The Twelve Links of Dependent Origination

by Kalu Rinpoche

All samsaric existence depends on the conditions and factors that form it; nothing has any autonomous or independent existence whatsoever. As conditions change, the phenomena that make up these lives arise and pass away; they are neither permanent nor independent.

All states conditioned by samsara appear, abide and disappear as the interaction and transition of interdependent factors. Appearance and disappearance, birth and death follow one another continuously. The traditional diagram presented here, called the wheel of samsara, wheel of birth, or wheel of life, illustrates the sequence of twelve components that make up the appearance and disappearance of the consciousness and its experiences, or samsara.

These twelve factors, which we already discussed, parallel the series of bardos and the transformations of mind which were described in the preceding chapters. They are complementary presentations that overlap.

Each link in this chain of reactions arises by virtue of the others; each one produces the next. Therefore, for example, where there is becoming there will be birth, followed by deterioration and death.

For an ordinary person, death is followed by a period of unconsciousness or ignorance in the bardo of emptiness. This ignorance is the point of departure in the cycle of illusion, the first mental obscuration that gives rise to all the others.

In the outer links of the wheel of life, the first link, ignorance, is symbolised by a blind person groping for the way with a cane. That ignorance also appears in symbolic form at the centre or hub around which the wheel of samsara constantly turns.

On the basis of ignorance, under the influence of latent formative elements in the fundamental consciousness, the experience of individual consciousness is reactivated. These elements are karmic imprints remaining in the fundamental consciousness after death and the disappearance of individual consciousness.

At the moment of death, the action of karma temporarily disappears. Then it returns as formative factors, the second link, reconditioning the mind in the individual consciousness along with mind's productions. These factors exist in the form of propensities and habits. The karma, or formative factors that cause the reappearance of the "I am" delusion, or sense of individual consciousness, are the point of departure here, but they continue their activity throughout the cycle. This rebirth of the individual consciousness is symbolised by a potter moulding clay and corresponds to the end of the bardo of emptiness, the moment at which the consciousness re-establishes itself before beginning its migration into the bardo of becoming.

The "individual" consciousness is the third link, symbolised by the agitated monkey which is the cognitive mode that experiences everything in terms of subject and object, which in turn gives rise to all dualistic activity.

The fourth link is called name and form, depicted by a boat with two people representing, respectively, consciousness and the mental body in the bardo of becoming. The consciousness subject corresponds to name, while form is the body with which it is identified in the experience of "I am that," as in "I am that body."

The fifth link is the six realms, depicted by a house with six openings that correspond to six sense fields in which the bardo being's consciousness is developed.

The sixth link, contact, represents the connection formed between consciousness-subject and its projection, or projected objects, between the consciousness identified with the mental body and the world it mistakenly perceives as being "out there," or outside of it. Recall again the analogy of the dream. This link is depicted by an arrow touching a man's eye.

The seventh link, sensation, shows a couple embracing; this represents the initial experience that arises as a result of the meeting of a subject and its objects.

The eighth link, thirst, depicted by a man drinking, is the urgency that provokes the subject to seize the thing as an object. The ninth link, grasping, is the subject's actual fixation upon an object, depicted by a man picking fruit from a tree. These links underlie our perceptions in general and those of the bardo of becoming in particular.

The tenth link, illustrated by a pregnant woman, is called becoming. Grasping, the fixation of the ninth link, concretises into the birth of a new life.

The eleventh link is birth in the world created by this state of existence. It is represented by a woman giving birth. This is entry into the bardo of birth to death. All the preceding links are like an electrical current whose energy generates the birth of a given state of existence. The exhaustion of this current finally leads to the next state and its disappearance and death. After birth, life evolves, deteriorates into old age, and ends with death.

Ageing and death, represented by a corpse being carried off to the charnel ground, is the twelfth and final link. After the bardo of the moment of death comes the bardo of emptiness, and so on. The wheel of samsara turns endlessly.

We take birth countless times in samsara's six realms; this is illustrated toward the centre of the wheel of life by six Tibetan letters. The entire wheel of samsara turns around the three mental poisons depicted at the centre of the illustration: ignorance, symbolised by the pig; hatred, symbolised by the snake; and desire, symbolised by the cock.