāda in terms of the ‘structure of experience’ and of
existentialist thought.1 The book took on the orthodox Theravādin three-life interpretation of
paṭiccasamuppāda and declared it not to be the Buddha’s teaching. Reading this book brought
the dhamma to vivid life, in contemporary philosophical terms, and, together with Ñāṇavīra’s
own peculiar life-story, brought an exciting sense of heroism to the study of what had
previously seemed arcane religious metaphysics.2
The book has gained something of a cult following, though I doubt now whether all of
Ñāṇavīra’s ideas stand up to close examination.3 However, at the time they liberated my mind
from traditional assumptions, and initiated a renewed exploration of the twelve nidānas, in
theory as well as in meditation practice. The present study is thus the outcome of a long
process of investigation of what the Buddha intended to teach with the twelve links of
paṭiccasamuppāda, but is nevertheless inevitably tentative, possibly somewhat mistaken, and
certainly incomplete. My relative ignorance of Abhidhamma means I have probably not fully
appreciated continuities in the tradition, and my ignorance of German means I have not been
able to read some important studies in the field.
Meanwhile, my grateful thanks must go to Prof. E.J. Rapson, and to the Managers of
the Rapson Scholarship, for giving me the chance to study for an MPhil at Cambridge. It has
been a pleasure and privilege to study Sanskrit with Dr Eivind Kahrs and Dr Vincenzo
Vergiani, and Pali with Dr Margaret Cone. My fellow students Antoine Panaioti and Prof.
Enrique Bocardo-Crespo have contributed to my thinking and Prof. Richard Gombrich has

1
Ñāṇavīra 1987.
2
I discovered Buddhadāsa’s ideas on the same topic later: Buddhadāsa 1986; Buddhadāsa 1989; Seeger 2005.
3
Bodhi 1998a, 1998b; Jones 2009.

2
always been supportive of my efforts to study early Buddhism. The enterprise has not been all
academic, and friends in the Western Buddhist Order, especially Padmadipa, Jayarava and
Sagaraghosa, have also helped me think matters through from various angles, practical and
conceptual.

Dhivan Thomas Jones, August 2009.

NB This dissertation is 25,000 words long and all my own work.

3
introduction: paṭiccasamuppāda as parody?

In this study I attempt to place the Buddha’s teaching of paṭiccasamuppāda in the

intellectual context of its time. I owe the general scope of such a project to Richard Gombrich,
whose studies concerning the historical context of the Buddha’s teaching have formed my
sense of the field.4 However, this work is more specifically a response to Joanna Jurewicz’s
article ‘Playing With Fire: the pratītyasamutpāda from the perspective of Vedic thought,’ on
the relation of the twelve nidānas of paṭiccasamuppāda to Brahmanical cosmogonic
speculation.5 She attempts to show how each of the nidānas in the Buddhist formula, as well
as the nidāna chain as a whole, was intended to parody the conception of an ātman6 revealing
and manifesting itself through the process of creation. From the Buddha’s point of view, there
is no such creative ātman at all, and only dukkha comes into being. If this interpretation of the
Buddha’s intention in teaching the twelve nidānas is correct, it sheds important new light on
the question of why exactly the Buddha taught the factors of the paṭiccasamuppāda as he did,
a matter that the early Buddhist discourses do not clearly explain.7 Richard Gombrich has
written of Jurewicz’s article: ‘Given the centrality to Buddhist doctrine of dependent
origination, I think this may rank as one of the most important discoveries ever made in
Buddhology.’8
Jurewicz herself, however, is careful to limit the scope of her discovery. She writes: ‘I
am aware that the interpretation of the pratītyasamutpāda as a polemic against Vedic
cosmogony tackles only one aspect of this huge problem; as the Buddha said to Ānanda:
“This conditioned origination is profound and it appears profound”… The investigation of all
other questions connected with the understanding of the Buddha’s chain remains within the

4
Gombrich 1990, 1992, 1996, 2009, etc.
5
Jurewicz 2000.
6
I cite ātman rather than attan because the Sanskrit form is more widely used to signify the (disputed)
permanent Self.
7
Gethin, 1998:149.
8
Gombrich 2005:154.

4
scope of Buddhology.’9 The point is presumably that parodying Brahmanical thought may not
have been the only purpose in the Buddha’s mind when teaching the twelve-fold
paṭiccasamuppāda.
The mainstream interpretation of the twelve nidānas within the Buddhist tradition
itself has become, of course, that they represent an explanation of the rebirth process over
three lifetimes. This detailed explanation has its problems from the philosophical point of
view.10 Moreover, it is not explicitly found in any early discourses. The twelve-fold
paṭiccasamuppāda is most often presented in the discourses as a stock formula without
explanation, and when explanations of the links are given, they do not quite explain why they
have been thus connected.11 The phrase constantly following the formulaic statement of the
twelve nidānas, ‘thus arises this whole mass of dukkha,’ points to the connection of the
twelve-fold paṭiccasamuppāda with the pragmatic, non-metaphysical orientation of the
Buddha’s teaching, which concerns just dukkha and the ending of dukkha.12 Nevertheless,
there are passages which show that the Buddha did in some sense also intend the nidāna chain
to show how rebirth occurs13 – without there being an ātman which is reborn.14
My project, therefore, is to examine the Buddha’s teaching of paṭiccasamuppāda in
order to gather evidence for how the Buddha was engaged in debate and dispute with the
Brahmanical religious culture of the day. My method will be close reading of the Pali
canonical texts. Having considered Jurewicz’s thesis in this introduction, I will review the
presentation of paṭiccasamuppāda in the Pali discourses to establish, in part 1, in what way
and to what degree this teaching can be considered a response to Brahmanical thought. In part
2, I will consider some evidence, excavated from within the Pali texts, of the Buddha’s
broader debate with Brahmanical concepts (especially ādeśa and upaniṣad) concerning
metaphysics and soteriology. This will furnish a broad context for the claim that with the
teaching of paṭiccasamuppāda the Buddha was engaged in dispute with brāhmaṇas. I will
conclude with some general thoughts concerning the form of the twelve-fold

9
Jurewicz 2000:77–8.
10
Williams 2000:71–2.
11
S 12:2 (ii.2), M 9 (i.49ff).
12
S 22:86 (iii.119) = S 44:2 (iv.384), M 22 (i.140).
13
E.g. D 15 (ii.56ff), S 12:65 (ii.104).
14
Collins 1982:108.

5
paṭiccasamuppāda chain and the presentation of concepts in the Upaniṣads, with the aim of
lending further plausibility to the proposal that the twelve-fold chain is a parody of Vedic
ideas.

Jurewiczʼs proposal

Jurewicz’s thesis begins from the observation that both Vedic cosmogony and
paṭiccasamuppāda describe conditions for the arising of things – specifically, they ‘describe
the creation of conditions for subject-object cognition, the process of this cognition, and its
nature’.15 The difference between Vedic cosmogony and the paṭiccasamuppāda doctrine
concerns who undergoes such a process of arising. For Vedic thought, ‘the cognitive process
is undertaken by a self-cognizing Absolute’.16 The word ātman conveys the reflexive
character of the process, since it refers both to the absolute itself and to the forms assumed by
this absolute once it has undergone its process of manifestation, namely, the world, the
individual human being, the innermost subjective essence of the human being, and the fire
altar that expresses the ātman’s manifestation on a ritual level. For Buddhist thought,
however, the ‘creation of conditions for subject-object cognition’ begins with avijjā,
ignorance; the process of this cognition is described with great precision but without any
reference to an ātman; and the nature of the whole process is said to be dukkha, suffering. The
implicit negation of the ātman in the Buddhist description is intended to show that the Vedic
version is based on a false premise – namely, that there is a self-aware absolute – and that
believing in it leads only to more rebirth and pain.
Jurewicz traces the Vedic cosmogony at issue to Ṛgveda 10.129, the Nāsadīya Sukta.
She believes that the general cosmogonic model proposed in this poem continues unaltered in
the ŚB and older Upaniṣads:

15
Jurewicz 2000:78.
16
Jurewicz 2000:78.

6
 In early ŚB, the cognitive character of the cosmogony is expressed in metaphors, the metaphor of
eating food and of the sexual act; in later ŚB and the early Upaniṣads, descriptions using abstract
terminology appear more and more frequently, although metaphors are also in use.17

In contrast, the Buddha’s twelve-fold paṭiccasamuppāda is a greatly simplified linear process,

in which the successive links are abstract concepts rather than metaphors; except that taṇhā
and upādāna retain metaphorical connotations connected with fire – taṇhā meaning ‘hot’ and
‘sweating’ and therefore ‘thirst’ (as well as ‘craving’), and upādāna meaning ‘fuel’ or
‘sustenance’ for a fire (as well as ‘clinging’).18
RV 10.129 presents a poetic cosmogony in which tad ekam, ‘that one’, emerges from
an unknowable pre-creative state, but remains in a darkness that represents the impossibility
of cognition. Such a state is described in later Vedic texts in different ways:

The idea of the inability to cognize, the result of the absence of anything other than the Creator, is
also expressed in the suggestive metaphors of Agni the fire, who because of hunger attacks his
Creator (ŚB 2.2.4.1–4), and of Death, identified with hunger, who looks for food (BU 1.2.1).19

According to Jurewicz’s thesis it is this non-cognition by the Creator that the Buddha parodies
with the term avijjā.
Because of the creator’s non-cognitive aloneness, he wishes for the appearance of a
‘second’ – an object which allows the possibility of subject-object cognition but which is yet
identical with the creator, and hence called ātman. In BU 1.2, 1.4 and AU this ātman is
cosmic, but at the same time the self of the cosmos and of the human being. In ŚB the
creator’s wish to create the ātman is expressed by subjunctive forms of the verb sam+√kṛ,
sometimes with abhi:

Prajāpati wants to build himself (ātmānam) in the form of a fire altar, which is his body and the
cosmos at the same time. He exudes from himself his eating (subjective) and eaten (objective)
parts. Then, he devours food with his eating part. Thus, Prajāpati builds himself up (ātmānam
abhisaṃskaroti), which is a natural consequence of eating.20

17
Jurewicz 2000:80.
18
Jurewicz 2000:95–8.
19
Jurewicz 2000:82.
20
Jurewicz 2000:83.

7
Therefore, according to the thesis under discussion, it is this building up of the self (ātman)
that is parodied by the Buddha with the term saṅkhāra.
The appearance of vijñāna represents in BU the manifestation of the ātman as the
highest cognitive power in the individual human being.21 In the cosmogonic myths of ŚB,
Prajāpati manifests himself (ātman vijñānamaya), wishes to create a second self that is made
of mind, and transforms himself into the eater and the food.22 This consciousness, both
individualised and cosmic, is a manifestation that is cyclically repeated:

The creation of the world is the process of the ātman’s realization of his inability to cognize, of his
wish to cognize himself, and of his cognitive power. This power once again displays its inability to
cognize, its wish to cognize, and its cognitive act, and so forth. In other words, the process is the
constant manifestation of the ātman as the object of cognition, as the will to cognize the object, and
as the subject performing the cognition.23

According to Jurewicz’s thesis, then, the inclusion of viññāṇa in paṭiccasamuppāda

represents the Buddha’s parody of the manifestation of the creator as cognizing subject, a
creator whose volitions or saṅkhāras have built up the possibility of cognition and hence
dispelled the state of non-cognition or avijjā. The Buddhist viññāṇa is that element which is
reborn again and again as long as the creator continues to want to manifest. Since from the
Buddha’s point of view there is in reality no ātman who undergoes such transformations, the
cosmogony represented by avijjā > saṅkhāra > viññāṇa represents the absurd recycling
process of a self which falsely postulates its own existence.
The term nāma-rūpa represents the cosmogonic moment at which the ātman shapes
the created world that has appeared to the cognizing subject. This moment is described in BU
by a striking image:24

sa eṣa iha praviṣṭa ā nakhāgrebhyo yathā kṣuraḥ kṣuradhāne’vahitaḥ syād viśvaṃbharo vā

viśvaṃbharakulāye

He [ātman] enters this [body] up the nail-tips like a razor might be encased in a razor-holder or an
ant in an ant-hill.

21
BU 2.4.5.
22
Jurewicz 2000:87.
23
Jurewicz 2000:88.
24
BU 1.4.7. Viśvaṃbhara might also mean a termite, some other insect, or fire (Olivelle 1998:493).

8
The giving of name and form is also related to the ritual whereby the father accepts his son
and confirms his identity with him: ‘As the father lives in his son, so the ātman undertakes
cognition in his named and formed self.’25 At the same time, this entry of the creator into the
created, his self-expression in name and form, has the effect of making cognition more
difficult, for the creator is no longer cognizable as a whole. The Buddha’s use of nāma-rūpa
to denote the entity into which the viññāṇa settles therefore follows the Vedic scheme, while
emphasising that the entry into nāma-rūpa is a merely limiting act since there is no ātman
undergoing it.
Jurewicz does not find such direct parallels between the next three links of the
Buddha’s twelve-fold paṭiccasamuppāda – saḷāyatana, phassa and vedanā – and Vedic
cosmogony, but this is not a problem for her thesis since their ‘cognitive character… is
obvious’.26 The relation of the seventh and eighth links – taṇhā and upādāna – to Vedic
cosmogony can hardly be disputed, however, and at this point Jurewicz’s thesis becomes
highly convincing. In the Nāsadīya tad ekam, ‘that one’, emerges from the solitude of creative
darkness through the arising of tapas, the heat of ascetic ardour, and through kāma, the fire of
desire. The Vedic poets recreate this ardour and desire. Vedic fire rituals similarly recreate the
conditions of creation. Hence:

It may be assumed that in formulating the tṛṣṇā [taṇhā] link, the Buddha was referring to the fiery
activity of the poets burning the world in the cosmogonic act of cognition. In his chain, their
activity is deprived of its positive dimension and is identified only with the negative aspect of fire,
which in its insatiability digests, and thus destroys, itself and the world around it.27

Agni, the fire, hence the poets, manifest their burning and blazing ātman in the cosmos,
creating light and hence conditions for cognition. This burning blazing needs fuel to sustain it,
and upādāna means ‘fuel’ or ‘sustenance’ in a concrete sense as well as ‘grasping’ in a more
abstract sense.28

25
Jurewicz 2000:89–90.
26
Jurewicz 2000:91.
27
Jurewicz 2000:96.
28
Jurewicz 2000:98, as explored in Gombrich 1996:48, 67–9.

9
 Jurewicz finds parallels between the last three links, bhava, jāti, and jarāmaraṇaṃ,
specifically in AU, which describes three births of the ātman: inside the mother, physical
birth, and death.29

Thus the ātman exists in the world before its birth and its death: its bhava precedes its jāti and
jarāmaraṇa.30

Moreover, AU uses a causative form of √bhū to denote that this ātman’s life is ‘made to be’
by its mother, and Jurewicz supposes that the Buddha may have been playing on this usage in
bhava.
Jurewicz concludes her article with a thought-experiment:

The Buddha preached at least some of his sermons to educated people, well versed in Brāhmaṇic
thought, who were familiar with the concepts and the general idea of Vedic cosmogony. To them,
all the terms used in the pratītyasamutpāda had a definite meaning and they evoked definite
associations. Let us imagine the Buddha enumerating all the stages of the Vedic cosmogony only to
conclude: “That’s right, this is how the whole process develops. However, the only problem is that
no one undergoes a transformation here!”31

Her thesis therefore reveals the Buddha as a brilliant teacher, undermining the cosmogony of
his rival religionists at the same time as promoting his own view of the ending of dukkha.

reactions and precedents to Jurewiczʼs proposal

Jurewicz’s thesis has attracted the critical attention of Richard Gombrich, who has
embraced her proposal enthusiastically as an explanation of why the twelve-fold formulation
of paṭiccasamuppāda is structured as it is.32 Jurewicz’s thesis also fits extremely well with his
own work of identifying earlier teachings to which the Buddha’s are a response. Gombrich
focuses attention on the first four links of the twelve-fold series because these have always
proved the most difficult for Buddhists to interpret in the usual non-cosmogonic way, and
hence most readily invite renewed explanation. The rest of the links do not so readily invite a
29
AU 2.
30
Jurewicz 2000:99.
31
Jurewicz 2000:100–1.
32
Gombrich 2009 (forthcoming) ch.9.

10
new and cosmogonic interpretation, since it is well known that they rehearse the appearance
(and continuity) of cognition within Buddhist doctrine.33 It is not so revolutionary to suppose
that the paṭiccasamuppāda chain is to some extent a reaction to Vedic thought in that it
describes the ‘round of rebirth’ without any ātman that is reborn.34 What is new about
Jurewicz’s proposal is the idea that the chain is a parody of Vedic ideas, and if evidence for
this proposal is available in relation to the first four links then this would strongly support the
proposal as whole.
This emphasis on avijjā, saṅkhāra, viññāṇa and nāma-rūpa finds immediate support
in Alex Wayman’s studies of the relation of these links to Upaniṣadic creation myths.35 His
work pre-empts Jurewicz’s thesis, though it offers nothing like her range of Vedic evidence.
He observes a ‘remarkable foreshadowing’ of the first four links in the creation myth of BU
1.2.1:36

naiveha kiṃcanāgra āsīt | mṛtyunaivedam āvṛtam āsīd aśanāyayā | aśanāyā hi mṛtyuḥ |

tanmano’kurutātmanvī syām iti | so’rcann acarat | tasyārcata āpo’jāyanta | arcate vai me
kamabhūd iti |

In the beginning there was nothing at all. It was covered only by death as by hunger, for hunger is
death. Then [death] made a mind, thinking, may I have a self. He engaged in recitation (arc). From
his recitation water was born. He thought, water came into being for me during recitation.

Wayman relates ‘it was covered only by death’ to avijjā; ‘as by hunger, for hunger is death’ to
saṅkhāra; ‘[death] made a mind, thinking, may I have a self’ to viññāṇa; and ‘he thought,
water came into being for me during recitation’ to nāma-rūpa. Such relations in fact extend
over several more verses in BU 1.2 in which Death continues to create an ātman and then the
whole world.37 What Wayman’s observation does not try to show, which Jurewicz’s thesis
makes clear, is exactly how the links of paṭiccasamuppāda relate to such a myth of Death’s
fertility. In the Buddha’s teaching, the appearance of ātman, whether from hunger or death,

33
Gombrich 2009 (forthcoming) ch.9.
34
Collins 1982:108.
35
Wayman 1971; Wayman 1974; Wayman 1980.
36
Wayman 1974:230.
37
Wayman does not spell this out, but it deserves spelling out, that the Buddhist rūpa is defined as the four
mahābhūtas, earth, water, air and fire, and these four are indeed among that which Death creates (BU 1.2.1–3).

11
out of the nothing, is only a matter of avijjā, and the further evolution of creation is only
dukkha.
Wayman’s independent suggestion of the parallel between the first four links of the
Buddhist paṭiccasamuppāda and Vedic cosmogony strengthens Gombrich’s focus on avijjā,
saṅkhāra, viññāṇa and nāma-rūpa as those links that most readily appear to fit Jurewicz’
proposal. This suggests an initial strategy to test Jurewicz’s proposal: to search for
corroboration from the Buddhist side that the first four links were intended to parody Vedic
cosmogony, since if such corroboration is lacking for these links it is unlikely to be found for
the rest.

evidence in the main nikāyas for Jurewiczʼs proposal

The four main nikāyas contain various discussions about the nature of the individual
links that provide scope for investigation, but they seem to provide only a minimum initial
corroboration of Jurewicz’s thesis. Later I will discuss sutta passages from the Suttanipāta
that present more compelling evidence, but these passages use the unsystematic language and
concepts of pre-nikāya Buddhism, in which the twelve-fold paṭiccasamuppāda chain had yet
to be fully developed. In this section I will assess what evidence can be found in support of
Jurewicz’s thesis about the twelve-fold chain as it is discusses in the main nikāyas.
Regarding avijjā we find passages that present ignorance as a primordial characteristic
of saṃsāra. The quasi-cosmic character of such avijjā is mentioned in the suttas of the
Anamatagga-saṃyutta, each containing the refrain:38

anamataggo yaṃ bhikkhave, saṃsāro, pubbā koṭi na paññāyati avijjānīvaraṇānaṃ sattānaṃ

taṇhāsaṃyojanānaṃ sandhāvataṃ saṃsarataṃ.

