The History of Buddhist Thought c13.39

c13.39

It is no wonder that the later Buddhists by coming to deny any real connection between each link, and even the natural causal sequence between contact and sensation, birth and old age, have deprived the formula of any meaning as a theory of causation. They have put in its place the Mahāyāna doctrine of interdependent relation, in which the causality held by the older schools becomes an illusion. We find that all the oldest interpretations do, in fact, treat it as a causal chain. They show us the attempts to make it a consistent account of the stages of the individual as he transmigrates. There is nothing to show that it ever had a more consistent meaning or why, if it had, the interpreters should have lost it.