Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c10.s2.4

c10.s2.4

This in effect is the kernel of the doctrine, and we may doubt the emphatic assurance of the texts that the Buddha’s attainment of enlightenment was closely involved with the gaining of knowledge of this further elaboration in the chain of causation in its stereotyped set of twelve links.³ The doubt is strengthened when we find the germs of the twelve contained in a text of the Suttanipāta¹ in which other ancient doctrines are preserved. There we find a set of eleven couples which illustrate the principle of causation: ‘That being, this becomes.’ In each case misery is the second element; the first are, in order, action which, based on ignorance, leads man to constant rebirth; ignorance; dispositions (*saṃkhāra*), allied to perception (*saññā*); consciousness; contact; feeling; thirst, which leads to grasping (*upādāna*); grasping which leads to becoming (*bhava*), rebirth, death, and misery; efforts; aliments (*āhāra*); and movements. There is here no attempt to erect an elaborate series, but the chain is already largely present in germ. Another text² of the same collection traces discord back to desire (*chanda*), based on feeling, based on contact, based on name and form, the empiric individual.