A moment, monks, prior to this beginningless samsara is not discerned, the roaming and rolling of
beings hindered by avijjā and fettered by taṇhā.

38
S 15:1 (ii.178) etc.; also at S 22:99ff. (iii.149ff.).

12
The possibility that avijjā is a first cosmic principle out of which the cosmos evolves is,
however, denied by passages that emphasize that avijjā arises on various psychological
conditions:39

purimā bhikkhave koṭi na paññāyati avijjāya ‘ito pubbe avijjā nāhosi, atha pacchā sambhavī’ti.
40
evam c’etaṃ bhikkhave vuccati, atha ca pana paññāyati ‘idappaccayā avijjā’ti.

Monks, a first moment of avijjā, before which it did not exist, after which it arose, cannot be
discerned. Nonetheless, monks, it can be discerned that avijjā has a specific condition.

The Buddha’s teaching of avijjā, therefore, implies a quasi-cosmic function for ignorance,
while tracing its origin to human psychology. An apparently quasi-cosmic avijjā might be a
parody of Vedic cosmogony, but the evidence is by no means compelling.
The second link of the twelve-fold paṭiccasamuppāda, saṅkhāra, does not feature in
any quasi-cosmic passages, though one of its two common definitions is relevant:41

katame ca bhikkhave saṅkhārā. tayo me bhikkhave, saṅkhārā: kāyasaṅkhāro vacīsaṅkhāro

cittasaṅkhāro, ime vuccanti bhikkhave, saṅkhārā.

And what, monks, are the saṅkhāras? These saṅkhāras are spoken of by me, monks, as threefold:
as body-sankhāras, as speech-saṅkhāras and as mind-saṅkhāras.

Such a division of saṅkhāras into those of body, speech and mind may be connected to Vedic
cosmogony. In the Taittirīya Āraṇyaka, in a narrative based on RV 10.129, Prajāpati, having
come into being, creates the world through thought, word and then deed:42

ā́po vā́ idám āsant salílam evá | sá prajā́patir ékaḥ puṣkaraparṇé sámabhavat | tásyā́ntar mánas
kā́maṇ sámavartata | idáṃ sṛjeyam íti | tásmād yát púruṣo mánasābhigácchati | tád vācā́ vadati |
tát kármaṇā karoti

Now, this (world) existed as the waters, only an ocean. Then Prajāpati came into being, alone, on a
lotus leaf. A desire arose in his thoughts that he would bring forth this (world). Therefore, what a
person conceives in his thought, that he says in his speaking and that he does in his doing.

39
At A 10.61 (v.113) avijjā depends on the five hindrances, which in turn depend on the three kinds of bad
conduct, and so on; at M 9 (i.55) avijjā is said to arise from the āsavas.
40
A 10:61 (v.113). The same is said of taṇhā in the following sutta.
41
S 12:27 (ii.43).
42
Taittirīya Āraṇyaka 1.23.1, quoted and trans. in Brereton 1999:257.

13
Jurewicz has described Prajāpati’s creation in ŚB as the way he builds himself up (ātmānam
abhisaṃskaroti); thus the Buddha’s definition of saṅkhāra in terms of body, speech and mind
might parody a Vedic cosmogonic formulation of the creator building up an ātman through
thought, word and then deed.43
I cannot find any direct evidence that the term viññāṇa in the Pali scriptures is used to
parody Vedic cosmogony. However, the Mahātaṇhāsaṅkhāya sutta provides a relevant
discussion. A monk named Sāti is reported as holding the view that:44

tathāhaṃ bhagavatā dhammaṃ desitaṃ ājānāmi yathā tadevidaṃ viññāṇaṃ sandhāvati saṃsarati,
anaññanti… yvāyaṃ bhante vado vedeyyo tatra tatra kalyāṇapāpakānaṃ kammānaṃ vipākaṃ
paṭisaṃvedetī’ti.

As I understand the Dhamma taught by the Blessed One, it is this same viññāṇa that roams and
rolls, not another… [and it is] that, Bhante, which speaks and feels, and experiences now here and
now there the good and bad results of actions.

The Buddha is reported as telling Sāti that this is a seriously wrong view, and that he in fact
teaches that viññāṇa is dependently-arisen:45

anekapariyāyena hi vo, bhikkhave, paṭiccasamuppannaṃ viññāṇaṃ vuttaṃ mayā, aññatra paccayā

natthi viññāṇassa sambhavo’ti

For in many ways, monks, I have said that viññāṇa is dependently-arisen, and that there is no
arising of viññāṇa other than from conditions.

Sāti holds the view that viññāṇa is a permanent essence, which according to the Buddha’s
teaching is the wrong view of eternalism (sassata-diṭṭhi). In Upaniṣadic passages, however,
vijñāna is identified with brahman, the ultimate reality, and hence with the ātman, the
permanent essence of the individual self.46 The Buddha, without denying that there is viññāṇa
and that it roams and rolls on through samsāra, teaches that viññāṇa is not independent of
conditions for its arising, and is hence constantly changing. Indeed, the Buddha goes on to

43
At S 41:6 (iv.293), also at M 44 (i.301), there is discussion of the bodily, verbal and mental saṅkhāras, ceasing
and arising again as a monk enters and leaves the state of cessation of feelings and perceptions, in what might be
considered an individualised (not cosmic) re-creation of the arising of subject-object cognition.
44
M 38 (i.256–8).
45
M 38 (i.259).
46
BU 3.9.28; TU 2.5.1.

14
liken viññāṇa to fire arising dependent on various kinds of fuel,47 a comparison that suggests
Vedic ideas concerning the poets’ fiery ardour which illuminates the world thus brought into
being – but without any ātman to enjoy it.48 The Buddha may therefore have formulated the
term viññāṇa such that it had the same place in the scheme of creation as the Vedic vijñāna
though it did not signify the ātman.
The term nāma-rūpa seems to have been used in early Buddhism to mean the manifest
universe as both conceptual and apparent.49 The term is also found with just this meaning in
the Upaniṣads, but with more definite metaphysical implications, for instance:50

tadetat trayaṃ [nāma rūpaṃ karma] sadekamayamātmā | ātmo ekaḥ sannetat trayam |
tadetadamṛtaṃ satyena cchanam | prāṇo vā amṛtam | nāmarūpe satyam | tābhyāmayaṃ
prāṇaśchannaḥ |

This threefold reality [nāman, rūpa and karman] is this one ātman. This one ātman is the threefold
reality. The immortal here is hidden by the real. The immortal is indeed prāṇa, and the real is
nāma-rūpa; by these two the prāṇa is hidden.

But the dialectic of Vedic cosmogony, whereby nāma-rūpa is the evolute of ātman,
manifesting yet hiding it, such that the ātman is attained by a regression of knowledge, is
entirely missing in the Buddha’s teaching. Viññāṇa and nāma-rūpa are said to depend upon
each other, and hence arises the cognitive process leading to further existence, which is but
dukkha.51 This is more like metaphysical sobriety than cosmogonic parody, and may have
been intended as a rebuke.

This consideration of the first four links of paṭiccasamuppāda does not as yet strongly
confirm Jurewicz’s thesis, though it does seem minimally to corroborate it. This minimal
corroboration allows us at this point to say only that Jurewicz’s proposal amounts to a general
sense that the Buddha’s teaching is in some way parodying Vedic cosmogony. Jurewicz might
indeed have noticed the ghosts of religious debate haunting the landscape of

47
M 38 (i.260).
48
Jurewicz 2000:96.
49
Ross Reat 1987:15; Reat notes that the definition of nāma-rūpa as the khandas, i.e. the individual person, is
not found in the nikāyas.
50
BU 1.6.3.
51
D 14 (ii.32), D 15 (ii.56ff), S 12:65 (ii.104), S 12:67 (ii.113ff).

15
paṭiccasamuppāda, but these ghosts appear unable to speak directly of their provenance or
purpose. There remains encouragement to persevere with the task of finding evidence for
Jurewicz’s idea, however, in that it is a distinct problem for Buddhology why the Buddha
taught the twelve links of paṭiccasamuppāda in the way that he did – while Jurewicz’s
proposal solves that problem at a stroke. In order to find evidence to Jurewicz’s thesis from
the Buddhist side, I will now examine the Pali textual accounts of the twelve-fold formulation
in order to establish some parameters for assessing her proposal.

16
part 1: paṭiccasamuppāda in early Buddhism

Any discussion of what the Buddha meant by paṭiccasamuppāda might usefully begin
with the passage, already quoted by Jurewicz, in which the Buddha rebukes Ānanda, who
claims he understands it:52

acchariyaṃ bhante, abbhutaṃ bhante, yāvagambhīro cāyaṃ bhante, paṭiccasamuppādo

gambhīravabhāso ca. atha ca pana me uttānakuttānako viya khāyatī’ti.

mā hevaṃ ānanda avaca, mā hevaṃ ānanda avaca, gambhīro cāyaṃ ānanda paṭiccasamuppādo
gambhīrāvabhāso ca. etassa ānanda, dhammassa ananubodhā appaṭivedhā evamayaṃ pajā
tantākulakajātā guḷāguṇḍikajātā muñjababbajabhūtā apāyaṃ duggatiṃ vinipātaṃ saṃsāraṃ
nātivattatī’ti.

‘It is wonderful, Bhante, it is marvellous, how deep and profound is this paṭiccasamuppāda, though
to me it seems quite plain.’

‘Do not say that, Ānanda, do not say that. This paṭiccasamuppāda is deep and profound. It is from
not understanding and penetrating this dhamma that people have become like a tangle of string
covered in mould and matted like grass, unable to escape from saṃsāra with its miseries, disasters
and bad destinies.’

Reading this passage as literature, the suggestion is not really that Ānanda’s grasp of
paṭiccasamuppāda was faulty; it is that anyone (represented by Ānanda) who thinks that the
doctrine, though profound, seems quite plain has not seen all of its implications. Richard
Gombrich has made the humorous suggestion that the passage implies that the early
Buddhists compiling the canon were confessing that they themselves did not understand
paṭiccasamuppāda.53 This is to say that, although the doctrine may have important
implications, the compilers are no longer clear what they are. In any case, the passage
suggests that the meaning of paṭiccasamuppāda was a point of debate from early times, in the

52
Mahānidāna Sutta D 15 (ii.55); also at S 12.60 (ii.92).
53
Gombrich 2009 (forthcoming), ch.9.

17
sense that although its conceptual expression, though profound, seems clear enough (‘it seems
quite plain’), this conceptual clarity masks the significance of its implications. So what are
these implications?
The Mahānidāna Sutta, before which this passage is prefixed, contains a discussion of
a paṭiccasamuppāda with nine links.54 The series begins from the mutual dependence of
viññāṇa and nāma-rūpa, with viññāṇa connoting the transmigrating entity (later called the
paṭisandhi-viññāṇa):55

viññāṇaṃ ca hi ānanda mātukucchismiṃ na okkamissatha, api nu kho nāmarūpaṃ

mātukucchismiṃ samuccissathā’ti

Should consciousness, Ānanda, not descend into a mother’s womb, would name and form arise in a
mother’s womb?

The sutta goes on to discuss ways in which one can have ideas about the ātman.56 Although it
would therefore seem likely that the discourse was originally composed in order to show how
paṭiccasamuppāda described the process of rebirth – but without recourse to an ātman – such
a discussion of rebirth-without-an-ātman is now merely implied. The possibility that the
Mahānidāna Sutta originally had a polemical purpose – denying the ātman – would be another
piece of corroborative evidence towards Jurewicz’s proposal. That possibility, however,
cannot be proved.
The Mahānidāna sutta’s formulation of paṭiccasamuppāda with nine links is unique.
Although other formulations, with five and ten links, are also recorded,57 the Buddhist
tradition came to understand the term paṭiccasamuppāda as primarily signifying the twelve-
fold nidāna chain.58 This later Buddhist understanding is doubtless founded on the stock
formula for paṭiccasamuppāda, found in numerous places in the Pali suttas, which contains

54
The usual 12 without avijjā, saṅkhāra and saḷāyatana.
55
D 15 (ii.63).
56
D 15 (ii.64ff).
57
At S 12:52 (ii.84–5), 12:53 (ii.86), 12:55 (ii.87–8), 12:57 (ii.89–90) and S 12:60 (ii.92–3), 5 nidānas (from
taṅhā to jarāmaraṇam); at D 14 (ii.31ff), and at S 12:65 (ii.104) 10 nidānas, the usual 12 without avijjā and
saṅkhārā.
58
Vism 518; Nyanatiloka 1980 q.v. paṭiccasamuppāda.

18
the twelve nidānas in a standardised list, in both forward (anuloma) order of arising and
reverse (paṭiloma) order of ceasing:59

imasmiṃ sati idaṃ hoti, imass’ūppādā idaṃ uppajjati, imasmiṃ asati idaṃ na hoti, imassa nirodhā
idaṃ nirujjhati

yadidaṃ avijjāpaccayā saṅkhārā, saṅkhārapaccayā viññāṇaṃ, viññāṇapaccayā nāmarūpaṃ,

nāmarūpapaccayā saḷāyatanaṃ, saḷāyatanapaccayā phasso, phassapaccayā vedanā,
vedanāpaccayā taṇhā, taṇhāpaccayā upādānaṃ, upādānapaccayā bhavo, bhavapaccayā jāti,
jātipaccayā jarāmaraṇaṃ sokaparidevadukkhadomanassupāyāsā sambhavanti. evametassa
kevalassa dukkhakkhandhassa samudayo hoti

avijjāyatveva asesavirāganirodhā saṅkhāranirodho, saṅkhāranirodhā viññāṇanirodho,

viññāṇanirodhā nāmarūpanirodho, nāmarūpanirodhā saḷāyatananirodho, saḷāyatananirodhā
phassanirodho, phassanirodhā vedanānirodho, vedanānirodhā taṇhānirodho, taṇhānirodhā
upādānanirodho, upādānanirodhā bhavanirodho, bhavanirodhā jātinirodho, jātinirodhā
jarāmaraṇaṃ sokaparidevadukkhadomanasupāyāsā nirujjhanti. evametassa kevalassa
dukkhakkhandhassa nirodho hotī’ti

When this exists, that exists, from the arising of this, that arises; when this does not exist, that does
not exist, from the ceasing of this, that ceases.

Namely, from ignorance as condition, there are formations; from formations as condition, there is
consciousness; from consciousness as condition, there are name-and-form; from name-and-form as
condition, there are the six sense realms; from the six sense realms as condition, there is contact;
from contact as condition, there is feeling; from feeling as condition, there is craving; from craving
as condition, there is clinging; from clinging as condition, there is existence; from existence as
condition, there is birth; from birth as condition, aging-and-death, grief, lamentation, pain, misery
and despair come to be. Thus is arisen this whole mass of pain.

From the fading away and cessation without remainder of just this ignorance, there is the cessation
of formations; from the cessation of formations, there is the cessation of consciousness; from the
cessation of consciousness there is the cessation of name-and-form; from the cessation of name-
and-form there is the cessation of the six sense realms; from the cessation of the six sense realms

59
M 38 (i.262–3); S 12:21 (ii.28), 12:37 (ii.65), 12:41 (ii.70), 12:61 (ii.95), 55:28 (v.388); A 10:92 (v.184); Ud
1.3 (3); without imasmiṃ sati… as preliminary: S 12:2 (ii.4), 12:4 (ii.7), 12:11 (ii.12), 12:15 (ii.17), 12:17 (ii.20–
1), 12:18 (ii.23), 12:46 (ii.76), 12:47 (ii.77); A 3:63 (i.177); Vin i.1, i.2; and there are more occurrences of
smaller sections.

19
 there is the cessation of contact; from the cessation of contact there is the cessation of feeling; from
the cessation of feeling there is the cessation of craving; from the cessation of craving there is the
cessation of clinging; from the cessation of clinging there is the cessation of existence; from the
cessation of existence there is the cessation of birth; from the cessation of birth, aging-and-death,
grief, lamentation, pain, misery and despair cease; thus there is the cessation of this whole mass of
pain.

However, although this formulation (or parts of it) occurs so very many times in the
Pali suttas, neither its signification nor its significance is immediately apparent, except for the
important message that it explains the arising and ceasing of ‘this whole mass of pain’. If
Jurewicz’s proposal is to be made more than merely a plausible hermeneutic possibility, some
key will need to be found with which to unlock the plain-seeming door of this formula. At this
point, however, an excursus is required in order to isolate the formulation of
paṭiccasamuppāda found in the early discourses from the Abhidharma conception of
paṭiccasamuppāda in terms of which the early Buddhist formulation is popularly interpreted
(as the bhavacakra, or ‘Wheel of Life’).

the three-life interpretation of paṭiccasamuppāda

From the point of view of the Buddhist Abhidharma tradition, there is no need to
search for such a key, because this tradition long ago settled upon a particular understanding
of the twelve-fold paṭiccasamuppāda. The Abhidharmikas certainly did not understand the
twelve links of paṭiccasamuppāda as a parody of Vedic cosmogony, but instead developed an
interpretive framework that took paṭiccasamuppāda as the explanation of the rebirth process
and which spread the twelve links over three lifetimes. This framework is most easily
summarized by presenting it in the form of a table:60

60
Cf. the diagram in Nyanatiloka 1980 q.v. paṭiccasamuppāda.

20
nidāna explanation lifetime
avijjā ignorance
karma-process previous life
saṅkhāra volitional formations
viññāṇa the re-linking (paṭisandhi) consciousness
between lives
nāma-rūpa name-and-form: mind (saṅkhāra, saññā and
vedanā) and body (rūpa) arising at result- (vipāka)
conception process
saḷāyatana the six sense organs in the embryo present life
phassa contact with the world
vedanā feeling
taṇhā craving
upādāna clinging karma-process
bhava existence in saṃsāra
jāti birth in the next life
result-process next life
jarā-maraṇa old age and death in the next life

This interpretation appears to be first recorded in the Jñānaprasthāna, the last book of the
Sarvāstivādin Abhidharma.61 It then appears in subsequent Sarvāstivādin commentarial
works,62 in Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośa,63 and in Theravādin commentarial works,
notably Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga,64 presumably influenced by the Sarvāstivādin
Abhidharma tradition.65
The three-life interpretation might be said to represent a highly developed religious
metaphysics that explains the process of rebirth according to karma. It is clearly the result of
centuries of reflection on the Buddha’s teaching by many minds, such that, as a religious
metaphysics, it has been made highly consistent. Modern Theravādin exegetes, moreover,
have no hesitation in suggesting that the three-life exegesis of the twelve-fold formulation of
paṭiccasamuppāda represents the implicit meaning of what is found in the suttas.66
Nevertheless, some observations can be made that suggest that it is unlikely that the three-life
interpretation was what was originally intended by the twelve-fold paṭiccasamuppāda.

61
Cox 1993:136.
62
Willeman, Dessein & Cox 1998:73, 239.
63
Abhidharmakośa 3.3.
64
Ch. XVII; Vism pp.578–81.
65
Wayman 1971:187.
66
E.g. Nyanatiloka 1957:158–9; Bodhi 1998a:44; Bodhi 2000:520.

21
 The placing of avijjā and saṅkhāra in a past life is not found in the suttas. Although in
the Mahānidāna Sutta and elsewhere67 it is implied that it is the viññāṇa that moves from life
to life, and that rebirth continues as long as there is fuel for the ongoing process,68 avijjā and
saṅkhāra are not discussed as causes for rebirth. An important example of the way the causes
of rebirth are described in the suttas is as follows:69

yañca bhikkhave, ceteti yañca pakappeti, yañca anuseti, ārammaṇametaṃ hoti viññāṇassa ṭhitiyā.
ārammaṇe sati patiṭṭhā viññāṇassa hoti. tasmiṃ patiṭṭhite viññāṇe virūḷhe āyatiṃ
punabbhavābhinibbatti hoti. āyatiṃ punabbhavābhinibbattiyā sati āyatiṃ jāti jarāmaraṇaṃ
sokaparidevadukkhadomanassupāyāsā sambhavanti. evametassa kevalassa dukkhakkhandhassa
samudayo hoti.

