Pratitya Samutpada

The Madhyamika school of Nagarjuna interprets Pratitya Samutpada in regard to relativity of all conditioned things. Events occur sequentially however there are no causal relations or forces over and above what happens. Whatever is considered as cause and effect cannot be joined by a real relation as cause and effect occur at different times. Dependent origination rejects the view that there are types of individual entities with inborn and specific causal powers: However it also denies that things happen randomly, which would make nonsense of moral responsibility.

Anything recognised as a unit has come into existence depending on several conditions. Buddhists though deny that there are any singular persisting entities that produce others. Reality consists of cooperating moments in fields of energies that are held together by a charm. Individual people are streams of physical and mental factors. The theory of conditioned origination is an attempt to account for the experience of organisation and repeatability. It is applicable to the physical and psychological realms and guarantees that actions will produce consequences apt to their moral quality. It is a constructed principle that governs the formations and interactions of the basic mental and physical elements of existence. Buddhists deny that there is any persisting being such as the soul that would link thoughts and actions with their results in this and future lives and which would experience the consequences of ethically significant actions. There is no God who could do moral policing. Mutually dependent origination is expressed sometimes as a twelve fold chain: basic ignorance, karmic dispositions, which condition mental events, which condition the psycho-physical body, which conditions the sensory receptors, which condition sense-object interactions, which condition feelings, which condition `thirst` or desire, which conditions craving, which conditions repeated existences, which condition births, which condition old age and death and all woes.

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