Dependent Origination and Impermanence

Dependent origination (Pali: paticcasamuppada; Sanskrit: pratityasamutpada) is presented in the early texts as the causal principle underlying both the Buddha's account of suffering and its cessation and his broader metaphysics of a universe without any first, uncaused cause or unchanging substrate. Its most compact canonical formulation, repeated throughout the Pali Canon, states: "When this exists, that comes to be; with the arising of this, that arises. When this does not exist, that does not come to be; with the cessation of this, that ceases" (Majjhima Nikaya 38, among many parallel occurrences) — a formula affirming that all phenomena arise and pass away strictly in dependence on conditions, without any of them possessing independent, self-sufficient existence — a quality later Buddhist philosophy, especially the Madhyamaka school, would develop into the technical concept of svabhava, "own-being" or "inherent existence," and its systematic negation.