What one thinks, monks, what one intends and what one is inclined towards, this is the basis for the
maintenance of consciousness. When there is a basis, there is the establishing of consciousness.
When this established consciousness has grown, there is the production of future renewed
existence. When there is future renewed existence, there arises birth, aging, dying, grief, sorrow,
pain, misery and despair. Thus there is the arising of this whole mass of pain.

The use of a locative absolute followed by an existential assertion in this passage follows the
general formulation of paṭiccasamuppāda (‘when this exists, that exists’), but here the arising
of viññāṇa is said to depend on the presence of the activities of thinking, intending and
inclining. Avijjā and saṅkhāra, however, are not described as the causes of future renewed
existence in this way.
This is not to say that avijjā and saṅkhāra do not appear in the suttas as conditions for
rebirth. Saṅkhāras are certainly implicated in the rebirth process:70

viññāṇe ce bhikkhave āhāre atthi rāgo atthi nandi atthi taṇhā patiṭṭhitaṃ tattha viññāṇaṃ virūḷhaṃ
yattha patiṭṭhitaṃ viññāṇaṃ virūḷhaṃ atthi tattha nāmarūpassa avakkanti yattha atthi
nāmarūpassa avakkanti atthi tattha saṃkhārānaṃ vuddhi yattha atthi saṃkhārānaṃ vuddhi atthi
tattha āyatiṃ punabbhavābhinibbatti yattha atthi āyatiṃ punabbhavābhinibbatti atthi tattha āyatiṃ
jātijarāmaraṇaṃ, yattha atthi āyatiṃ jātijarāmaraṇaṃ, sasokaṃ taṃ bhikkhave sadaraṃ
saupāyāsanti vadāmi.
67
D 15 (ii.63), S 12:38 (ii.65), etc.
68
S 44:9 (iv.399).
69
S 12:38 (ii.65).
70
S 12:64 (ii.101).

22
 If, monks, there is passion, delight and craving for the sustenance which is consciousness, then
consciousness, being established, has grown. Where there is an established consciousness that has
grown, there is the descent of nāma-rūpa. Where there is the descent of nāma-rūpa, there is the
increase of saṅkhāra. Where there is increase of saṅkhāra, there is the production of future
renewed existence. Where there is the production of future renewed existence, there is future birth,
aging and death. Where there is future birth, aging and death, monks, I say that this is a grievous,
unhappy and troubled situation.

However, this passage does not imply that the saṅkhāra have the nature of prior causes of
rebirth; indeed, they are said to increase due to the descent of nāma-rūpa, suggesting a more
supportive conditioning role in producing renewed existence. The role of avijjā in the rebirth
process in the suttas is similarly described as a supportive condition:71

avijjānīvaraṇassa, bhikkhave, bālassa taṇhāya sampayuttassa evamayaṃ kāyo samudāgato. iti

ayañceva kāyo bahiddhā ca nāmarūpaṃ, itthetaṃ dvayaṃ, dvayaṃ paṭicca phasso saḷevāyatanāni,
yehi phuṭṭho bālo sukhadukkhaṃ paṭisaṃvedayati etesaṃ vā aññatarena.

Monks, for the fool obstructed by ignorance and connected to craving, this body has been got in
this way. Thus there is just this body and external nāma-rūpa, thus this pair; dependent on this pair
is contact and the six sense bases, by which six or by a particular one of them, the fool, touched,
experiences pleasure and pain.

In this passage, avijjā, as was the case for saṅkhāra, does not have a causal connotation but
denotes a condition whereby the round of rebirth continues.72
The three-life interpretation of paṭiccasamuppāda depends upon the application to the
twelve links of a fully developed causal theory, such that, for instance, avijjā and saṅkhāra as
the karma-process of the previous existence can be interpreted as the cause of the resulting
links in the present existence. (And similarly the craving, clinging and becoming of the
present existence can be interpreted as the cause of future birth, aging and death).73 From a
historical perspective, however, there is no such causal theory evident in the suttas. Taking
the presentation of the links of paṭiccasamuppāda as they are given in the suttas, without

71
S 12:19 (ii.23–4).
72
Bodhi 1998b:162–6 cites these very same passages to show that the three-life interpretation is in fact implied
in the suttas, showing how the three-life interpretation can be read back into them by a sufficiently assertive
exegesis.
73
Cox 1993:136.

23
interpreting them according to later causal theory, the twelve-fold formulation of
paṭiccasamuppāda appears to teach that each factor is, in modern terminology, a necessary
condition for the following paṭiccasamuppanna dhammas.74
The fully developed causal theory that the Abhidharmikas applied to the twelve links
was schematised in terms of six causes (hetu) and four conditions (pratyaya) in the
Sarvāstivādin school75 and twenty-four conditions (paccaya) for the Theravādins.76 However,
there are no such elaborate distinctions in the suttas. Terms denoting ‘cause’ and ‘condition’
occur in a general sense but as synonyms. For instance, the Mahānidāna sutta includes the
refrain:77

tasmātihānanda es’eva hetu etaṃ nidānaṃ esa samudayo esa paccayo jarāmaraṇassa [pe]
yadidaṃ jāti [pe]

Therefore, Ānanda, just this is the cause, the source, the origin, the condition of age and death [etc.]
– namely, birth [etc.]

The Buddha is reported as using the words cause (hetu), source (nidāna), origin (samudaya)
and condition (paccaya) as synonyms, and hence it is impossible here to read into the
relations of the links of paṭiccasamuppāda later distinctions made between these and other
terms.
The very general relationship of one factor of paṭiccasamuppāda being a ‘condition’
for a following factor does not necessarily connote a temporal sequence; and indeed the
relation of avijjā and saṅkhāra in the passages quoted above seems mainly to signify their
each being one of several conditions for continued existence, and hence of dukkha. The idea
of them as prior causes for the appearance of viññāṇa depends upon an interpretation of
conditionality as karmic causation.
The same point holds at the other end of the formula, in a more subtle way. In the
three-life formulation of paṭiccasamuppāda the final links, jāti and jarāmaraṇa, are
interpreted as the result-process of present karma in the next life. These links are defined in

74
Ronkin 2005:204ff; Watts 1982:408.
75
Willeman, Dessein & Cox 1998:28–9.
76
Nyanatiloka 1957:117–27.
77
D 15 (ii.57ff).

24
the suttas, however, in such a way that it is unlikely they were intended to refer to future
states:78

yā tesaṃ tesaṃ sattānaṃ tamhi tamhi sattanikāye jāti, sañjāti, okkanti, abhinibbatti, khandhānaṃ,
pātubhāvo, āyatanānaṃ paṭilābho, ayaṃ vuccatāvuso jāti. bhavasamudayā jāti samudayo.
bhavanirodhā jātinirodho.

The birth of whatever beings into the various classes of beings; the creation, the production, the
manifestation of the constituents; the obtaining of sense-experience – this, friend, is said to be
birth. From the arising of existence, there is the arising of birth. From the cessation of existence,
there is the cessation of birth.

This definition suggests that jāti means ‘being born’ in the general sense of the beginning of
existence. Aging and death are defined in a similarly general way:79

yā tesaṃ sattānaṃ tamhi tamhi sattanikāye jarā, jīraṇatā, khaṇḍiccaṃ, pāliccaṃ, valittacatā,
āyuno saṃhāni, indriyānaṃ paripāko ayaṃ vuccatāvuso jarā… yā tesaṃ tesaṃ sattānaṃ tamhā
tamhā sattanikāyā cuti, cavanatā, bhedo, antaradhānaṃ, maccumaraṇaṃ, kālakiriyā, khandhānaṃ
bhedo, kalebarassa nikkhepo idaṃ vuccatāvuso maraṇaṃ… jātisamudayā jarāmaraṇasamudayo.
jātinirodhā jarāmaraṇanirodho.

The aging of whatever beings in the various classes of beings – agedness, brokenness of teeth,
greyness of hair, wrinkledness of skin, the dwindling of life, the failing of the faculties – this is said
to be aging… The decease of whatever beings in the various classes of beings – the passing away,
breaking up, disappearing, dying, death, one’s time being up, the breaking up of the constituents,
the throwing off of the body – this, friend, is said to be death… From the arising of birth, there is
the arising of aging and death. From the cessation of birth, there is the cessation of aging and death.

These definitions suggest very general qualities of human experience signified by the terms
‘birth’, ‘aging’ and ‘death’. The dependence of birth on existence and of aging and death on
birth is therefore a logical necessity in a general and impersonal sense. By contrast, the three-
life interpretation limits logical necessity to concrete factual causality, whereby individual and
personal birth, aging and death are the result of previous karma.

78
M 9 (i.50); cf. S 12:2 (ii.3).
79
M 9 (i.49); cf. S 12:2 (ii.2).

25
 In brief, the later Buddhist tradition discovered in the twelve-fold paṭiccasamuppāda a
metaphysics of rebirth whereby the individual’s existence undergoes a sequence of caused
and causal stages through their karma and its results. This is not entirely lacking in the suttas,
but whereas the individual nidānas are defined ambiguously there, as both general categories
of experience and as stages in an individual’s faring in saṃsāra, the Abhidharmic exegesis
restricts the twelve links to their application to individual existence. In this way, avijjā and
saṅkhāra are taken as referring to past karma, jāti and jarāmaranaṇa to future results of
karma. In the suttas, however, these links are defined as general aspects of experience in
terms broader than their factual application to individual destiny, and as conditioning factors
in the broadest sense, not only karmic causality – and in this sense open to a ‘cosmological’
interpretation.
A further point can be made in order to distinguish the three-life interpretation from
paṭiccasamuppāda as presented in the suttas. The links of paṭiccasamuppāda were not
originally presented explicitly in terms of the processes of karma and the results of karma. By
interpreting them in this way the Abhidharmikas imposed upon the twelve-fold
paṭiccasamuppāda a conception of karma that developed after the time of the Buddha.80 A
resulting inconsistency is as follows. According to the three-life interpretation, vedanā is part
of the result-process from a previous existence. In conversation with the paribbājaka Moḷiya
Sīvaka, however, the Buddha is reported as saying that vedanā may be due to bile, phlegm or
wind, due to an imbalance of these humours or to their union, to a change in season, to some
acute cause, or it may be the result of karma, and hence:81

yaṃ kiñcāyaṃ purisapuggalo paṭisaṃvediyati sukhaṃ vā dukkhaṃ vā adukkhamasukhaṃ vā

sabbantaṃ pubbekatahetu’ti yañca sāmaṃ ñātaṃ tañca atidhāvanti, yañca loke saccasammataṃ
tañca atidhāvanti, tasmā nesaṃ samaṇabrāhmaṇānaṃ micchā’ti vadāmi.

Saying, ‘whatever a person experiences, pleasant, unpleasant or neither, all this is caused by what
was done in the past,’ they exceed what is known by oneself, they exceed what is considered true
in the world; therefore I say that those renunciates and brāhmaṇas are wrong.

80
Vetter 1988:92; Ñāṇavīra 1987:17; Bodhi 1998b:167–9.
81
S 36:21 (iv.230).

26
The renunciates referred to in this sutta are to be understood as Jains, since elsewhere they are
referred to as teaching that the hedonic quality of experience is the result of past karma.82 The
Pali commentaries are in fact aware of the inconsistency involved in stating that vedanā is the
result of past karma,83 but their metaphysics seem already to have moved towards the Jain
point of view in the interpretation of vedanā as part of the result-process of the previous life.84
The traditional Buddhist interpretation of the twelve links of paṭiccasamuppāda as
applying over three lives therefore involves some distinct developments in interpretation. The
general and logical conception of conditionality found in the suttas has become a formalised
causal theory, with the karmic causality providing the overall dynamic of the formula. Avijjā
and saṅkhāra especially are attributed a karmic efficacy not evident in the suttas. The
definitions of jāti and jarāmaraṇa are restricted to specific individual existences rather than
having the most general unspecified application. And the vedanā of paṭiccasamuppāda are
interpreted as results of past karma despite this interpretation nearing the wrong views of the
Jains. This is not to say that the Abhidharmic interpretation of the twelve-fold
paṭiccasamuppāda is mistaken or indefensible; indeed, the fact that the early Buddhists had to
develop a coherent interpretive framework for paṭiccasamuppāda shows that the meaning of
the formula was an issue from earliest times.

limit-conditions to Jurewiczʼs proposal

While the Abhidharmic interpretation of paṭiccasamuppāda restricts the application of

the twelve links to an explanation of the individual rebirth process, the twelve links in the
suttas preserve an openness and ambiguity that resists such a definite metaphysical reading,85
and this opens up the possibility that the Buddha also taught paṭiccasamuppāda as a parody of
Vedic cosmogony. It also raises the question of why the Buddhist tradition so completely

82
M 101 (ii.214).
83
Bodhi 1998b:168.
84
Vetter 1988:92. This is not to say that the later Buddhist view of karma is incompatible with the Buddha’s
teaching, only that it requires a particular exegesis of the early teaching to achieve, and this exegesis developed
later.
85
Wayman 1980 explores two interpretations of dependent origination, impersonal/cosmic, and
personal/individual, that are never explicitly distinguished in the earliest sources.

27
focussed on one aspect of the paṭiccasamuppāda. Part of the answer might be that, as Richard
Gombrich shows, the Buddhist tradition at an early date lost any sense of the play of myth and
parody in the Buddha’s teaching,86 as well as awareness of the teaching’s historical context.87
However, the ambiguity of paṭiccasamuppāda also implies that from earliest times the twelve
links were to some extent understood as applying to the rebirth process of the individual. If
the paṭiccasamuppāda were intended as a cosmogonic parody, it could not therefore have
been meant wholly so. This is important for a Buddhological perspective on Jurewicz’s
proposal, and establishes a first distinct limit for its possibility. The interpretation of
paṭiccasamuppāda as a parody of Vedic cosmogony can only be part of the Buddha’s
intended meaning.
There is a second limit to the possibility of Jurewicz’s proposal. This limit depends
not on a consideration of traditional interpretation but on the results of modern scholarship. It
is that the twelve links of paṭiccasamuppāda are most likely a relatively late development in
the Buddhist doctrine. This being the case, parodying Vedic cosmogony (assuming such to
have been the Buddha’s aim) might have been a distinct and later development in the
Buddha’s teaching. The second limit for the possibility of Jurewicz’s proposal is therefore
that parodying Brahmanical ideas was unlikely to have been the Buddha’s first intention when
formulating paṭiccasamuppāda. However, a possible implication of this second limit is that
the formulation specifically of the twelve links may indeed have been motivated (though, by
the first limit, not wholly) by the intention to parody Vedic ideas. While the first limit restricts
the possibility of Jurewicz’s proposal to being only part of what the Buddha intended in the
twelve-fold paṭiccasamuppāda, the second limit suggests that there may have been a creative
process of development whereby the Buddha’s teaching of paṭiccasamuppāda was used
against the Brahmanical paradigm of the creative ātman. But such suggestions first require a
fuller exploration of how the twelve-fold nidāna chain might have developed.88

86
Gombrich 2009 (forthcoming), ch. 9.
87
Gombrich 1996:66
88
The fact that the term paṭiccasamuppāda refers to a general principle of conditionality as well as to the various
chain of nidānas is further evidence for this second limit-condition; I will return to paṭiccasamuppāda as a
principle in part 3.

28
origins of the twelve-fold chain

The Pali discourses make different statements about when the Buddha discovered
paṭiccasamuppāda. In several suttas, the Buddha is said to have discovered the truths
expressed in the twelve links prior to his awakening:89

pubbeva me bhikkhave sambodhā anabhisambuddhassa bodhisattasseva sato etadahosi: kicchaṃ

vatāyaṃ loko āpanno jāyati ca jīyati ca mīyati ca cavati ca upapajjati ca. atha ca panimassa
dukkhassa nissaraṇaṃ nappajānāti jarāmaraṇassa. kudāssu nāma imassa dukkhassa nissaraṇaṃ
paññāyissati jarāmaraṇassā’ti. tassa mayhaṃ, bhikkhave, etadahosi: kimhi nu kho sati
jarāmaraṇaṃ hoti, kiṃpaccayā jarāmaraṇan’ti? tassa mayhaṃ, bhikkhave, yoniso manasikārā ahu
paññāya abhisamayo – jātiyā kho sati jarāmaraṇaṃ hoti, jātipaccayā jarāmaraṇan’ti…

Before my awakening, monks, when I was still an unawakened bodhisatta, the thought occurred to
me: indeed, how this world is fallen; it is born, it ages, dies, falls and arises; but it discerns no
escape from this pain, this aging-and-death. But surely an escape is to be discerned from this pain,
this aging-and-death. Then, monks, it occurred to me to ask: when what exists does aging-and-
death exist, from what as condition is there aging-and-death? Then, monks, through paying creative
attention I realized through insight that when there is birth there is aging-and-death, from birth as
condition, aging-and-death…

And so on, back through all the links. Indeed, all the former Buddhas are also said to have
undergone the same pre-awakening realisation.90 This realisation is presented as initiating a
train of thought for the bodhisatta that leads to awakening, and this presentation, beginning
with the stock phrase, ‘before my awakening, monks, when I was still an unawakened
bodhisatta’,91 is repeated in other suttas for several different trains of thought.92

89
S 12:10 (ii.10); S 12:65 (ii.104); Lamotte 1980:121–3.
90
S 12:4–9 (ii.4–9).
91
pubb’eva me bhikkhave sambodhā anabhisambuddhassa bodhisattass’eva sato etad ahosi.
92
M 4 (i.17) (fear of the jungle); M 19 (i.114) (two kinds of thoughts); M 26 (i.163) (the noble quest); S 22.26
(iii.27) (relish, danger and escape in regard to the five khandhas); S 35:13 (iv.6–7) (relish, danger and escape in
regard to the six senses); S 35:117 (iv.97) (on sense-pleasures); S 36:24 (iv.233) (on vedanā); S 51:11 (v.263)
(on iddhipādas); A 3:101 (i.258) (relish, danger and escape in regard to the world); A 5:196 (iii.240) (some
dreams).

29
 Other Pali discourses record that the Buddha contemplated the twelve links one week
after his awakening:93

evaṃ me sutaṃ: ekaṃ samayaṃ bhagavā uruvelāyaṃ viharati najjā nerañjarāya tīre
bodhirukkhamūle paṭhamābhisambuddho. tena kho pana samayena bhagavā sattāhaṃ
ekapallaṅkena nisinno hoti vimuttisukhapaṭisaṃvedī. atha kho bhagavā tassa sattāhassa accayena
tamhā samādhimhā vuṭṭhahitvā rattiyā paṭhamaṃ yāmaṃ paṭiccasamuppādaṃ anulomaṃ
sādhukaṃ manasākāsi…

Thus have I heard. Once the Blessed One was living at Uruvelā, on the bank of the Nerañjarā river,
at the root of the Bodhi tree, just after he had become fully awakened. Now at that time the Blessed
One sat cross-legged for seven days experiencing the bliss of liberation. Then at the end of those
seven days, the Blessed One emerged from that meditative concentration and in the first watch of
the night paid creative attention to paṭiccasamuppāda in forward order, in this way…

These texts go on to state the stock passage containing the general formula of
paṭiccasamuppāda followed by the twelve nidānas. Most later Buddhist texts, however, and
not only those of the Theravādin school, describe the Buddha’s discovery of
paṭiccasamuppāda as one of the culminating insights of the night of his awakening;94 as the
Nidānakathā puts it in brief:95

pacchimayāme paṭiccasamuppāde ñāṇam otāresi.

in the last watch of the night, he came to knowledge about paṭiccasamuppāda.

