Nāgārjuna's Middle Way · Chapter 26
Examination of the Twelve Links
Why does suffering keep coming back? We get what we wanted and want something else. We lose what we loved and grieve. One life, the tradition says, leads to another in the same way. The Buddha's answer was a chain of twelve links: from confusion to action, from action to a new life, from contact to feeling, from feeling to craving, and from craving to birth, ageing and death. This chapter sets out that chain.
It is the one chapter of the work with no refutation in it. After twenty-five chapters showing that nothing is found standing on its own, Nāgārjuna explains how things work. That is the point. Emptiness does not stop the world working; a world of own-natures could not work at all (Chapter 24). Dependent arising, the subject of the homage in Chapter 1, is here shown doing its everyday job: producing suffering when ignorance is present, and ending it when ignorance ends.
The verses
The translation is new, made from the Sanskrit for this site. The Sanskrit is given above each verse; it follows the GRETIL e-text (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
abhisaṃskurute yāṃs tair gatiṃ gacchati karmabhiḥ ||
Covered over by ignorance, one makes the three kinds of formations that lead to rebirth. Through these actions one goes to a new destiny.
saṃniviṣṭe 'tha vijñāne nāmarūpaṃ niṣicyate ||
With formations as its condition, consciousness enters a new destiny. Once consciousness has entered, name-and-form takes shape.
ṣaḍāyatanam āgamya saṃsparśaḥ saṃpravartate ||
When name-and-form has taken shape, the six sense fields come about. Depending on the six sense fields, contact arises.
nāmarūpaṃ pratītyaivaṃ vijñānaṃ saṃpravartate ||
Depending on the eye, on visible form and on attention, that is, depending on name-and-form, consciousness arises.
sparśaḥ sa tasmāt sparśāc ca vedanā saṃpravartate ||
The coming together of the three, form, consciousness and eye, is contact. And from contact, feeling arises.
tṛṣyamāṇa upādānam upādatte caturvidham ||
With feeling as condition there is craving, for one craves for the sake of feeling. Craving, one takes up the four kinds of grasping.
syād dhi yady anupādāno mucyeta na bhaved bhavaḥ ||
When there is grasping, becoming arises for the one who grasps. If one did not grasp, one would be freed, and there would be no becoming.
jarāmaraṇaduḥkhādi śokāḥ saparidevanāḥ ||
That becoming is the five aggregates. From becoming, birth arises; and ageing, death, suffering and the rest, sorrow with lamentation,
kevalasyaivam etasya duḥkhaskandhasya saṃbhavaḥ ||
distress and despair: all this arises from birth. In this way this whole mass of suffering comes to be.
avidvān kārakas tasmān na vidvāṃs tattvadarśanāt ||
So the one who does not know makes the formations that are the root of saṃsāra. The one who does not know is the maker; the one who knows is not, because they see how things are.
avidyāyā nirodhas tu jñānasyāsyaiva bhāvanāt ||
When ignorance has ceased, formations do not arise. And ignorance ceases through cultivating this very knowledge.
duḥkhaskandhaḥ kevalo 'yam evaṃ samyag nirudhyate ||
By the ceasing of each link, the next does not arise. In this way this whole mass of suffering rightly comes to an end.
The twelve links
The twelve links (dvādaśāṅga pratītyasamutpāda) are the Buddha's own map of how suffering keeps itself going. The chapter walks round them in order:
- Ignorance (avidyā): not seeing how things are; taking them to exist from their own side.
- Formations (saṃskāra): actions of body, speech and mind shaped by that ignorance.
- Consciousness (vijñāna), which those actions carry into a new life.
- Name-and-form (nāmarūpa): the mind and body of that life.
- The six sense fields (ṣaḍāyatana): eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind.
- Contact (sparśa): sense, object and consciousness meeting.
- Feeling (vedanā): pleasant, unpleasant or neither.
- Craving (tṛṣṇā): wanting more of the pleasant and less of the unpleasant.
- Grasping (upādāna): holding on.
- Becoming (bhava): the build-up toward a new existence.
- Birth (jāti).
- Ageing and death (jarāmaraṇa), with all their sorrow.
The links are often read over three lives: ignorance and formations in a past life; consciousness through becoming in this one; birth, ageing and death in the next. But the same chain can be seen in a single afternoon. Confusion shapes an action; the action shapes how the next moment is met; something is seen, a feeling comes, craving follows, and the grip of 'I must have this' gives birth to a new little world of worry, which grows old and dies. Both readings are traditional.
From ignorance to a new life
The chain starts with ignorance (26.1). Covered over by it, a person makes 'formations' in three ways, through body, speech and mind. These are not just deeds done and gone. They shape a direction, the way a river cuts its bed, and the next life flows along that bed.
Consciousness, conditioned by formations, 'enters' the new destiny (26.2). This sounds like a traveller moving house. It is not meant that way. Nothing passes over; the old flame lights a new one, as Nāgasena said of rebirth. Once consciousness has entered, name-and-form, the mind and body of the new life, takes shape, and with it the six sense fields (26.3).