In this way, the realization of the twelve-fold paṭiccasamuppāda came to be regarded by the
Buddhist tradition as the cognitive or intellectual content of the Buddha’s experience of
awakening.
That the early sources suggest that the Buddha’s discovery of paṭiccasamuppāda
occurred both prior to his awakening and after it imply that these stories do not record
historical facts. They are rather to be read as means by which the Buddha, or the compilers of
the early discourses, emphasized the importance of the twelve links. Consequently, the later
tradition’s placing of the Buddha’s discovery of paṭiccasamuppāda during the latter part of

93
Ud 1.1 (1) (cf. Ud 1.2–3); Vin i.1–2.
94
Mv ii.285; Lv 346; Lamotte 1980:120.
95
NK i.75.

30
the night of his awakening should be considered as a literary feature rather than a historical
record, and more as a doctrinal theory about the awakening than as a description of it.96 To
look at the same situation from the perspective of the development of Buddhist doctrine, the
diversity of the accounts of the moment when the Buddha discovered paṭiccasamuppāda
allows the possibility that the discovery of the twelve-fold formulation of paṭiccasamuppāda
does not belong to the oldest accounts of the Buddha’s awakening, but is a later doctrine that
was read back into the narrative of the awakening.97
The idea that the twelve-fold paṭiccasamuppāda is the product of doctrinal
development naturally leads to the possibility that this formulation represents a combination
or synthesis of simpler lists. Erich Frauwallner noticed that the twelve-fold chain, when
understood as describing the individual’s entanglement in saṃsāra, seems to repeat itself,
explaining rebirth first through avijjā and then again through bhava. He explained this
awkwardness by supposing that the twelve-fold chain consisted initially in the links from
taṇhā to jarāmaraṇa, but that the Buddha later added the earlier links:98

Originally, the Buddha had, as the sermon of Banaras [the ‘first sermon’] teaches, considered only
thirst as the prime cause of rebirth and showed how this thirst came into existence and led to
entanglement in a new existence. Then the thought thrust itself upon him that the final cause of
entanglement in the cycle of existence must be sought in ignorance and he has developed a similar
thought-process which traced the coming into existence of rebirth to that ignorance.

Richard Gombrich has seized upon Frauwallner’s hypothesis as a means of explaining the
process by which the Buddha developed the twelve-fold chain of paṭiccasamuppāda as a
parody of Vedic cosmogony, in decisive support of Jurewicz’s proposal.99 According to this
argument, having first explained the origin of rebirth in craving, the Buddha went on to add
the earlier links, the first four being added specifically to parody Vedic ideas.

96
Using the distinction made by Schmithausen 1981:200.
97
Vetter 1988:45–53 argues that the doctrine of twelve links must have developed after that of the four noble
truths; cf. Schmithausen 1981: 211–2.
98
Frauwallner 1973:167; in German in Frauwallner 1953:1,211; summarised in Collins 1982:108.
99
Gombrich 2009 ch.9 (forthcoming).

31
 An unfortunate weakness of Frauwallner’s hypothesis is that there is no textual
evidence to support it. It is true that there are discourses in the Nidāna-saṃyutta that present
the paṭiccasamuppāda chain from taṇhā to jarāmaraṇa, for instance:100

upādāniyesu bhikkhave dhammesu assādānupassino viharato taṇhā pavaḍḍhati. taṇhāpaccayā

upādānaṃ. upādānapaccayā bhavo. bhavapaccayā jāti. jātipaccayā jarāmaraṇaṃ
sokaparidevadukkhadomanassupāyāsā sambhavanti. evam etassa kevalassa dukkhakkhandhassa
samudayo hoti.

Monks, for someone living absorbed in the enjoyment of things to which one can cling, craving
increases. From craving as condition, there is clinging; from clinging as condition, there is
existence; from existence as condition, there is birth; from birth as condition, aging-and-death,
grief, lamentation, pain, misery and despair come to be. Thus is arisen this whole mass of pain.

This discourse, and its variations, indeed explain rebirth as originating in taṇhā. However,
other accompanying discourses repeat the same themes with the same similes and include
links prior to taṇhā.101 This leads to the observation that the discourses presenting links from
taṇhā to jarāmaraṇa might just as well be regarded as presenting shortened versions of the
full twelve-fold chain as presenting an original short chain from which the twelve-fold
version was made with the addition of earlier links. Consequently, the shorter sequence has no
particular claim to relative antiquity, and therefore cannot form a basis for deductions about
the composition of the longer chain.
Another disadvantage of Frauwallner’s hypothesis is its unfortunate consequence. The
addition of links to the supposedly older chain beginning from taṇhā creates a twelve-fold
chain that explains rebirth twice but does not reconcile the explanations. Frauwallner remarks:

the deficiency in systematization, the inability to mix different views and principles into a great
unity was perhaps the greatest weakness of Buddha… It is also, however, to be considered whether
it was not psychologically impossible for the Buddha to annul or to replace the knowledge which

100
S 12:52 (ii.84–5). S 12:53 (ii.86) is identical but with saññojaniyesu (obstacles) instead of upādāniyesu; S
12:55 (ii.87–8), S 12:57 (ii.89–90) and S 12:60 (ii.92–3) repeats S 12:52, but follows the quoted passage with
similes of trees rather than of fire.
101
S 12:58 (ii.90–1), S 12:59 (ii.59).

32
 had come before him in the hour of enlightenment and which had become an unwavering certainty
to him.102

Since in fact there is no evidence for Frauwallner’s hypothesis, it would seem more just to
suppose that the hypothesis is lacking than that the Buddha was such an inferior thinker. Such
an unfortunate consequence is anyway avoided by the proposal (unknown to Frauwallner) that
the full twelve-fold formulation is a parody of Vedic ideas. That the Buddha did not bother to
reconcile two different explanations of rebirth matters less if the explanation presented first –
that rebirth has its condition in avijjā and saṅkhāra – is designed to parody Brahmanical
cosmogony rather than to be absolutely convincing as systematic doctrine.
Though there is no evidence to support Frauwallner’s hypothesis directly, the
supposition that it embodies – that the twelve-fold formulation of paṭiccasamuppāda is a later
doctrine representing some combination or development of earlier, simpler formulations –
remains possible, and hence the possibility that such a composite doctrine was designed as a
parody. Roderick Bucknell has analysed the various longer versions of the paṭiccasamuppāda
chain much more convincingly than Frauwallner, and reconstructed the process by which the
standard twelve-fold version arose.103 However, his reconstruction presently requires more
evidence.104 I propose here to reconstruct the formation of the twelve-fold paṭiccasamuppāda
in a different and simpler way, by observing variations in presentation of the chain in the
early discourses.
Let us first observe that the twelve-fold formulation of paṭiccasamuppāda is not found
at all in the Dīgha Nikāya,105 and that the majority of its occurrences are in the Nidāna-
saṃyutta of the Saṃyutta Nikāya.106 This means that the version that became standardized in
the later Buddhist tradition was not regarded as standard by the early reciters. There is some
confirmation of the diversity of early formulations of paṭiccasamuppāda in recent

102
Frauwallner 1973:168.
103
Bucknell 1999.
104
Bucknell 1999:341 acknowledges that his account implies a ‘remarkably early and drastic hiatus in the
transmission’ of the doctrine of paṭiccasamuppāda, in that nāma-rūpa had to undergo a change of meaning, from
the world of sense experience to the individual’s mind and body. Such a hiatus would itself need to be explained
if his reconstruction were to be considered more than hypothetical.
105
At D 14 (ii.31ff.) and D 15 (ii.55ff.) the Buddha presents paṭiccasamuppāda without mentioning the first two
nidānas. Norman 1983:37 suggests that missing out avijjā & saṅkhāra ‘represents the traditional view of the
Dīgha-bhāṇakas’.
106
See e.g. n.57 above.

33
scholarship. Mun-Keat Choong has shown in his comparison of the Saṃyutta Nikāya with the
Chinese Saṃyuktāgama that the various formulations of paṭiccasamuppāda in those
collections are largely shared, and hence existed before the divergence of the Sarvāstivāda
and Vibhajjavāda traditions.107 This suggests that in early Buddhism the chain may have been
understood as consisting not in a definite number of dependently-arisen terms but as a flexible
mode of presentation, using five, nine, ten or twelve links, of various terms in the Buddha’s
teaching. Rather than asking how the twelve-fold formulation came to be constituted from
smaller units, the historical problem should therefore be re-framed as that of explaining how it
came to be regarded as standard. That it presented a popular and effective parody of Vedic
cosmogony, as Jurewicz suggests, may be part of the answer.
The implication of this approach is that earlier and shorter presentations of the
paṭiccasamuppāda chain may not have been intended to parody Vedic ideas at all. This
implication is borne out by a consideration of the Kalahavivāda sutta of the Suttanipāta.108
This discourse belongs to the Aṭṭhaka-vagga, which might well be a record of the Buddha’s
teaching at an early stage in its development.109 Hajime Nakamura has demonstrated how it
sets forth what appears to be a primitive version of the paṭiccasamuppāda chain, interspersed
with disorganized explanations of social ills, in the form of answers to questions concerning
the origins of various forms of dukkha.110 The form of presentation prefigures the ‘discovery’
sequence of paṭiccasamuppāda, in which the Buddha is represented as asking, ‘does X have a
condition?’, then discovering X’s condition, and then asking the same question for that
condition, and so on.111 The sequence starts from the question kuto pahūtā kalahā vivādā –
‘Where do quarrels and disputes come from?’112 Extracts from the answers to this and the
following questions show their structure in relation to the later paṭiccasamuppāda chain:

107
Choong 2000:204.
108
Sn vv.862–77 (168–71).
109
Dating discussed in Norman 2001:xxxii; Vetter 1990:50–1 disputes the antiquity of the Kalahavivāda sutta,
but his argument that six of the suttas of the Aṭṭhaka-vagga are ‘non-Buddhist’ is too difficult to discuss here.
110
Nakamura 1980; also La Vallée Poussin 1913:3.
111
D 15 (ii.55ff); S 12:10 (ii.10–11); 12:23 (ii.29); 12:24 (ii.36–7); 12:51 (ii.81–2); 12:65 (ii.104–5); the
‘discovery’ sequence is discussed by Wayman 1980:280–1, Yamada 1980:268–71 and Cox 1993:139, and
contrasted with the ‘presentation’ sequence beginning with avijjā.
112
Sn v.862 (168).

34
 piyā pahūtā kalahā vivādā | paridevasokā sahamaccharā ca…113

Quarrels and disputes come from what is dear;

lamenting and grief, together with self-seeking;…

chandānidānāni piyāni loke | ye vā pi lobhā vicaranti loke…114

These things held dear have their source in desire –

whatever longings that wander the earth;…

sātaṃ asātan’ ti yam āhu loke | tam ūpanissāya pahoti chando…115

Desire arises in dependence on what

is called pleasant and unpleasant in the world;…

phassanidānaṃ sātaṃ asātaṃ | phasse asante na bhavanti h’ete…116

The pleasant and the unpleasant have their source in contact;

when there is no contact they do not come to be…

nāmañ ca rūpañ ca paṭicca phassā | icchānidānāni pariggahāni…117

Contacts are dependent on name and form;

acquiring has its source in wanting…

The various terms used here are not the technical terms found in the four main nikāyas.
Indeed, the lack of systematic nikāya terminology and doctrine in the Aṭṭhaka-vagga is part of
the reason for supposing that its composition came first.118 But this sutta’s ideas can be
matched with the familiar, and presumably later, terminology thus:119

113
Sn v.863 (163).
114
Sn v.865 (169).
115
Sn v.867 (169).
116
Sn v.870 (169–70).
117
Sn v.872 (170).
118
Norman 1983:69.
119
Nakamura 1980:170.

35
 kalahavivāda (quarrels and disputes) = bhava (existence)120
piya (what is dear) = upādāna (clinging)
chanda (desire) = taṇhā (craving)
sāta, asāta (pleasant, unpleasant) = vedanā (feeling)
phassa (contact) = phassa (contact)
nāmañ ca rūpan ca (name and form) = nāma-rūpa (name-and-form)121

Given the existence of the paṭiccasamuppāda chain in this primitive form, the hypothesis by
Frauwallner of a primordial form of the chain starting from taṇhā, looks to be disproved,
since the Kalahavivāda sutta’s chain already embeds craving in a dependently-arisen
perceptual and affective structure.
The relatively unsystematic nature of this sequence implies that it preserves a form of
paṭiccasamuppāda that existed prior to the standardized chains. Despite its primitive
structure, however, it conveys many of the forms of words used to express how one thing
arises dependent upon another: things dear have their nidāna (source) in desire; desire arises
upanissa (reliant) upon pleasant and unpleasant; contact is paṭicca (dependent) on name-and-
form; and, most importantly, when there is no contact (phasse asante), pleasant and
unpleasant do not exist – the locative absolute construction of the (presumably later) general
formula of paṭiccasamuppāda.122
The Kalahavivāda sutta thus shows that a primitive version of the paṭiccasamuppāda
chain belongs to the earliest known Buddhism. However, this version is not concerned with
rebirth according to karma, and nor does it appear to be concerned with parodying
cosmogonic ideas. It simply concerns the arising of dukkha through a cognitive process in
which the hedonic properties of experience lead to reactive greed, emotional entanglement,
and all the ills of the human situation. This is strong evidence to support my conception of a
second limit to the possibility of Jurewicz’s proposal, that the Buddha’s teaching of

120
Kalahavivāda is not really equivalent to bhava, but might be said to represent painful aspects of existence in
actuality rather than abstractly, especially when considered together with parideva (lamenting), soka (grief),
mānātimānā (pride and arrogance), and pesuṇa (slander) as in Sn v.862 (168); Nakamura 1980:170.
121
We can additionally cite the dependence of nāma-rūpa on viññāṇa from the Pārāyana-vagga at Sn v.1037
(198); Nakamura 1980:171.
122
Nakamura 1980:171.

36
paṭiccasamuppāda was not initially designed to parody Vedic ideas, but that the formulation
of the twelve-fold chain may have been prompted by that aim.

development of the twelve-fold chain

I have explored two limits to the possibility of Jurewicz’s proposal. Firstly, because
the twelve-fold chain can be understood as explaining individual rebirth, it cannot only be
concerned with parodying Vedic cosmogony. Secondly, because the twelve-fold chain was a
development within the development of early Buddhism, and the earliest recorded chain is not
concerned with parodying Vedic cosmogony, paṭiccasamuppāda was not originally a parody
of Vedic ideas. Given these limits, it remains possible that the twelve-fold chain developed at
least partly in order to parody Brahmanical ideas. What follows is simply a first attempt to
gather evidence towards showing that such a development actually took place. The
conclusion, I think, must be that the twelve-fold paṭiccasamuppāda is not a parody of Vedic
cosmogony in any straightforward sense. Rather, it is a parody in the sense that the
pragmatics of the Buddha’s path consist in a reversal of the individual’s process of ‘creation’
(of dukkha) – a ‘creation’ described in opposition to Brahmanical soteriology, conceived as
the individual’s retracing of the cosmogonic process, hence leading back from the manifest
world to the truth of ātman and brahman.
The Dvayatānupassanā sutta is perhaps not among the oldest discourses of the
Suttanipāta, but nevertheless seems to contain ideas not yet given systematic form. Most of
the terms of the twelve-fold paṭiccasamuppāda occur in this sutta, but they are not arranged in
a dependent series.123 Each of them is said, in prose sections of the discourse, to be the origin
of dukkha, and the cessation of each is said to be the cessation of dukkha:

yaṃ kiñci dukkhaṃ sambhoti sabbaṃ avijjāpaccaya [pe]… avijjāya [pe] tveva asesavirāganirodhā
natthi dukkhassa sambhavo

123
Sn 3:12 vv.724–65 pp.139–49; Bucknell 1999:318; La Vallée Poussin 1913:1–5; Collins 1982:108. La Vallée
Poussin regards the Dvayatānupassanā Sutta as the source of the paṭiccasamuppāda series: ‘It is very probable
that the paticcasamuppāda system, elaborately defined in so many suttas, is only a recast of this primitive
fragment of Abhidhamma’ (La Vallée Poussin 1907:453). This opinion assumes that the sutta in question pre-
dates all other formulations of paṭiccasamuppāda, but this assumption seems speculative and unlikely.

37
 Whatever pain arises, all of it has ignorance [etc.] as its condition… from the fading away and
cessation without remainder of just this ignorance [etc.] there is no arising of pain.

That is to say, the Dvayatānupassanā sutta certainly concerns paṭiccasamuppāda – in that it

describes the conditions for the arising of dukkha, and how that dukkha ceases with the
cessation of those conditions, but it does not link these conditions into a dependently-arisen
chain.124 Verse sections of the discourse expand poetically on the relation of each term to
dukkha and to the cessation of dukkha. I will focus here on the first four terms of the twelve-
fold paṭiccasamuppāda chain.
Avijjā is described as a force responsible for repeated birth and death:125

jātimaraṇasaṃsāraṃ ye vajanti punappunaṃ

itthabhāvaññathābhāvaṃ avijjāyeva sā gati

avijjā hayaṃ mahāmoho yenidaṃ saṃsitaṃ ciraṃ

vijjāgatāva ye sattā nāgacchanti punabbhavanti

Those turning with the rolling-on of birth and death time and again
to states of being here and there – it’s just ignorance on the move.

This ignorance is great delusion by which existence rolled along;

but those who have learned wisdom – they will not come to live again.

This force is called ‘great delusion’ (mahāmoha), and this delusion appears to have acquired,
presumably as a poetic conceit, a quasi-cosmic creative force. These verses add considerably
to the evidence that the Buddha intended at least the first four links of the twelve-fold
paṭiccasamuppāda to parody Vedic cosmogony. Beings have been self-created through a
cognitive process characterized by ignorance: an ironic re-telling of the Brahmanical story of
the manifestation of the ātman. The Buddhist discourse goes on to say that beings that have
attained knowledge (vijjā) do not come to further existence.126

124
M 9 (i.46ff.) also defines all twelve of the links of the standard paṭiccasamuppāda chain but without linking
them. In this sense it resembles Sn 3:12. However, its definitions are identical to those at S 12:2 (ii.2ff.), whose
definitions follow the exposition of the standard twelve-fold chain.
125
Sn vv.729–30 (142).
126
Sn v.730 (142).

38
 The discourse does not do more than explain that all dukkha has the saṅkhāras as its
condition, without hinting at any cosmogonic function for the saṅkhāras.127 However, in a
later verse, saṅkhāras are described as synonymous with iñjita and eja,128 which Norman
translates as ‘commotion’ and ‘emotion’, attempting a word-play on the verbal roots √iñj and
√ej, both meaning ‘move’.129 What is ‘built up’ is thus just agitation, and any cosmogonic
resonance in saṅkhāra is negative. The calming (samatha) of all the saṅkhāras, which is
equated with the stopping of apperceptions (saññāya uparodhana), is described as the
destroying (khaya) of dukkha.130
By the calming of consciousness (viññāṇūpasama) a monk is without craving
(nicchāta) and quenched (parinibbuta).131 This verse thus evokes the simile of fire in relation
to viññāṇa, since parinibbuta literally means the ‘being blown out’ of a flame. This simile is
described by Richard Gombrich as a parody of Brahmanical thinking concerning creation and
the maintenance of the ritual fire.132 In the Mahātaṇhāsaṅkhāya sutta the Buddha likens
consciousness to a fire that burns dependent on sense-objects;133 and in the Ādittapariyāya
sutta the simile is given moral force when the Buddha describes everything, including sense-
experience, sense-consciousness and sense-objects as being on fire with the fires of greed,
hate and delusion.134 The ‘quenching’ of such a fire is therefore the reversal of a creative
process by the fiery ātman that the Buddha has revisioned in merely negative terms.
The term nāma-rūpa does not occur as one of the items that is said to be the condition
for dukkha, but occurs later in the discourse in relation to the belief in ātman, which has
perhaps been implied all along:135

anattani attamānaṃ passa lokaṃ sadevakam

niviṭṭhaṃ nāmarūpasmiṃ, ‘idaṃ saccan’ ti maññati

See the world, with its devas, thinking there is self in what does not have it,

127
Sn v.731 (142).
128
Sn v.751 (146).
129
Norman 2001:99, 319; DP 367, 543: both iñjati and ejati are glossed kampane in Pali word-lists.
130
Sn v.732 (142).
131
Sn v.735 (143).
132
Gombrich 1996:65–72.
133
M 38 (i.259–60); Gombrich 1996:48; Gombrich 2009 ch.8 (forthcoming).
134
S 35:28 (iv.19). One who has understood (abhisamaya) contact (phassa) and destroyed (khaya) feeling
(vedanā) is also quenched (parinibbuta): Sn vv.737,739.
135
Sn v.756 (147).

39
 ensconced in name-and-form, thinking it is what’s real.

The implication is that being ensconced in nāma-rūpa, believing it to be what is real (sacca),
follows from the belief in ātman.136 By contrast, nibbāna does not have deluding nature, and
one is quenched (parinibbuta) who has understood (abhisamaya) what is real (sacca).137 The
Buddha’s soteriology is here fairly explicitly contrasted with that taught in the Upaniṣads.
The Dvayatānupassana sutta therefore shows that the first four terms of what became
the twelve-fold paṭiccasamuppāda chain are likely to have been connected to a subtle but
constant ironic play on Brahmanical concepts. The cosmogonic terms viññāṇa and nāma-rūpa
are described merely as creating dukkha, while the cessation of avijjā, saṅkhāra and viññāṇa
is the ceasing of what has been created. Nāma-rūpa is described as the arena in which the
ātman establishes its false existence.
My proposal regarding the development of the twelve-fold paṭiccasamuppāda chain is
that it represents the addition of the terms as discussed in the Dvayatānupassana sutta to a
more primitive chain that was already in existence, such as that recorded by the Kalahavivāda
sutta. This primitive chain represents the Buddha’s non-ironic account of a cognitive process
whereby the human situation, characterized as dukkha, arises on condition of cognition, based
on viññāṇa and nāma-rūpa, a subject and a manifest objective world. Such a chain, beginning
from the interdependence of viññāṇa and nāma-rūpa, evidently developed into the form of a
paṭiccasamuppāda chain consisting in nine or ten links found in the Dīgha Nikāya and
elsewhere, and there is no need to suppose that this chain intends to parody Vedic
cosmogony.
The addition of avijjā and saṅkhāra to the beginning of this chain emphasizes how the
Buddha had already changed the meaning of viññāṇa and nāma-rūpa from evolutes of ātman,
as the Vedic cosmogony has it, to functional concepts that explain the arising of dukkha. The
twelve-fold chain remains a positive account of a cognitive process leading to dukkha, though
now extended back to primal ignorance, and courting incoherence in its additional
explanation of rebirth. But at the same time it contrives to be an ironic cosmogony, a parody,
of the Brahmanical ātman, now shown to be imagined through ignorance (avijjā), built up

136
At BU 1.4.7, the ātman has entered into and hidden itself in the world of nāma-rūpa, and hence this world
ātmety evopāsita, should simply be considered as the Self.
137
Sn v.758 (148).

40
(saṅkhāra) by mistake, and falsely postulated as the real subject ‘behind’ the consciousness
(viññāṇa) immersed in its manifest world (nāma-rūpa). This parody is not the primary
significance of the twelve-fold chain, but an additional resonance felt, as Jurewicz imagines,
by an audience familiar with Brahmanical teachings.

cosmogony and meditation

I will conclude with a suggestion about how the twelve-fold paṭiccasamuppāda might
originally have been received by the Buddhas’s followers. Alexander Wynne has recently
attempted to demonstrate how Buddhist meditation developed from pre-existing traditions of
Brahmanical yoga.138 He argues that the conceptual background to the element meditation of
Brahmanism was the cosmological thought evident in the Vedanta, going back to the
Nasādiya Sūkta (RV 10.129).139 That is, the non-Buddhist yogins aimed to undo the process
of creation in their meditation practice, to find their way back to the brahman, the self-
cognizing Absolute behind or at the heart of things. The Buddha, Wynne argues, learned
meditation from teachers versed in such an approach, achieving the states of ākiñcañña
(nothingness) following Āḷāra Kālāma and naivasaṃjñānāsaṃjñāyatana (the realm of neither
perception nor non-perception) following Uddaka Rāmaputta, states which are equivalent to
the realization of the ātman.140 The Buddha rejected the cosmology but not all of the
meditations, some of which, such as the meditation on the six elements, remained part of the
Buddhist tradition’s repertoire of techniques.141
My suggestion is that the Buddha, in formulating the twelve-fold paṭiccasamuppāda
chain, was creating a structure for contemplation in the same way as his Brahmanical
contemporaries, with the aim of systematically reversing the process of creation in order to
find the truth at the heart of and behind the trouble and strife of the world; except that the
Buddha’s parodic cosmogony ultimately returned the meditator simply to the avijjā and
delusion from which only dukkha had ever arisen. Having encountered this truth at the heart

138
Wynne 2007.
139
Wynne 2007:39.
140
Wynne 2007:42ff.
141
Wynne 2007:35–6.

41
of things, the meditator would then indeed embark on the process of cessation of this same
creation, replacing ignorance with knowledge, and so on, seeing through the ātman that had
falsely postulated its own existence.
If the Buddha had learned about ideas concerning cosmogony and meditation from his
first teachers, it is likely that the presentation of his own dhamma should from the beginning
have been engaged in debate about such matters. In the next part of my study I will discuss
more broadly the intellectual context of the Buddha’s teaching in order to place
paṭiccasamuppāda more precisely in debates of the Buddha’s day.

42
part 2: the Buddhaʼs intellectual context

An assumption made by Jurewicz’s proposal is that the Buddha was familiar enough
with certain specific Brahmanical ideas to parody them. It might reasonably be asked whether
in fact it is likely that the Buddha knew the particular Vedic texts that Jurewicz cites. After
all, the Buddhist tradition holds that he was from a khattiya background,142 and therefore had
not had the long education by which brahmaṇas learned the Vedas. It is unlikely that he knew
Sanskrit.
An initial survey of the early discourses shows the Buddha as a well-informed outsider
regarding the Vedic tradition. He is represented as knowing about certain rituals of the
brahmaṇas and as contrasting his dhamma with Vedic ritualism.143 He is also represented as
knowing about the texts and mantras of the brahmaṇas,144 and as mocking their beliefs145 and
deities.146 But all this does not seem to stop the Buddha from positive engagement with
brahmaṇas: he is represented, for example, as someone to whom two young brahmaṇas have
recourse over a disagreement concerning brahmuno sahavyatāya maggo, ‘the way to union
with Brahmā’; the Buddha advises them that the way to do so is to pervade the entire world
with a mind of boundless mettā, karunā, muditā and upekkha.147 Of course, the idea of
brahmaṇas going to the Buddha for advice on such a matter suggests that the text is a literary
polemic, but it only works as such if the Buddha was supposed to have been knowledgeable
about Vedic teachings.

142
D 14 (ii.3).
143
E.g. A 10:176 (v.263), in which Cunda tells the Buddha of western brahmaṇas who carry water pots and
recommend purification rites such as touching earth and fresh cow dung, fire-worship, sun-worship and ritual
bathing. The Buddha by contrast recommends keeping ten ethical precepts, including not killing, not stealing,
not lying, etc.
144
E.g. at M 95 (ii.170), in which the Buddha is familiar enough with the Vedas to converse with a young
brahmaṇa who is a master in the Vedic sciences, and to ask him about the ten Vedic ṛṣis.
145
brahmaṇas believe they are born from the mouth of Brahmā, but in fact they are born from their mothers’
wombs like everyone else (M 93 (ii.148)).
146
The Buddha represents the supposed creator, Brahmā, as a deluded non-creator (D 1 (i.18–9)), and as
supremely arrogant (DN 11 (i.211–23)).
147
D 13 (i.251). These four are elsewhere called brahmāvihāras, e.g. at Sn 1:8 vv.143–52 for mettā.

43
 Some scholarship suggests the Buddha had a good knowledge of some Vedic texts.
Richard Gombrich has devoted a paper to showing how the Buddha is presented in the
Aggañña sutta148 as parodying Brahmanical ideas about the origins of society and of the four
varṇas.149 Gombrich catches allusions to RV 10.129, BU 1.2 and BU 1.4, texts I have
discussed above in relation to cosmogonic ideas possibly parodied in the twelve-fold
paṭiccasamuppāda. If Gombrich is right, it adds considerable plausibility to Jurewicz’s
proposal. However, I have tried to show that there is no straightforward evidence, such as
textual allusions, to show that the twelve-fold chain was intended to parody Vedic
cosmogony; instead, my research suggests a more subtle exploitation by the Buddha of ideas
his audience shared, in the context of a pragmatic meditative reversal of the arising of dukkha.
But even this suggestion relies on the assumption that his hearers would have been familiar
with cosmogonic ideas that have come down to us in the form of Vedic texts, and so the
question remains of the degree to which the Buddha was familiar with those texts.
Johannes Bronkhorst has recently discussed this issue,150 concluding that no evidence
has yet been presented to convince him that the early Upaniṣads were known to the authors of
the early Buddhist texts. Bronkhorst takes issue, for instance, with K.R. Norman, who has
written concerning the passage etaṃ mama, eso’ham asmi, esa me attā, ‘that is mine, I am
that, that is my attā’ in the Alagaddūpama sutta:151

The idea that the world and the ātman (= brahman) are the same is found in the Upaniṣads, and it is
possible to find actual verbal echoes of the Upaniṣads in this passage, e.g. eṣa ma ātmā (Chand.
Up. III 14.3–4)… In contrast to this false view the Buddha states that someone who is cognizant
with the ariya-dhamma looks at rūpa, etc., with the thought: na etaṃ mama, n’eso’ham asmi, na
m’eso attā, “That is not mine, I am not that, that is not my attā”.

Bronkhorst argues that, whereas the Chāndogya passage concerns brahman, there is no
mention of brahman in the Alagaddūpama sutta, and that the Buddhists are more widely
criticizing a notion of the ātman as immutable, which is connected with the theme of rebirth,
whereas the Upaniṣad has no such theme. He concludes that the Alagaddūpama sutta does not

148
D 27 (iii.80–98).
149
Gombrich 1992; the Aggañña sutta has also been studied by Collins 1993.
150
Bronkhorst 2007:207–18.
151
Norman 1991:201, in reference to M 22 (i.135).

44
contain an ‘actual verbal echo’ of an Upaniṣad, but instead that both the sutta and the
Upaniṣad are parallel positions concerning a notion of an immutable ātman that was current in
the spiritual culture of ‘Greater Magadha’ at the time these texts were composed.152
The existence of such a spiritual culture is the hypothesis behind Bronkhorst’s
argument. His claim is that Buddhism and Jainism did not, as has hitherto been thought,
develop against a background of Brahmanical ideas as formulated in the Upaniṣads, but
within the pre-existing spiritual culture of Greater Magadha; and that the Upaniṣads were to
some extent likewise the reaction of Brahmanical thinkers to this culture.153 Bronkhorst
claims that the fundamental feature of this culture is the belief in rebirth and karmic
retribution, an ideology preceding the rise of Buddhism and Jainism, and existing
independently of Vedic thought.154 However, as Bronkhorst admits, the existence for this
culture and its ideology is an inference from Buddhist and Jaina texts155 – which is to say that
it is a hypothesis based on the interpretation of evidence.
Bronkhorst’s hypothesis concerning the spiritual culture of Greater Magadha is
somewhat at odds with Richard Gombrich’s hypothesis that the Buddha’s teaching is a
response to Brahmanical thought as found in the early Upaniṣads.156 Hence Bronkhorst
engages in detailed criticism of some of Gombrich’s claims to have found allusions to Vedic
and Upaniṣadic passages in early Buddhist texts,157 preferring to find, as in his criticism of
K.R. Norman above, mere parallels between Buddhist and Upaniṣadic passages. However,
Gombrich himself is on occasion capable of the requisite caution in stating his hypothesis,158
in accordance with his explicitly Popperian method of proposing hypotheses that may require
revision in the light of evidence and criticism.159 By contrast, Bronkhorst’s method is
tendentious, consisting of selective interpretation of evidence that supports his hypothesis, or
criticism of what does not.

152
Bronkhorst 2007:217.
153
Wynne’s thesis, that the Buddha’s teachers taught ‘Upaniṣadic’ meditation and cosmology, also appears
compatible with Bronkhorst’s ideas.
154
Bronkhorst 2007:52–4.
155
Bronkhorst 2007:4.
156
Bronkhorst 2007:212, citing Gombrich 1990:14, 1996:31, 2005:152–3.
157
Bronkhorst 2007:212–8.
158
E.g. Gombrich 1992:162, in a caveat noted by Bronkhorst 2007:212–3.
159
Gombrich 1992:159; 1996:1ff.; 2009 ch.5 (forthcoming). Gombrich helped prepare Conjectures and
Refutations for publication (Popper 1963:viii).

45
 Nevertheless, Bronkhorst’s hypothesis is important as it suggests a paradigm shift,160
from the paradigm of early Buddhist teachings as a reaction to Brahmanism to a new
paradigm of both early Buddhist teachings and Brahmanical ideas competing for influence in
the culture of ‘Greater Magadha’. Thinking within such a paradigm means it is no longer
important whether definite allusions to Upaniṣadic passages can be found in the early
Buddhist discourses, and in fact such allusions show that both Buddhists and Upaniṣadic
thinkers were engaged in related topics of enquiry and debate.161
In the sections that follow I will explore three examples of topics of debate common to
both the early Buddhists and the Upaniṣadic thinkers that have not been noticed before. These
explorations will not directly concern Jurewicz’s proposal concerning paṭiccasamuppāda but
will instead reveal some of the concerns and methods of the Buddha and his philosophical
contemporaries. These revelations will later allow me to examine particular features of the
Buddha’s teaching of paṭiccasamuppāda in its intellectual context.

common topics of debate (i): ādeśa, ʻsubstituteʼ

In the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, Uddālaka Āruṇi instructs his son Śvetaketu in the
importance of ādeśa, the ‘rule of substitution’,162 by which one theme of discussion is
replaced by another:163

śvetaketo yannu saumyodaṃ mahāmanā anūcānamānī stabdho’si | uta tam ādeśam aprākṣyo
yenāśrutaṃ śrutaṃ bhavaty amataṃ matam avijñātaṃ vijñātam iti | katham nu bhagavaḥ sa ādeśo
bhavatī’ti |

‘Śvetaketu, here you are dear, big-headed, thinking yourself learned and arrogant; surely you must
have asked about that ādeśa by which one hears what has not been heard, thinks what has not been
thought, and cognizes what has not been cognized?’ ‘Sir, what is this ādeśa?’

160
In the spirit of Kuhn 1970. The test of a paradigm shift is how the new paradigm helps to shed new light on
phenomena which the previous paradigm left unexplained.
161
These themes are also explored in Samuel 2008, which I have not yet had time to study.
162
Trans. Olivelle 1998.
163
CU 6.1.4.

46
Ādeśa is a methodological procedure used by Vedic ritual sūtras in which a certain course of
action is given as a specific injunction, or substitute, in a certain general situation.164 It is also
an important grammatical term, signifying the Pāṇinian approach to explaining certain
phonological changes as the ‘replacement’ (ādeśa) of a remaining element (sthānin).165
Uddālaka applies the concept of ādeśa to speculative thought concerning the ātman. Just as
the bee gathers nectar from every tree to make one mass of honey, so the ātman is the one
essence of all beings. Nectar and ātman are ādeśas standing for many flowers and many
beings.166 Elsewhere we find ādityo brahmety ādeśaḥ: ‘the substitution of brahman for the
sun’, so that one who venerates brahman will hear cheering just like the sound heard when
the sun rises.167 Similarly, mano brahmety upāsīta, ‘brahman is the mind: thus one should
venerate’:168 this is an instruction on a method of contemplation. Patrick Olivelle notes the
close relationship between brahman (‘formulation of truth’) and this concept of ādeśa:169 the
Upaṇisadic sage comprehends reality as OṂ through mystic homologies.
I contend that the Buddha was familiar with such a concept of ādeśa. I described
above the Buddha’s teaching to two young brahmaṇas of ‘the way to union with Brahmā’.
Assuming that the Buddha understood Brahmā as the personification of brahman,170 he
therefore teaches the young brahmaṇas that developing boundless mettā, etc., is the ādeśa or
substitute for the way to Brahmā/brahman. The Buddha’s teaching is pragmatic soteriology
rather than Upaniṣadic mystic homology, but the use of ādeśa is the same, suggesting that the
concept belonged to the intellectual context of the day. The fact that ādeśa is also a term in
the grammatical tradition shows that the Buddha was a participant in wider traditions of

164
Kahrs 1998:182–3; Thieme 1968.
165
Cardona 1997:10. Kahrs 2002:25 summarises the relationship of grammatical to ritual use of ādeśa: ‘It seems
to me that it is perfectly possible to go directly from the meaning and usage of the term ādeśa in ritual texts to
understand its use in the sense of ‘substitute’. In ritual works ādeśa means ‘instruction; specification’. It is a
specific injunction, which overrules what is already there, what is “in place”, sthāne. In other words, something
automatically applies (prāpnoti) unless there is some specific instruction, ādeśa, to overrule it. In practice this
comes down to ‘substitute’, and the usage of the term ādeśa in grammar is accordingly nothing more than a
special application of its liturgical use.’
166
CU 6.9 – though I am not sure if I have understood the meaning correctly.
167
CU 3.19.1.
168
CU 3.18.1.
169
Olivelle 1996:214.
170
Gombrich 1996:21, and 32, where Gombrich describes belief in Brahmā as a ‘less sophisticated’ form of the
doctrine of brahman as the hidden truth of the universe.

47
Indian thought.171 Such participation might give us a model for considering the extent and
significance of the Buddha’s knowledge of Brahmanical thinking. The Buddha may or may
not have been familiar with specific Vedic texts, but he was immersed in an intellectual
context and a system of ideas and arguments from which both his own and Brahmanical
thinking developed their distinctive emphases.
In another discourse,172 the Buddha encounters the householder Sigālaka, who has
performed ritual ablutions and is about to worship the six directions, in accordance with his
late father’s wishes. The Buddha, without dissuading him from his piety, gives him specific
instructions on the meaning of this worship in terms of social ethics and observances, and
these instructions could also be considered ādeśas. It is perhaps no coincidence that CU
3.4.1–11 concerns the worship of the directions in relation to a structure of homologies
involving ādeśa and brahman, and that this brahman is to be imparted by a father to his
son.173 Again, the Buddha prefers practical teachings to mysticism.174

common topics of debate (ii): a story about Prajāpati and Indra

I discussed above how K.R. Norman claimed to find ‘actual verbal echoes’ of the CU
in the Alagaddūpama sutta,175 but how Johannes Bronkhorst instead sees them as parallel
passages.176 However, I will show how there appears to be another echo of the CU in this
same sutta, this time buried, as if the reciters of the discourse had already forgotten the details
of the ancient Indian intellectual context in which the Buddha had taught. If I am right, this
does not disprove Bronkhorst, but does emphasize the shared concerns and stories of the early
Buddhists and Upaniṣadic writers.

171
Kahrs 1998:175.
172
D 31 (iii.180ff).
173
CU 3.11.5; Olivelle 1996:213–5.
174
The replacement of Vedic purification rites by ethical precepts, mentioned above in n.143, may be another
example of ādeśa in the Buddha’s teaching. No doubt many more such examples could be discovered, though
ādesa does not seem to occur in the early Buddhist discourses.
175
Norman 1991:200–10.
176
Bronkhorst 2007:217.

48
 The Alagaddūpama sutta177 consists of several connected sections. In the first,178 the
Buddha corrects the monk Ariṭṭha who holds the wrong view that:

tathāhaṃ bhagavatā dhammaṃ desitaṃ ājānāmi: yathā yeme antarāyikā dhammā antarāyikā vuttā
bhagavatā, te paṭisevato n’ālaṃ antarāyāyā’ti

‘thus I understand the dhamma taught by the Blessed One: that those things called obstructive by
the Blessed One aren’t really obstacles for one who indulges them.’