How experience is built
Verses 26.4–5 slow down at the moment that matters most for practice: contact. Seeing does not happen inside a finished eye looking at a finished object. Visual consciousness arises in dependence on the eye, on visible form, and on attention (26.4). The verse sums these up as 'name-and-form': eye and visible form are the 'form' side, attention the 'name' (mental) side. The meeting of the three, eye, form and consciousness, is called contact. From contact comes feeling.
Then craving (26.6). We crave for the sake of feeling: more of the pleasant, an end to the unpleasant. Craving grows into grasping, which the tradition lists as four kinds: grasping at pleasures, at views, at rules and rituals, and at a self. With grasping, becoming arises, the build-up toward a new existence (26.7). And the verse adds its own escape clause: one who did not grasp would be freed, and there would be no becoming.
Becoming is the five aggregates, the body and mind of a new life (26.8). From it comes birth, and from birth everything that follows: ageing, death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress and despair (26.9). 'This whole mass of suffering' is the Buddha's own phrase. It is called 'whole' or 'only' (kevala) because there is nothing else in it. Candrakīrti reads the word as 'without a self or anything belonging to a self': no one who owns the suffering, only the suffering, arising from its conditions.
Who does it, and how it stops
Verse 26.10 gives the moral. The one who does not know is the maker of the formations, the root of saṃsāra. The one who knows makes none, because they see how things are (tattva). This is not a change of fate imposed from outside. It is the plain consequence of the chain: the formations that lead to new suffering are made by not-knowing. Take away the not-knowing, and nothing is left to make them.
So the chain can stop (26.11–12). When ignorance ceases, formations do not arise. And ignorance ceases through 'cultivating this very knowledge': for Candrakīrti, seeing dependent arising as it really is, which is seeing its emptiness, the insight the whole work has been teaching. Then each link, losing its condition, does not arise: no formations, so no new consciousness thrown into a new life, and so on round the wheel. The whole mass of suffering comes to an end.
Why the chapter is here
A reader who has followed the earlier chapters may be surprised. Chapter 1 found no arising from self, other, both or neither. Chapter 19 found no time standing on its own, and Chapter 18 no self. How can this chapter speak so plainly of one thing arising from another, of consciousness entering a new life?
The answer is the two truths (Chapter 24). The earlier chapters asked whether things arise from their own side, and found that they do not. This chapter describes how they arise as the world speaks: in dependence, each link named in relation to the others. There is no conflict, because the two descriptions answer different questions. More than that, the working chain needs the emptiness found earlier. A chain whose links had natures of their own could never stop. Ignorance with its own nature could never be removed, and the mass of suffering would be permanent. Because the links are empty, the chain works, and because it works, it can be ended.
Candrakīrti, whose reading the books follow, treats the chapter as the conventional account, fully endorsed, of how saṃsāra runs. Nothing in it conflicts with emptiness, and its last verses make emptiness the cure: the knowledge that ends ignorance is the seeing of how things are.
What is left standing
Everything the tradition relies on is kept here: karma, rebirth, the link between what we do and what we become, and the path that ends suffering. What is left out is only the owner. There is no self that travels through the twelve links, no 'I' who ages and dies from its own side. Verse 26.9 calls it a mass of suffering with nothing else in it, and verse 26.10 makes the maker of saṃsāra not a person but not-knowing.
The chain can be watched in any hour. Notice the next time a pleasant feeling turns into wanting, or an unpleasant one into pushing away. That step, from feeling to craving, is where the wheel turns. Seen clearly, as a meeting of conditions with no one behind it, it does not have to turn.
In the books
The two books take up this chapter's themes in several places.
- Chapter 1, The Substantialist Misconception (The Logical Necessity of a Substrateless World), the section 'The Innate Sense of Reality': innate grasping, the felt sense that things are there from their own side. This is the ignorance that heads the chain.
- Chapter 8, States of Awareness, Deep Sleep, and Death, the section 'Objection: Doesn't This Evade the Question of Rebirth?': Nāgasena's lamp, and karmic continuity designated across lives with nothing passing over.
- Chapter 9, The Reconceptualization of Continuity, the section 'Objection: If No One Persists, Who Is Responsible?': the mere I that acts and experiences the results of its actions.
Read also: Neither Carried Nor Cut, on continuity with nothing carried over and nothing cut off.
Talks on YouTube:
Words to know
- The twelve links (dvādaśāṅga pratītyasamutpāda): the chain from ignorance to ageing and death.
- Ignorance (avidyā): not seeing how things are; taking them to exist from their own side.
- Formations (saṃskāra): actions shaped by ignorance, which give direction to what follows.
- Contact (sparśa): the meeting of sense, object and consciousness.
- Craving (tṛṣṇā) and grasping (upādāna): wanting, then holding on.
- Becoming (bhava): the build-up toward a new existence.
- How things are (tattva): what knowing sees; for Madhyamaka, emptiness.