The Buddha reminds Ariṭṭha how he has taught the disadvantage of pleasure (kāmā), and tells
him that by his wrong grasp of the dhamma he will experience dukkha.179 In the second
section,180 the Buddha gives the simile of the water snake: if one grasps the dhamma wrongly
one will be bitten, but grasping it correctly one comes to no harm. In the third section,181 the
Buddha gives the parable of the raft: another way to grasp the dhamma incorrectly is to carry
it on one’s head like a raft one has used to cross a river. But the dhamma is for crossing over,
not for holding on to. In the fourth section,182 the Buddha explores how people grasp onto a
belief in attā and thereby cause themselves harm. His conclusion is that all aspects of human
experience should be seen as n’etaṃ mama n’eso ’ham asmi na meso attā ti, ‘this is not mine,
this is not what I am, this is not my self’; as Norman has shown, this contrasts with the
teaching eṣa me ātmā (‘this is my Self’) of CU 3.14.3–4.
The short passage that follows183 appears to be a flourish in praise of the
consciousness of one who has let go of all wrong views:

evaṃ vimuttacittaṃ kho bhikkhave bhikkhuṃ saindā devā sabrahmakā sapajāpatikā anvesaṃ
n’ādhigacchanti: ‘idaṃ nissitaṃ tathāgatassa viññāṇan’ti. taṃ kissa hetu: diṭṭhevāhaṃ bhikkhave
dhamme tathāgataṃ ananuvejjo’ti vadāmi.

Monks, the gods together with Inda, Brahmā and Pajāpati, searching for the monk whose mind is
thus liberated, do not ascertain that which the consciousness of the tathāgata is based on. What is
the reason? Monks, I say that once one has seen the truth the tathāgata is not to be found.

177
M 22 (i.130–42).
178
M 33 (i.130–4).
179
M 22 (i.132).
180
M 22 (i.134–5).
181
M 22 (i.135).
182
M 22 (i.135–40).
183
M 22 (i.140).

49
My conjecture is that this flourish is related to a story found in CU 8.7–12, in which Prajāpati,
in the role of an Upaniṣadic sage, says:184

ya ātmāpahatapāpmā vijaro vimṛtyur viśoko vijighatso’pipāsaḥ satyakāmaḥ satyasaṇkalpaḥ

so’nveṣṭavyaḥ, so vijijñāsitavyaḥ | sa sarvaṃś ca lokān āpnoti sarvāṃś ca kāmān yas tam ātmānam
anuvidya vijānāti

The ātman whose evils are destroyed, which is free from old age and death, free from grief, free
from hunger, not thirsty, whose desires (kāmā) are real and intentions are real – that is to be sought,
that one should seek to perceive. Finding and perceiving that ātman, one obtains all worlds and all
desires.

Having heard this speech, Indra from among the devas and Virocaṇa from among the asuras
become Upaniṣadic pupils in order to learn how to find this ātman.185 Prajāpati teaches them
that the ātman reflected in the mirror and which they can dress up (i.e. the body) is the
immortal brahman. Virocaṇa and Indra go off śāntahṛdayau, ‘having contented hearts’. Of
course this upaniṣad or ‘hidden connection’ between the ātman and brahman is false, for if
the ātman is the same as the body then when the body dies the ātman will die, which means
that this ātman is not the immortal brahman at all.186 Indra realizes this and comes back to
Prajāpati for more teachings.187
Indra is led gradually by Prajāpati to the teaching that the ātman is not the same as the
mortal body but dwells in it as an immortal (amṛta) and bodiless (aśarīra) ātman, the seer
behind seeing, the hearer behind hearing, etc., an ātman untouched by pleasure and pain.188
Perceiving this ātman one will attain the world of brahman after death, but also in the present,
perhaps in meditation:189

eṣa saṃprasādo’smācchrīrāt samutthāya paraṃ jyotir upasaṃpadya svena rūpeṇābhiniṣpadyate |

sa uttama puruṣaḥ

184
CU 8.7.1.
185
CU 8.8.1–3.
186
CU 8.8.4–5.
187
CU 8.9.
188
CU 8.10–12.
189
CU 8.12.3. One who ātmani sarvendriyāṇi saṃpratiṣṭha ‘concentrates all the faculties on the ātman’ attains
the world of brahman: CU 8.15.

50
 This serene one, having arisen from this body and reached the light beyond, is revealed in his own
form. He is the highest person (uttamaḥ purusaḥ).

Having taught Indra about this ātman, Prajāpati makes a final speech showing that it is indeed
this experience of the ātman that brings the results he had promised:190

taṃ vā etaṃ devā ātmānam upāsate | tasmāt teṣāṃ sarve ca lokā āttāḥ sarve ca kāmāḥ | sa
sarvāṃś ca lokān āpnoti sarvāṃś ca kāmān yas tam ātmānam anuvidya vijānāti

Those gods venerate this ātman, as a result of which they have obtained all worlds and all desires.
Finding and perceiving that ātman, one obtains all worlds and all desires.

Perceiving such an ātman is thus associated with obtaining kāmā, pleasure, in the world of
brahman.
Returning to the Alagaddūpama sutta, Inda (= Indra) and Pajāpati (= Prajāpati) are
represented as indeed searching for an ātman, but in this case for the ātman of vimuttacitta
bhikkhu, ‘the monk whose mind is liberated’. Their anvesaṃ,191 ‘searching’ echoes their
interest in the ātman which anveṣṭavyaḥ ‘is to be sought’ in the Upaniṣad, both terms deriving
from anu+√iṣ, ‘search’ or ‘seek’. Although Inda and Pajāpati are mentioned elsewhere in the
Pali canon, it is usually only as representatives of the Vedic deities, members of the thirty-
three gods of whom Sakka is the chief. In Vedic mythology, Brahmā is closely related to or
synonymous with Prajāpati.192 It therefore seems likely that the particular association of Inda,
Brahmā and Pajāpati found in the Buddhist discourse in the Alagaddūpama sutta is the
remnant of a parallel to the CU. Since there appears to be no other reason for mentioning
these particular deities, we might guess that originally this passage was an ironic commentary
on the story of Indra, instructed by Prajāpati, in search of the ātman, though this original
ironic re-telling has almost sunk into oblivion.
However, not only do Inda and Pajāpati not find the ātman of such a monk, but they
‘do not ascertain that which the consciousness of the tathāgata is based on’. Tathāgata has
here the general meaning of ‘become-thus’, i.e. awakened, rather than referring specifically to

190
CU 8.12.6.
191
The namuḷ form of absolutive: Geiger 1994:§215; at S 4:23 (i.122) Māra anvesaṃ n’ādhigacchati (‘searching
does not ascertain’) the viññāṇa of the monk Godhika, who has just attained parinibbāna.
192
E.g. CU 8.15.

51
the Buddha.193 Elsewhere a tathāgata is described as uttamapuriso, ‘the highest person’,194
the very phrase (uttamaḥ puruṣaḥ) used at CU 8.12.2 to describe the person who has attained
the immortal bodiless ātman. We thus find the Buddhists implicitly contending the true
meaning of the uttamapurisa. While in the Upaniṣad this highest person taught by Prajāpati
had realized the ātman, in the Buddhist discourse the highest person as tathāgata is a
consciousness of which these same teachers cannot ascertain the basis. The Upaniṣadic
highest person is therefore from the Buddhist perspective not the highest at all.
The Buddha explains that the reason Inda and Pajāpati do not ascertain that which the
consciousness of the tathāgata is based on is that the tathāgata is ananuvejjo, ‘not to be
found’. In the Upaniṣad, it is the ātman which, ‘finding (anuvidya) and perceiving that self,
one obtains all worlds and all desires’, both ananuvejjo and anuvidya being derived from
anu+√vid. This suggests that Inda and Pajāpati in the sutta, although they are supposed to
have found the ātman, will not be able to do the same when they try to ascertain the basis of
the tathāgata’s consciousness. The reason has already been given in the sutta: such a one,
having examined his mind for any traces of an ātman, has found that n’etaṃ mama n’eso
’ham asmi na meso attā ti, ‘this is not mine, this is not what I am, this is not my ātman’.
I have tried to show how the flourish in the Alagaddūpama sutta about Inda, Pajāpati,
and the tathāgata’s viññāṇa is part of a dispute about the nature of salvation. Buddhist
soteriology does not culminate in the attainment of an immortal bodiless ātman who enjoys
itself, but in a viññāṇa that has relinquished everything, including all interest in kāmā, in this
world or the next. This might shed some light on Ariṭṭha’s wrong view. It is unlikely that
someone interested in pursuing pleasures would have become a bhikkhu. When it is said he
held the view that ‘those things called obstructive by the Blessed One aren’t really obstacles
for one who indulges them’, perhaps what was meant was he held the view that finding the
ātman would enable him to obtain all his desires in the next world. If so, then he would have
indeed been in the company of Indra and Prajāpati, and for that reason not a tathāgata.
Two conclusions follow from this discovery of a Buddhist allusion to a story in CU.
First, even if, following Bronkhorst, we claim merely that there are parallels between the

193
Gethin 2008:xlvi.
194
S 22:86 (iii.116).

52
Alagaddūpama sutta and CU, still the authors of the Buddhist text were highly informed about
Upaniṣadic thought, suggesting an intellectual context in which Brahmanical thinking was
influential and well known. Second, the Buddhist allusion to this Brahmanical thought is so
well hidden in the sutta as we have it that it would seem that the Buddhist tradition began
quite early to forget the intellectual context in which the Buddha’s discourses had their origin.
From these conclusions it follows that, even if the twelve-fold paṭiccasamuppāda was
originally a parody of Vedic ideas, such an origin might also have quickly become obscured.

common topics of debate (iii): upaniṣad / upanisā

In the story of Prajāpati teaching Indra and Virocaṇa about the nature of ātman in CU
8.8.4, I mentioned that Prajāpati initially told them that the physical body (ātman) was the
immortal brahman, but that this ‘hidden connection’ (upaniṣad) was in fact false. The word
upaniṣad is traditionally understood to mean a ‘secret teaching’, imparted to the student
sitting at the teacher’s feet, from upa (near) + ni (down) + √sad (sit),195 whence the name
given to the texts supposed to have been taught in this way. However, the earlier meaning of
upaniṣad in the Upaniṣads and other texts is ‘connection’ or ‘equivalence’;196 within
Brahmanical thinking it connects levels of reality in a hierarchy. Joel Brereton has clarified
the use of the term upaniṣad in the Upaniṣads:197

The Upanishadic sages set up a system of levels that shows which powers include other powers or
which are dependent on which others. Ultimately, by moving towards progressively deeper levels,
the sage identifies the fundamental principle on which everything else is established. In one sense,
this is the most characteristic technique of the Upanishads, for it is from it that the Upanishads have
their name. The word “upaniṣad,” though usually translated “secret teaching” or the like,
originally meant the subordination of one thing to another. The purpose of arranging things in such
a progression is finally to identify the dominant reality behind an object.

195
Black 2007:6. Black makes the point that ‘this is undoubtedly what the word has come to mean’, even though
this was not its earlier meaning.
196
Olivelle 1998:24; Cohen 2008:4 also proposes ‘underlying reality’.
197
Brereton 1990:124–5.

53
Hence the purpose of identifying such ontological upaniṣads is soteriological: it allows the
sage to identify with the ultimate reality (brahman) and hence become it. The story that
Prajāpati gave Indra and Virocaṇa a false upaniṣad as a sort of test shows that such salvific
concepts were not easily acquired, and once acquired were guarded as secrets to be revealed
only to suitable initiates. Furthermore, the implication would seem to be that these upaniṣads
were the subject of debate among thinkers of the day.
Indeed, the term upaniṣad cannot be wholly distinguished from the term ādeśa,198
such that in the Taittirīya Upaniṣad they are given as synonyms:199

eṣa ādeśaḥ | eṣa upadeśaḥ | eṣā vedopaniṣat | etad anuśāsanam | evam upāsitavyam | evam u
caitadupāsyam

This is the injunction (ādeśa), this is the teaching (upadeśa), this is the hidden teaching (upaniṣad)
of the Veda, this is the admonition. It is to be venerated thus. This indeed should be venerated thus.

This statement follows a passage explaining how, if one has a doubt about a ritual
(karmavicikitsā), or a doubt about a practice (vṛttavicikitsā), or with regard to practices
subject to criticism, one should observe an experienced and devoted brāhmaṇa in action, and
behave likewise. Perhaps at this non-metaphysical level of discussion terms such as ādeśa and
upaniṣad are synonyms, whereas the terms have distinct meanings in more technical contexts.
More metaphysically, the term upaniṣad overlaps in meaning with the Vedic term bandhu,
meaning ‘kin’ but also the ‘connection’ of one thing with another.200
The term bandhu in this sense occurs in RV 10.129, the prototypical cosmogonic
201
hymn:

sató bándhum ásati nír avindan | hṛdí pratī́ṣyá kaváyo manīṣā́

Searching in their hearts through inspired thinking,

poets found the connection (bandhu) of the existent in the non-existent.

198
Gren-Eklund 1984:108–9.
199
TU 1.11.4.
200
Olivelle 1998:24; Smith 1989:78–81.
201
Trans. Brereton 1999:253; bandhu is also discussed in Gonda 1965.

54
This remarkable verse suggests that the discovery of a bandhu by the poets is as much a
matter of creating as finding: it is an active process of discovery of connections in a cosmos
within which the poet’s mind is an essential part.202
Another Vedic term, nidāna, which overlaps in meaning with bandhu, is used in RV
10.130 in a cosmogonic context concerning the first sacrifice:203

kā́sīt pramā́ pratimā́ kíṃ nidā́nam

What was the prototype, what was the counterpart and what was the connection between them?

The function of a nidāna, like that of a bandhu, is to link the manifest world with its
transcendent prototype, and hence to link the sacrificer into cosmic reality. As Brian Smith
puts it:204

Connections thus bring together the immanent and the transcendent in such a way that the
inaccessible is made accessible by the play of resemblances, and the manifest is fulfilled by
participation in the transcendent. The universal elements, emitted from the Cosmic One, attain their
full, actualized reality only when linked one to another and to their point of origin.

Joanna Jurewicz suggests that it is significant that the title of the Mahānidāna sutta, the
longest early Buddhist discourse concerning paṭiccasamuppāda, incorporates this old Vedic
term, and she uses this suggestion to provide some further evidence towards her proposal that
twelve-fold paṭiccasamuppāda is a parody of Vedic cosmogony:205

Nidāna, denoting the ontological connection between different levels and forms of being, also
refers to the epistemology: it also gives the explanation of this connection. I presume that this is the
first meaning of nidāna in the title of the Buddha’s sermon. It is really “a great explanation”: there
is no ātman, the nidāna of the cosmogony. The negation of the ontological nidāna constitutes the
Buddha’s mahānidāna.

Within the text of the Mahānidāna sutta, the term nidāna is said to be synonymous with hetu,
samudaya and paccaya; the term nidāna, when used to describe one of the items of the
twelve-fold paṭiccasamuppāda, refers to each item being the ‘source’ or ‘explanation’ of the

202
Discussed by Brereton 1999:255.
203
RV 10.130.3 trans. Jurewicz 2000:100.
204
Smith 1989:80.
205
Jurewicz 2000:100.

55
succeeding item, dependent upon which the succeeding item arises. In the Buddha’s teaching
there is no ‘prototype’ to which manifest reality could be connected, and yet human
experience can be described as arising through the connections between avijjā, the process of
perception, taṇhā and so on.
The Buddhist use of the Vedic word nidāna also illustrates the second conclusion I
drew in my discussion of Prajāpati and Indra above, that the Buddhist tradition appeared soon
to forget the ironic references to Brahmanical thinking in the Buddha’s teachings. For
instance, we find in the Saṃyutta Nikāya the following form of words:206

sanidānaṃ bhikkhave uppajjati kāmavitakko no anidānaṃ, sanidānaṃ uppajjati vyāpādavitakko no

anidānaṃ, sanidānaṃ uppajjati vihiṃsāvitakko no anidānaṃ

The thought of pleasure, monks, occurs with a nidāna, not without a nidāna. The thought of ill-will
occurs with a nidāna, not without a nidāna. The thought of harming occurs with a nidāna, not
without a nidāna.

The word nidāna here appears to be used simply in the sense of ‘condition’ or ‘cause’,
synonymously with other such words, and without any apparent reference to Vedic usage.207
It is still possible, however, to read an ironic reference into the Buddhist usage. To say that
thoughts of pleasure, ill will and harming have a nidāna is to say that the cosmic connections,
the knowledge of which is required for salvation, are not ontological at all, but to be found in
the ethical quality of one’s thinking.
It is possible, therefore, to conclude that the Buddhist use of the term nidāna might
originally have intended an allusion to its meaning in Vedic cosmogony. Such an allusion
would have been ironic, since the Buddhist use of Vedic words emphasized its pragmatic and
anti-metaphysical soteriology. Even so, the Buddhist’s emphasis on the mind might have been
familiar to an audience that knew RV 10.129, with its emphasis on the creativity of the poetic
mind. The Buddha might thus be described as a thinker within the Indian tradition rather than
in reaction to Brahmanical thought. I will now try to show how the Buddha was also a
participant in a debate concerning the nature of the upaniṣads or ‘hidden connections’ by

206
S 14:12 (ii.152).
207
Hence SA ii.134: sanidāno sappaccayo, ‘with a nidāna [i.e.] with a condition’.

56
which a sage could comprehend creation and come to liberating knowledge, in the same way
that he was a participant in debates concerning the meaning of nidāna.
Louis Renou nicely summed up the context for the concepts of nidāna and
upaniṣad:208

La pensée védique, telle qu’on l’entrevoit sous sa forme rituelle dans les Brāhmaṇa, sous la forme
speculative dans les Upaniṣad, se définit comme un système d’équations, – équations entre le
microcosme et le macrocosme, entre le monde rituel et le monde mythique, entre l’ordre human et
l’ordre divin, le point culminant de ces associations étant la fameuse formule tat tvam asi.

While both terms signify a ‘connection’ within such a system of equations, nidāna in Vedic
thought signifies the identification of two things on different levels of reality, while upaniṣad
signifies the possibility of substituting one for another.209 Several scholars have investigated
the range of meaning of upaniṣad, from its appearance in the Brāhmaṇas to its use by early
Buddhists.210 While relying on their scholarship, I believe our understanding of the Buddhist
use of upaniṣad is enhanced when it is interpreted partly as a parody of Vedic thought.
I will first review the Upaniṣadic conception of upaniṣad. Returning to the story of
Indra, Virocaṇa and Prajāpati in CU, Virocana, having left Prajāpati and returned to his fellow
asuras, announced to them the false upaniṣad he had learned:211

ātmaiveha mahayya ātmā paricaryaḥ | ātmānam eveha mahayann ātmānaṃ paricarann ubhau
lokāvavāpnotīmaṃ cāmuṃ ceti

‘It is just the body (ātman) that is to be delighted in, the body that is to be cared for; someone
delighting in the body, someone caring for the body, wins both worlds, here and hereafter.’

This is a false upaniṣad in that it is a ‘hidden connection’ between things seen (the body) and
unseen (the next world) that is not salvific. The asuras believe in a correspondence that is
untrue:212

asurāṇāṃ hyeṣopaniṣat | pretasya śarīraṃ bhikṣayā vasanenālaṅkāreṇeti saṃskurvanti | etena hy

amuṃ lokaṃ jeṣyanto manyante

208
Renou 1978:149.
209
Renou 1978:151.
210
Schayer 1925; Renou 1978; Falk 1986; Vacek 1991.
211
CU 8.8.4.
212
CU 8.8.5.

57
 This is indeed the upaniṣad that the demons believe in: they perform the rites for the body of
someone departed with food-offerings, clothing and ornaments, for they think that thereby the
world hereafter is to be won.

Whatever the provenance of the funerary customs of the asuras described here, the CU story
presents a better upaniṣad: Prajāpati teaches Indra that the ātman is the bodiless, immortal
brahman, and that by finding and venerating it one obtains all worlds and all desires.213
The uses of the word upaniṣad in this story typify the use of the word in the
Upaniṣads, as meaning (i) a ‘secret teaching’, or the text of a teaching, about connections,
even if the connection is false, and (ii) the content of such a teaching, when it identifies a
‘hidden connection’; that is, a ‘gnostic homology’.214 A vivid example of the first meaning is
in BU:215

sa yathorṇavābhis tantun occared yathāgneḥ kṣudrā visphuliṅgā vyuccaranty evamevāsmād

ātmanaḥ sarve prāṇāḥ sarve lokāḥ sarve devāḥ sarvāṇi bhūtāni vyūccaranti | tasyopaniṣat
satyasya satyam iti | prāṇā vai satyaṃ teṣām eṣa satyam ||

As a spider comes down its thread, and as little sparks spring forth from a fire, likewise all the vital
functions (prāṇa), all the worlds, all the gods, and all beings spring from this self (ātman). Its
upaniṣad is ‘the real related to the real’, for the real is the vital functions, and the self is the real
that relates to them.

The text portrays the metaphysical dependence or upaniṣad of entities on the ātman in terms
of a kind of mystical immanence: the images of the thread and the sparks present what is seen,
and the spider and the fire are the reality, upon which they depend.
The word upaniṣad is used in its second meaning in the following typical example
from CU:216

213
CU 8.12.6.
214
Vacek 1991 distributes 16 occurrences of upaniṣad in the early Upaniṣads among these two meanings.
Adding further occurrences indexed by Olivelle (1998:673) results in the following list: meaning (i) at BU
2.4.10, 4.1.2, 4.2.1, 4.5.11, CU 8.8.4 (twice), 8.8.5, TU 2.9.1, 3.10.6, KU 4.7; meaning (ii) at BU 2.1.20, 5.5.3,
5.5.4, CU 1.1.10, 1.13.4, 3.11.3, TU 1.3.1, 1.11.4, KsU 2.1–2, KeU 4.7–9. Olivelle also adds three more
occurrences of upaniṣad from later Upaniṣads in meaning (i) at SU 5.6, and in meaning (ii) at SU 1.15–16 and
MuU 2.2.3.
215
BU 2.1.20.
216
CU 1.13.4, based on the trans. by Olivelle 1998:185.

58
 dugdhe’smai vāg dohaṃ yo vāco dohaḥ | annavān annādo bhavati | ya etām evaṃ sāmnām
upaniṣadaṃ vedopaniṣadaṃ veda

When a man knows the upaniṣad of the Sāman chants – speech will yield for him the milk which is
the very milk of speech, and he will come to own and to eat his own food.

This verse follows a list of ‘gnostic homologies’ between words and things, in the mode of
thought typical of many Upaniṣadic passages that connect items based on kinds of
resemblance (verbal, sacrificial, actual), which might also be described as bandhus. Knowing
such upaniṣads is said to bring benefits, religious and material.
In the early Buddhist texts, the word upanisā occurs with a similar frequency to
upaniṣad in the Upaniṣads, suggesting the terms were equally part of the respective traditions’
vocabularies.217 Earlier Pali scholars, however, were not even sure the terms were equivalent.
The authors of PED thought it more likely that the Pali upanisā was a contracted form of
upanissaya (‘basis’, ‘support’) than an equivalent of Sanskrit upaniṣad.218 This suggests how
little the Pali Buddhist term upanisā appeared, at least to the early scholars, to partake in the
meaning of the Vedic upaniṣad. Renou, however, has clearly shown the identity of the
terms:219

Upanisā en pāli signifie «cause», comme on sait. On a hésité longtemps à mettre le mot en
parallèle avec upaniṣad en raison de la différance de sens. On a été jusqu’à supposer que le mot
pāli remontait à upanissaya. Mais upanisā est à upaniṣad ce qu’est parisā à pariṣad, et le Sanskrit
bouddhique connaît parfaitement la forme upaniṣad (à côté d’upaniṣā, mal sanskritisé) au sens de
«cause». L’énumération mokṣasyopaniṣat… vairāgyam, jñānasyopaniṣat… samādhiḥ, etc.
Saundaran. XIII, 22 sqq., qui reproduit celle d’Anguttaranik. V p.311, confirme bien qu’il s’agit
d’un doublet pur et simple.

If upanisā is simply the Pali version of upaniṣad then there is no need to suppose that upanisā
is a contracted form of upanissaya.220 The text to which Renou appeals to show the
equivalence of the two terms is the Saundarananda of Aśvaghoṣa:221

217
Vin (v.164); M 117 (iii.71); several occurrences in series at S 12:23 (ii.29ff); A 3:67 (i.198); A 9:1 (iv.351);
several occurrences in series at A 10:3–5 (v.4–6), 11:3–5 (v.314–6); Sn p.140; Sn v.322; Dhp v.75.
218
PED q.v. upanisā; cf. CPD q.v. upanisā: ‘a semantic blend has taken place with upanissaya’.
219
Renou 1978:150; cf. BHSD q.v. upaniṣad: ‘= Pali upanisā’.
220
Hence in DP q.v. upanisā there is no mention of upanissaya.

59
 mokṣasyopaniṣat saumya vairāgyam iti gṛhyatāṃ |
vairāgasyāpi saṃvedaḥ saṃvido jñānadarśanaṃ ||

jñānasyopaniṣac caiva samādhir upadhāryatāṃ |

samādherapy upaniṣat sukhaṃ śārīramānasaṃ ||

praśrabdhiḥ kāyamanasaḥ sukhasyopaniṣat parā |

praśrabdher apy upaniṣat prītir apy avagamyatāṃ ||

tathā prīter upaniṣat prāmodyaṃ paramaṃ mataṃ |

prāmodyasyāpy ahṛllekhaḥ kukṛteṣvakṛteṣu vā ||

ahṛllekhasya manasaḥ śīlaṃ tūpaniṣac chuci |

ataḥ sīlaṃ nayatyagryam iti sīlaṃ viśodhaya ||

My friend, you should accept that dispassion is the upaniṣad of liberation,

understanding of dispassion, and knowledge and vision of understanding.

You should realise that concentration is the upaniṣad of knowledge,

and that the upaniṣad of concentration is bliss of body and mind.

The upaniṣad of bodily and mental bliss is supreme tranquillity,

and you should understand that the upaniṣad of tranquillity is rapture.

Likewise the upaniṣad of rapture is thought to be the highest joy,

and that of joy is freedom from remorse concerning what has been done or not done.

The upaniṣad of the mind’s freedom from remorse is purity of virtue;

so purify your virtue, for virtue leads the way.222

Like Renou, Johnston, the editor and first translator of Saundarananda, noticed that the
‘ladder of salvation’ described in this passage is very like a passage in the Aṅguttara
Nikāya:223

221
Johnston 1928:91–2. Renou might also have appealed to AK i.106 ‘duḥkhopaniṣac chraddhā’, equivalent to
S ii.31.
222
Covill 2007:247 translates upaniṣad here as ‘secret’: ‘dispassion is the secret of liberation’ etc. The word
‘secret’ captures some of the complex meaning of upaniṣad/upanisā in a single English word, overtly preserving
the Upaniṣadic meaning of upaniṣad as ‘secret teaching’, but also having a pregnant sense that captures the
dependence of one thing on a higher and hidden thing.
223
A 11:3 (v.314) = A 11:4–5 (v.315–6); A 10:3–5 (v.4–6) are the same except nibbidā and virāga are
conjoined. The ‘ladder of salvation’, or ‘path series’ is also found at D 34 (iii.288); S 12:23 (ii.29); Vin v.164;
the central items of the path series (pāmojja > pīti > passadhi > sukha > samādhi) occur in a frequent pericope.

60
 sīlavato bhikkhave sīlasampannassa upanisasampanno hoti avippaṭisāro. avippaṭisāre sati
avippaṭisārasampannassa upanisasampannaṃ hoti pāmojjaṃ. pāmojje sati pāmojjasampannassa
upanisasampannā hoti pīti. pītiyā sati pītisampannassa upanisasampannā hoti passaddhi.
passaddhiyā sati passaddhisampannassa upanisasampannaṃ hoti sukhaṃ. sukhe sati
sukhasampannassa upanisasampanno hoti sammāsamādhi. sammāsamādhimhi sati
sammāsamādhisampannassa upanisasampannaṃ hoti yathābhūtañāṇadassanaṃ.
yathābhūtañāṇadassane sati yathābhūtañāṇadassanasampannassa upanisasampannā hoti nibbidā.
nibbidāya sati nibbidāsampannassa upanisasampannā hoti virāgo. virāge sati virāgasampannassa
upanisasampannaṃ hoti vimuttiñāṇadassanaṃ.

Monks, for someone virtuous and perfectly behaved, the upanisā of freedom from remorse is fully
realized. When there is freedom from remorse, for someone completely free of remorse, the
upanisā of joy is fully realized. When there is joy, for someone completely joyous, the upanisā of
rapture is fully realized. When there is rapture, for someone completely rapturous, the upanisā of
tranquillity is fully realized. When there is tranquillity, for someone completely tranquil, the
upanisā of bliss is fully realized. When there is bliss, for someone completely blissful, the upanisā
of concentration is fully realized. When there is concentration, for someone completely
concentrated, the upanisā of knowing and seeing what is real is fully realized. When there is
knowing and seeing what really is, for someone completely knowing and seeing what really is, the
upanisā of disenchantment is fully realized. When there is disenchantment, for someone
completely disenchanted, the upanisā of dispassion is fully realized. When there is dispassion, for
someone completely dispassionate, the upanisā of knowing and seeing liberation is fully realized.

It therefore seems likely that Aśvaghoṣa had access to a version of the Buddha’s discourses
such that he knew that Sanskrit upaniṣad was the equivalent to the Pali upanisā.224
Although Renou succeeded in identifying the words, he believed their meanings had
diverged, upaniṣad meaning ‘connection’ and upanisā meaning ‘cause’. I have discussed the
rich Vedic conception of upaniṣad, but I will now dispute Renou’s assumption that Pali
upanisā means ‘cause’. He was no doubt following the Buddhist commentaries, which
routinely gloss upanisā as kāraṇa or paccaya.225 It would appear that the commentaries

224
Johnston 1936:xxxv argues that Aśvaghoṣa possibly belonged to the Bahuśrutikas, a sub-sect of the
Mahāsaṅghikas. Johnston 1932:74 notices but cannot quite explain the alternation of saṃveda in Aśvaghoṣa for
nibbida in the Pali.
225
E.g. AA v.2 on A v.311 etc.: upanisā is kāraṇa; hence English translators render upanisā as e.g. ‘proximate
cause’ (Bodhi 2000:554), ‘specific basis’ (Gethin 2008:213).

61
preserve no awareness of upanisā as ‘secret teaching’ and ‘hidden connection’. Such a
meaning is, however, still discernible. In the Dhammapada, the word upanisā is used in one
verse:226

aññā hi lābhūpanisā | aññā nibbānagāminī

evam etaṃ abhiññāya | bhikkhu buddhassa sāvako
sakkāraṃ nābhinandeyya | vivekam anubrūhaye

The upanisā about gain is one thing; that about going to nibbāna is another.
Thus having realized this, the monk who is a follower of the Buddha
should not enjoy honour but should practise seclusion.

Norman translates the first two padas ‘There is one means for getting gain, another means for
going to nibbāna’.227 He understands nibbānagāminī as an abbreviation of nibbānagāminī-
upanisā, and I have followed this in my translation. But Norman follows the commentary in
taking upanisā to mean paṭipadā (‘means’),228 which I believe is unsatisfactory.229 If we
consider upanisā in relation to CU 8.7–12 and the discussion of the story of Indra and
Prajāpati in the Alagaddūpama sutta, then its use in Dhp has a context. The upaniṣad that
Prajāpati teaches Indra about the ātman enables him to obtain all worlds and desires,230 while
the tathāgata’s realization is not like this.231 I contend that the ‘gain’ (lābha) and ‘honour’
(sakkāra) of Dhp 75 refers to the kind of quest for the ātman of CU 8.7–12, and that the
upanisā that leads to such gain and honour is just such an Upaniṣadic ‘secret teaching’. By
contrast, the upanisā the Buddha teaches is about ‘going to nibbāna’; it consists in practising
seclusion, and its ‘hidden connections’, leading from virtue through meditation to liberation
based on insight, are described in A 11:3 specifically as several upanisā. If I am right,
upanisā at Dhp v.75 does not mean ‘cause’ but means the same as upaniṣad. My
interpretation also has the advantage of lending the verse more depth of meaning. The idea
that the ‘means’ to gain and the ‘means’ to nibbāna are not the same is very basic, while the

226
Dhp v.75.
227
Norman 1997:11.
228
Dhp-A ii.102.
229
Norman (1997:81) writes: ‘For the meaning “means, way” for upanisā, see CPD (s.v. upanisā), and BHSD
(s.v. upaniṣad).’ CPD and BHSD, however, do not give ‘means, way’ in their definitions, although ‘means’ is
given in PED.
230
CU 8.7.6.
231
M 22 (i.140).

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idea that the ‘secret teaching’ about ‘gaining other worlds’ is one thing and the ‘secret
teaching’ about the ‘going to nibbāna’ is another establishes an interesting distinction
between contemporary soteriologies.
Harry Falk, also disagreeing with Renou on the translation of Pali upanisā as ‘cause’,
argues that the Buddhist upanisā means the same as the Upaniṣadic upaniṣad except that its
usage is profane,232 meaning that it does not refer to ‘gnostic homologies’ (in which the
Buddha appears not to have believed). He cites a sutta in the Aṅguttara Nikāya in which
upanisā has a non-magical meaning, with a close parallel in a Vedic text. The Buddha asks
the monks:233

sambodhipakkhikānaṃ āvuso dhammānaṃ kā upanisā bhāvanāya

Friend, what is the upanisā for the cultivation of those things that are wings to full awakening?

The Buddha answers his own question by explaining five such upanisās: spiritual friendship,
impeccable conduct, appropriate teachings, energetic effort, and discernment of arising and
passing away; and for one who has spiritual friendship, the others follow. These upanisās are
neither secret nor hidden, but are nevertheless ‘teachings’ and ‘connections’. Falk points out
that there is an overlap between this list and a list of eight upaniṣads in a Vedic text:234

athaitā vedasyāṣṭāv upaniṣado bhavanti. vittiś copastavaś ca damaś ca śraddhā ca saṃpraśnaś

cānākāśīkaraṇaṃ ca yogaś cācāryaśuśrūṣā ceti.

There are these eight upaniṣads for knowledge: intelligence, honour, self-control, faith, inquiry, not
making oneself a public object, yoga and obedience to the teacher.

Falk prefers the translation ‘Voraussetzung’ (‘condition’, ‘prerequisite’) for both upanisā and
upaniṣad, but acknowledges that such an abstract noun fails to capture the relation to an inner
state of the agent implied by both the Vedic concept and its Buddhist version.235
I will finish this discussion of upaniṣad and upanisā by citing the Dvayatānupassana
sutta, referred to in part 1 in relation to its discussion of most items of the twelve-fold

232
Falk 1986:95; thanks to Eivind Kahrs for translating.
233
A 9:1 (iv.351).
234
Saṃhitopaniṣadbrāhmana 3.20, in Falk 1986:96.
235
Falk 1986:97.

63
paṭiccasamuppāda. This discourse opens with a prose section in which the Buddha, surveying
the monks who were sitting in silence, asks them:236

tesaṃ vo bhikkhave kusalānaṃ dhammānaṃ ariyānaṃ niyyānikaṃ sambodhagāmīnaṃ kā upanisā

savanāyā’ti, iti ce bhikkhave pucchitāro assu, te evam assu vacanīyā: yāvad eva dvayatānaṃ
dhammānaṃ yathābhūtaṃ ñāṇāyā’ti.

If, monks, there were someone who asked (pucchitar), ‘what upanisā is there in hearing those
wholesome teachings which are noble, leading, and going to full awakening?’ they should be
answered thus, ‘only so as to know that they really are the pairs of teachings.’

Translations of upanisā as ‘requisite’ or ‘cause’ will not work here.237 Norman translates
upanisā as ‘point’, hence: ‘what point is there, bhikkhus, in your listening to these
doctrines…’,238 following the commentary’s ‘kā upanisā kiṃ kāraṇaṃ kiṃ payojanaṃ
tunhākaṃ savanāya’: ‘what is the upanisā [means] what is the cause, what is the purpose for
your hearing?’.239 But translating upanisā as ‘point’ or ‘purpose’ means losing contact with
the word’s intellectual context.
This context is established by the word pucchitar, ‘questioner’, which in other places
in the Pali canon refers to fellow bhikkhus or non-Buddhists asking difficult questions.240 Let
us imagine that such a pucchitar moved in an intellectual context in which an upaniṣad was a
‘secret teaching’ about or ‘connection’ between levels of reality, knowing which meant truth
and salvation. The hypothetical difficult questioner would therefore be asking the monks what
upaniṣad was associated with the Buddha’s dhamma. The reply the Buddha gives is, ‘only so
as to know as they really are the pairs of teachings.’ The Buddha therefore refuses to make an
ontological ‘connection’, limiting his upaniṣad to the epistemological connection of hearing
and knowing. The soteriological content of the Buddha’s ‘secret teaching’ is knowing the
pairs of dhammas, that is, knowing how certain things – avijjā, saṅkhāras, viññāṇa, and so on

236
Sn p.140.
237
Thanissaro manages to translate upanisā as ‘prerequisite’ by changing the syntax: ‘Monks, if there are any
who ask, “Your listening to teachings that are skillful, noble, leading onward, going to self-awakening is a
prerequisite for what?”’ (www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/snp/snp.3.12.than.html); this makes hearing the
prerequisite of knowing, rather than knowing being the upanisā of hearing. Thus he changes the meaning of the
passage into something obvious.
238
Norman 2001:94.
239
Sn-A ii.503.
240
M 69 (i.472); S 22:2 (iii.6).

64
– are dukkha and give rise to dukkha, and knowing how and why such dukkha ceases. Hence
the Buddha’s upaniṣad replaces the gnostic homologies of Vedic teachers with his doctrines;
it is a pragmatic anti-upaniṣad, and another aspect of the Buddha’s mahānidāna.

the Buddhaʼs ʻsecret teachingʼ

One particular discourse, the Upanisā sutta, allows us to return specifically to the
intellectual context of paṭiccasamuppāda.241 In this sutta the Buddha is represented as listing
an extended version of the twelve-fold paṭiccasamuppāda chain consisting in 23 items, with
jarāmaraṇa replaced by dukkha, and eleven following, similar to the ones given by
Aśvaghoṣa and at A v.313. The Buddha says that each item saupanisa no anupanisa, ‘has an
upanisā, is not without an upanisā’. The form of words then used – for instance, kā ca
bhikkhave vimuttiyā upanisā? virāgo ti ssa vacanīyaṃ, ‘and what, monks, is the upanisā for
liberation? “Dispassion” should be the answer’ – is the same as that used in the
Dvayatānupassana sutta, in which the upanisā of hearing the dhamma is knowing the pairs of
teachings. The Upanisā sutta continues with a summary:

iti kho bhikkhave avijjūpanisā saṅkhārā. saṅkhārūpanisaṃ viññāṇaṃ. viññāṇūpanisaṃ

nāmarūpaṃ. nāmarūpūpanisaṃ saḷāyatanaṃ. saḷāyatanūpaniso phasso. passūpanisā vedanā.
vedanūpanisā taṇhā. taṇhūpanisaṃ upādānaṃ. upādānūpaniso bhavo. bhavūpanisā jāti.
jātūpanisaṃ dukkhaṃ. dukkhūpanisā saddhā. saddhūpanisaṃ pāmujjaṃ. pāmujjūpanisā pīti.
pītūpanisā passaddhi. passaddhūpanisaṃ sukhaṃ. sukhūpaniso samādhi. samādhūpanisaṃ
yathābhūtañāṇadassanaṃ. yathābhūtañāṇadassanūpanisā nibbidā. nibbidūpaniso virāgo.
virāgūpanisā vimutti. vimuttupanisaṃ khaye ñāṇaṃ.

241
S 12:23 (ii.29–32). C.A.F. Rhys Davids 1922:viii–ix first drew attention to its apparent uniqueness in the Pali
canon in replacing the cessation series of paṭiccasamuppāda with a path series; Sangharakshita 1987:145–42 and
Bodhi 1980 have subsequently studied it. Its unique inclusion of the links dukkha > saddhā > pamojja at the
beginning of the path series may be specific to the Pali recension: Minh Châu 1991:351 describes a version
preserved in Chinese translation from the Sarvāstivādin Mādhyāgama, in which nirvāṇa replaces khāye ñāṇa
and adds items equivalent to avippatisāra (‘freedom from remorse’) and sīla (‘virtue’) before equivalents to
dukkha and saddhā in Pali. Maitiu O’Ceileachair, in a personal communication, tells me that the Chinese version
is the 55th sūtra of T.99. The Chinese version omits the simile of rain falling on a mountain and flowing into
streams, lakes, rivers and the sea, a pericope occurring in several Pali discourses and in my opinion belonging
more naturally at A 10.61 (v.114) & ff.

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 So, monks, ignorance is the upanisā of formations, formations are the upanisā of consciousness,
consciousness is the upanisā of name-and-form, name-and-form is the upanisā of the six sense
realms, the six sense realms are the upanisā of contact, contact is the upanisā of feeling, feeling is
the upanisā of craving, craving is the upanisā of clinging, clinging is the upanisā of existence,
existence is the upanisā of birth, birth is the upanisā of pain, pain is the upanisā of faith, faith is the
upanisā of joy, joy is the upanisā of rapture, rapture is the upanisā of tranquillity, tranquillity is the
upanisā of bliss, bliss is the upanisā of concentration, concentration is the upanisā of knowing and
seeing what really is, knowing and seeing what really is is the upanisā of disenchantment,
disenchantment is the upanisā of dispassion, dispassion is the upanisā of liberation, and liberation
is the upanisā of knowledge about destruction.

The commentaries gloss upanisā as paccaya for the obvious reason that upanisā here stands
in place of paccaya in the standard version of the twelve-fold paṭiccasamuppāda.242 But I
have tried to show that upanisā in the Pali canon ought generally to be read as participating in
the intellectual context of its time. Glossing it as paccaya serves rather to locate upanisā
within the dogmatic interpretations of later Buddhist tradition, in which the word has no
distinct meaning, but is merely a synonym of other words for ‘cause’ and ‘condition’.243
The Upanisā sutta has been preserved in a repetitious form that resists much analysis,
but the use of upanisā in other discourses already discussed allows me to propose that the
word here does not mean paccaya but upaniṣad, ‘secret teaching’ and ‘hidden connection’.
The discourse preserves a formulation of the twelve-fold paṭiccasamuppāda chain that
presents the items of the chain in a way that fairly explicitly parodies Vedic thinking. After
all, taken literally as Buddhist doctrine (with upanisā as paccaya), this 23-fold chain
contradicts itself: if, on the arising of dukkha, arises the path that leads to
yathābhūtañāṇadassana (the cessation of avijjā) and virāga (the cessation of taṅhā), then
avijjā, taṅhā and dukkha cease, and then the path too ceases. The addition of the path series to
the twelve-fold series must therefore be rhetorical. The Buddha’s ‘secret teaching’ here is that
the process of creation (of the ātman) begins from ignorance; the ‘hidden connections’ of this

242
SA ii.53: sa-upanisan ti sa-kāraṇan sa-ppaccayaṃ. Grammatically, upanisā occurs here as the final
component of bahuvṛhis qualifying each ‘dependent’ item, whereas paccaya in the ‘standard’ twelve-fold chain
occurs as the final component of karmadhārayas in the ablative. Renou 1978:152–3 suggests that pratyaya
originally had the same connotations as upaniṣad and nidāna, i.e. meaning ‘connection’; this raises the
possibility that paccaya also had some ironic sense in its original intellectual context.
243
AK ii.245 ‘hetu, pratyaya, nidāna, kāraṇa, nimitta, liṅga, upaniṣad sont synonymes’.

66
process result only in dukkha. The Buddha’s ‘secret teaching’ does not, however, stop with
dukkha, but traverses a path of ‘hidden connections’ through ethics, meditation and insight,
leading to liberation in this life, and not to the ātman or the world of brahman after death.

It would seem, therefore, that the Buddha was familiar enough with Brahmanical ideas
concerning metaphysics and soteriology to parody them and use them for his own ends.
Although these ideas have been preserved in the Upaniṣads, this does not imply that the
Buddha was familiar with such texts, only with the ideas preserved in them. This point acts as
a corrective to Bronkhorst’s hypothesis concerning the spiritual culture of ‘Greater Magadha’:
the Buddha appeared to be deeply involved in debate with Brahmanical ideas, which therefore
must have been more predominant in ancient Magadha than Bronkhorst’s hypothesis appears
to allow. The evidence for the Buddha’s engagement in debate with Brahmanical ideas,
however, is often buried in the Pali discourses, suggesting that such an intellectual context
was soon forgotten by the Buddhist tradition.

67
conclusion: paṭiccasamuppāda as parody and
doctrine

I have made no attempt, simply because of lack of space, to present basic information
about Buddhist doctrine concerning the definitions of the twelve links that have been my
topic, or even to analyse the standard presentation of paṭiccasamuppāda in the early
discourses. My intention, in part 1 of this study, was limited to testing Joanna Jurewicz’s
proposal that the twelve-fold paṭiccasamuppāda chain is a parody of Vedic cosmogony. But it
proved by no means easy to present convincing evidence that the Buddha intended to parody
brahmanical ideas. The early discourses appear to preserve very few clues that this was the
Buddha’s aim. The strongest evidence turned out to be circumstantial: that the twelve-fold
paṭiccasamuppāda chain appears to combine awkwardly two distinct accounts of rebirth, but
that, if the chain was intended as a parody of Vedic cosmogony, this would explain its
awkward appearance. Another possibility of interpretation I considered likely was that the
cosmogony at issue was of the inner world of the individual, such that the Buddha’s parody
supported a distinct approach to a meditative dismantling of the false ātman. There is no
doubt scope for more research in this area.
Then, in part 2, I took an indirect approach to the issue, and presented evidence for the
Buddha’s engagement with concepts and stories from the brahmanical tradition. This
approach proved far more productive of interesting results. I found evidence that the Buddha
was familiar with the concept and technique of ādeśa and with the world-view implied by the
concept of upaniṣad. In both cases the Buddha presented his own teaching by redefining these
concepts in his own terms, stripped of the false metaphysics of the ātman, and concerned with
the pragmatics of the path to liberation from dukkha. Since the concepts of ādeśa and
upaniṣad are concerned with how things follow from each other – with early speculations on
what we might call ‘causality’ – then the Buddha’s engagement with these topics of debate

68
shows him disputing with brahmanical thinking as a way to formulate his own views on this
topic. All this is indirect evidence in support of Jurewicz’s proposal.
An important result of this investigation into the Buddha’s broader debate with
brahmanical thinking is that it draws attention to how quickly the Buddhist tradition appeared
to forget about that whole debate. The story of Pajāpati and Inda has been left as a kind of
half-buried fossil in the Alagaddupama sutta, and the topic of upanisā had become merely a
synonym for words meaning ‘cause’, despite its obvious connections with Upaniṣadic
thinking. The implication of this evidence for forgetfulness is that, if it is true that the twelve-
fold paṭiccasamuppāda chain was originally intended as a parody of Vedic cosmogony, this
may have been forgotten quite rapidly, perhaps quite naturally, in the wake of the
development of increasingly systematic Buddhist doctrine.
A larger issue concerning the development of Buddhist doctrine arises from all this.
Assuming (as I think we must) that the twelve-fold paṭiccasamuppāda chain was taught by
the Buddha himself, to what degree did the Buddha intend that this teaching was to be
understood as a positive doctrine concerning the nature of saṃsāra, and to what degree a
parody of brahmanical thinking, a corrective to views of his time? The twelve-fold chain is
presented in the early discourses as an explanation of the rebirth process but without any
ātman that undergoes it. (The three-life interpretation of the twelve-fold chain only developed
later; at this stage paṭiccasamuppāda simply explains rebirth in general terms). But parody
and doctrine are not the same kind of thing. Doctrine ought to endure, whereas parody may
make little sense beyond its time. Indeed, the twelve-fold paṭiccasamuppāda seems always to
have been a perplexing doctrine, and this might suggest that it has to some degree been
misunderstood by the tradition.

69
possibilities for future research

The limited confines of this thesis, and the limited time available to write it in, have
left me with two unexplored but promising directions for future research into
paṭiccasamuppāda in relation to brahmanical thinking.

(i) The standard presentation of the twelve-fold chain very commonly begins with the
statement of a general formula of paṭiccasamuppāda:

imasmiṃ sati idaṃ hoti, imass’ūppādā idaṃ uppajjati, imasmiṃ asati idaṃ na hoti, imassa nirodhā
idaṃ nirujjhati

When this exists that exists, from the arising of this that arises; when this does not exist that does
not exist, from the ceasing of this that ceases.

While the Buddhist tradition has generally used the term paṭiccasamuppāda to refer to the
twelve-fold chain,244 modern scholars have noticed that the term applies as much to this
general formulation as to the twelve-fold chain that is the commonest applied version of this
abstract principle. Even so, there is disagreement on whether the abstract formulation is a
summary of the twelve-fold chain,245 or is a general principle of which the twelve-fold chain
is an exemplification.246 It seems to me that it must be a general formulation, because it is so
similar to the famous teaching in brief given by the arahant Assaji to Sariputta:247

atha kho āyasmā assaji sāriputtassa paribbājakassa imaṃ dhammapariyāyaṃ abhāsi:

ye dhammā hetuppabhavā tesaṃ hetuṃ tathāgato āha |

tesañ ca yo nirodho evaṃ vādi mahāsamaṇo’ti

244
E.g. Vism 518; see n.58 above.
245
Shulman 2008:307 sees the general formula as a summary and argues that ‘the abstract formula relates
precisely and only to the mutual conditioning of the 12 links.’
246
Collins 1982:106 states that ‘it is crucially important to distinguish between the general idea of conditionality,
and the twelve-fold series, which has come to be the traditional way in which the teaching is expressed.’
247
Vin i.40.

70
 atha kho sāriputtassa paribbājakassa imaṃ dhammapariyāyaṃ sutvā virajaṃ vitamalaṃ
dhammacakkhuṃ udapādi: yaṃ kiñci samudayadhammaṃ sabbaṃ taṃ nirodhadhamman’ti

Then Venerable Assaji spoke this formulation of dhamma to Sāriputta the wanderer:

Things with sources and conditions – the tathāgata has named their condition
And what the ceasing of them is; this is the great renunciate’s teaching.

Hearing this formulation of the dhamma, the stainless spotless dhamma-vision arose for Sāriputta
the wanderer, that whatever is of a nature to arise is of a nature to cease.

This summary of the dhamma is of exactly the same logical form as the general formula of
paṭiccasamuppāda, which therefore might also be described as a ‘formulation of dhamma’
(dhammapariyāya), and not merely a summary of the twelve-fold paṭiccasamuppāda chain.
A point that I have not seen made before is that both the general formula of
paṭiccasamuppāda and the formulation of dhamma given to Sāriputta formulate a universal
truth in grammatical terms. The general formula does this in two ways: first, by stating that
the locative absolute construction followed by an existential statement implies a constant
relationship between two items; second, by stating that the use of the ablative case signifies
the existential dependence of one of those items upon the other. The formulation of dhamma
to Sāriputta does the same through stating the relationship of items as one being the hetu of
another. It might also be observed that the term paccaya is commonly used to describe this
same dependence, using the ablative case, in the formulation that, from one thing as paccaya,
there is another thing. All this leads to the intriguing possibility that the Buddha was in some
sense familiar enough with Indian grammatical traditions to use its terminology (hetu,
paccaya) and its formalities (absolute constructions and the analysis of case-relations) to
frame his insight. In one sense this is merely to notice that the Buddha was an Indian thinker:
‘Ahérer à la pensée indienne, c’est d’abord penser en grammarien’.248 In another sense it is to
be able to initiate philosophical communication, for grammatical thought is for India as
mathematical logic is for Greece.249

248
Renou 1953:86, quoted in in Staal 1965:114.
249
Staal 1965; Ingalls 1954:4. This observation enables a corrective gesture towards Kalupanaha’s (1975)
attempt to characterise the Buddhist philosophy of causality in terms of empiricism and logical positivism.
Kalupahana insists on reading a theory of causality back into the early Buddhist discourses without any

71
 With this in mind it makes sense to translate the Buddha’s insight into dependent-
arising into a the following modern logical formulation:250

¬Әx ¬(Ә(y)Cyx)

there is no x such that it is not the case that some y stands as its condition; logically equivalent to:

∀x (Ә(y)Cyx)

all x’s are such that there is some y that stands as their condition.

That is to say, nothing happens without an explanation. I contend that the Buddha’s general
formulation of paṭiccasamuppāda is designed to have the same precision and universal
validity as this logical formulation of a universal truth, expressed in native grammatical
terms.251
A consequence of framing the logical formulation of universal conditionality like this
is that it allows us exactly to spot the logical fallacy of supposing that, because everything
arises on some condition, then there must be a single ultimate cause (as self-cognizing
absolute) from which everything comes, which is God or brahman; that is, if:

(i) ∀x (Ә(y)Cyx)

then there must be some one cause which is the cause of everything:

(ii) Әy (∀(x)Cyx)

there is some y such that it is the case that for all x’s y is their cause.

The fallacy is that, although (i) would logically follow from (ii), (ii) is not implied by (i), so
that universal conditionality does not logically imply a creator.252

methodological consideration of how to relate modern western terminology to the very different conceptual
paradigms in use in ancient India.
250
I am grateful to Antoine Panaioti for this insight into paṭiccasamuppāda and modern logic.
251
this conceptual translation highlights the outstanding question of what is meant by one thing being the
‘condition’ of another; it would appear that Buddhist tradition later took ‘condition’ to indicate an ontologically
productive relationship, but that in the early discourses the Buddha intended only to indicate a relationship of
logical necessity: Ronkin 2005:204ff; Watts 1982:408; Shulman 2008:298.
252
Priest 2000:22.

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 Perhaps the Buddha had something similar in mind when formulating his principle of
conditionality. Passages in Vedic texts preserve a many records of brahmanical thinking about
the creation of the ātman and its world (subject-object cognition) from brahman. The
Buddha’s general principle of paṭiccasamuppāda was a sufficiently precise instrument to
clarify that, if everything arises on certain conditions, it is merely mistaken thinking to
suppose that there is a first cause of the universe, a brahman from which the ātman and its
world of nāma-rūpa could emerge. The Buddha’s teaching of dhamma concerned itself only
with dukkha and its cessation, and from this pragmatic point of view Vedic cosmogony and its
associated soteriology was both false and a distraction. Hence the Buddha, when presenting
his teaching of the twelve-fold paṭiccasamuppāda chain, do so in such a way that it both
negated and parodied the Vedic cosmogony at the same time as explaining the arising and the
cessation of dukkha.

(ii) The individual items of the twelve-fold paṭiccasamuppāda chain are concepts that are
subjective (referring to subjective experience) and universal (referring impersonally to no
particular person). They are not presented as psychological concepts, but neither are they
presented with the independence belonging to myth. What kind of concepts are these, and
why did the Buddha present his teaching in such terms?
Gunilla Gren-Eklund has analysed similar concepts as they appear in CU 7.1–26,
where a series of fifteen items are arranged in a hierarchical series.253 Two of these items
(nāman and vijñāna) in fact overlap with the twelve-fold paṭiccasamuppāda series, and sukha
overlaps with the 23-fold series found in the Upanisā sutta. Moreoever, the sage Nārada’s
motivation in seeking this knowledge from Sanatkumāra is that he wishes to cross to the other
side of sorrow (śoka),254 an aim more than reminiscent of how the paṭiccasamuppāda chain
explains the arising of ‘this whole mass of dukkha’. Many years ago, Foucher observed that
these concepts:255

253
Gren-Eklund 1984.
254
CU 7.1.3.
255
Foucher 1930:xxviii;

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 ne sont pas entre eux dans la relation de cause à effet, mais dont néan moins chacun suppose
l’existence du precedent – exactement comme il arrive dans la fameuse chaîne des douze nidāna
bouddhiques.

Gren-Eklund lends additional subtlety to Foucher’s observation when she describes the
relation of concepts in such a series as an ‘inclusive hierarchy’:256

which does not presuppose that a necessarily produces b or that b necessarily arises from a, since it
is by no means a genetic relation. Furthermore, there is no reference whatsoever to any time
relation, since each concept of the chain must be understood in its bare existence. Yet one may
perhaps be permitted to argue that this description of the world, which locates each concept inside
another concept, is in some way similar to a description that makes each concept arise from another
concept.

Such observations raise the possibility that the Buddha’s manner of connecting concepts in
the paṭiccasamuppāda chain partook of contemporary Indian thinking in ways not previously
investigated. The series of concepts in CU 7 supposedly leads to knowledge of the ātman,257
while of course the Buddha’s series shows that there is no such ātman to be known. Research
into the method of connecting concepts in the Upaniṣads and in early Buddhist discourses
may therefore produce more evidence into how paṭiccasamuppāda was originally a parody of
brahmanical thought.

256
Gren-Eklund 1984:116–7.
257
CU 7.26.1.

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abbreviations

A: Anguttara Nikāya ed. R. Morris, E. Hardy, PTS 1885–1900.

AA: Manorathapūraṇi (commentary on A) ed. E. Walleser, H. Kopp, PTS 1924–57.
AK: L’Abhidharmakośa de Vasubandhu trad. L. de La Vallée Poussin, Paris 1923.
AU: Aitareya Upaniṣad ed. Patrick Olivelle in The Early Upaniṣads, Oxford: OUP 1998.
BHSD: Franklin Edgerton, Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Dictionary, Yale University Press 1953.
BU: Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad ed. Patrick Olivelle in The Early Upaniṣads, Oxford: OUP
1998.
CPD: Trenckner et al, Critical Pāli Dictionary, Copenhagen, 1925–.
CU: Chāndogya Upaniṣad ed. Patrick Olivelle in The Early Upaniṣads, Oxford: OUP 1998.
D: Dīgha Nikāya ed. T.W. Rhys Davids, J.E. Carpenter, PTS 1889–1910.
Dhp: Dhammapada ed. O. von Hinüber and K.R. Norman, PTS 1994.
Dhp-A: Dhammapada commentary, ed. H. Smith, PTS 1906–14.
DP: Margaret Cone, Dictionary of Pāli, vol.1, Oxford: PTS 2001.
KU: Kaṭha Upaniṣad ed. Patrick Olivelle in The Early Upaniṣads, Oxford: OUP 1998.
KeU: Kena Upaniṣad ed. Patrick Olivelle in The Early Upaniṣads, Oxford: OUP 1998.
KsU: Kauṣītaki Upaniṣad ed. Patrick Olivelle in The Early Upaniṣads, Oxford: OUP 1998.
Lv: Lalitavistara ed. P.L. Vaidya, Darbhanga: Mithila Institute 1958.
M: Majjhima Nikāya ed. V. Trenckner, R. Chalmers, PTS 1888–1902.
MuU: Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad ed. Patrick Olivelle in The Early Upaniṣads, Oxford: OUP 1998.
Mv: Mahāvastu ed. E. Sénart, Paris 1882–97.
NK: Nidānakathā
PED: Rhys Davids & Stede, Pali–English Dictionary Chipstead: PTS 1921–5.
RV: Ṛg Veda
S: Saṃyutta Nikāya ed. L. Féer, PTS 1888–98.
SA: Sāratthappakāsinī (commentary on S), ed. F.L. Woodward, London: PTS 1929–37.
ŚB: Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa

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SU: Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad ed. Patrick Olivelle in The Early Upaniṣads, Oxford: OUP 1998.
Sn: Suttanipāta ed. Dines Andersen and Helmer Smith, Oxford: PTS 1913.
Sn-A: Paramatthajotikā (commentary on Sn), ed. Helmer Smith, PTS 1916–7.
TU: Taittirīya Upaniṣad ed. Patrick Olivelle in The Early Upaniṣads, Oxford: OUP 1998.
Ud: Udāna ed. P. Steinthal, PTS 1885.
Vin: Vinaya ed. H. Oldenberg, PTS 1879–1883.
Vism: Visuddhimagga ed. C.A.F. Rhys Davids, London: PTS 1975.

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