If you count the Śālistamba Sūtra as early then you can count that one too. Also, seeing as how dependent origination is an expansion of the 4 noble truths shouldn’t they also be counted?
I don’t know. I haven’t studied it closely. It’d obviously take more time to look at all the variations. It’s not uncommon for the Agamas to have many permutations of related lists that get combined into a bigger one. Which is older? I don’t know. It seems very similar to the case of the ten powers of the Tathagata. There’s many permutations in the Agamas and Nikayas, but the ten powers became the one everyone cites by the time Mahayana sutras were translated to Chinese. The twelve links look like that, too.
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Counting the 4NT suttas would, of course, drastically lower the ratio of suttas with 12 nidanas to suttas with less than 12…
A very popular work those years was the paper you quoted , “Playing With Fire: The pratiyasamutpada from the perspective of Vedic Thought” from Joanna Jurewicz.
The author pointed to interesting parallelisms or synchrony between classifications from the Vedic thought and the Buddhist formulation. And from here it could be understood like a more underlying direct influence or also like a comfortable cognitive inheritance to structure a real new thing. As happens with The Seven Sages of Greece, The Seven Samurai, The Magnificent Seven, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and etcetera.
Thanks, I think that’s the way I’m beginning to see the 12 links too, as just one explanation of DO that may or may not be late, but definitely was not as central as it later became.
However, Choong Mun-keat in The Notion of Emptiness in Early Buddhism (1999) states that the five factors (from (1) “craving” to (5) the dukkha) of the twelve nidanas are the “most concise formula corresponds directly to two of the four noble truths”:
“conditioned genesis does not always have twelve factors in early Buddhist texts. There also exist accounts of it which list five factors, eight, nine, ten, or eleven factors, as well as the usual twelve factors. The statement of conditioned genesis with just five factors runs: (1) craving, (2) attachment, (3) becoming, (4) birth, and (5) “aging-and death, along with grief, lamentation, pain, depression and despair.” This most concise formula corresponds directly to two of the four noble truths, since (5) “aging-and-death, along with grief, lamentation, pain, depression and despair” is suffering (first truth), and (1) craving (taṇhā) is the origin of suffering (second truth). Since craving is itself a conditioned phenomenon, the series of causes can be extended to as many as twelve factors.” (pp. 18-19).
Pages 18-19 from The Notion of Emptiness in Early Buddhism by Choong Mun-keat 1999.pdf (1.0 MB)
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Ultimately, we need to understand all teachings of the Buddha within ourselves (The ‘Samditthiko’ nature of the dhamma). The following book helped me understand the process of dependent origination (as going through the 12 links – rather, than as three lifetimes):
Javier - The legend here is that the Buddha drew this ‘Wheel of Life’ schematic into the sand to simplify this teaching. Judging by your question and the nature of the replies, it seems that you are hell bent on turning this central teaching into yet another scholastic debacle!
Well, I think that’s a pretty unfair and uncharitable assessment of what is just one person’s attempt to understand something.
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I just realized that this might not work because a lot of suttas with the formula have an abbreviated version of it.
For example SN 12.15 has just "‘Ignorance is a condition for choices. Choices are a condition for consciousness. … That is how this entire mass of suffering originates. "
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That’s possible, but I assume the translators abbreviate when they refer to suttas which are immediately preceding - which is likely in SN 12. If you find a few examples outside of SN 12 I will gladly do a more detailed search.
Do you need to study astronomy and its history to know that it is hot standing out in the midday sun? What I am reacting to is the academic’s approach to the Buddha’s Dhamma; whereas it is the PRACTICE that matters. Isn’t Dependent Origination as laid out in the Suttas enough? Isn’t that all you need to know so that your life will benefit from the Buddha’s great insight? Launching a ‘History of Ideas’ type investigation will never help you to become a better person which - after all - is the correct yardstick by means of which one can assess the true value of the Buddha Dhamma.
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Dear venerable @Phraalan please understand this forum exists exactly for, among other things, these things to be discussed.
No one is saying that practice doesn’t matter so be mindful of straw men.
If the discussion is to you useless or simply unpleasant you can mute it (I do it all the time!).
And if you want to encourage people to maybe not give too much thought to speculative doubts then patience, kindness and compassion is the way to get that message across.
With reverence and respect 
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It sounds like you have great devotion the the Triple Gem and that’s wonderful. Others here do too. Many of the efforts on this site are careful considerations to carefully sort out what the Buddha most likely actually said and what might have been added to the canon by later traditions. But just because something may have come later doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t true or valuable and certainly nobody here is saying that. We owe tremendous gratitude to the Buddhist scholars who investigate and discuss these delicate matters. They do it because the Dhamma is priceless to them too.
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The versions of the nidanas that I find most interesting are those in which it’s said that namarupa gives rise to vinnana and vinnana gives rise to namarupa. For example in DN14: “Name and form are conditions for consciousness. Consciousness is a condition for name and form.” The list then continues with “The six sense fields are conditions for contact…” and so on, as usual.
Elsewhere namarupa and vinnana are described as being like two bundles of reeds supporting each other.
It seems more likely to me that this is an earlier version of the nidanas, that was later expanded.
I interpret this closed loop of namarupa-vinnana in the following way:
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vinnana is not “consciousness” as an ethically neutral term. It’s discriminating consciousness. It separates and divides. One of the primary separations is into self and other, which is where our problems begin. (PED: "Vi (indecl.) [prefix, resting on Idg. ṷi “two,” as connotation of duality or separation.)
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Namarupa has the pre-Buddhist meaning of our experience of the world divided into supposedly separate entities (rupa), which are named (nama).
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This pair (namarupa and vinnana) supports and reinforces each other, because the mind that separates and discriminates, especially into self and other, is continually experiencing self and other, and so it naturally continues its separating and discriminating activities.
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We’re told (also in DN 14) that “This consciousness turns back from name and form, and doesn’t go beyond that.” In other words this is a closed loop. Vinnana sees a world of namarupa and, living within it, can’t conceive of anything else.
The rest of the list — the six sense fields, contact, feeling, craving, grasping, becoming, birth, old age and death — follows from this. I suspect, like Javier, that birth, old age, and death, were originally one item, standing for “dukkha” — “this entire mass of suffering” — so that the list was not originally about death and rebirth, but was simply laying out how suffering comes to be.
I take the rest of the list to be an elaboration or a working out of how suffering comes to arise in a mind that functions dualistically.
So perhaps the nidanas had originally nothing to do explicitly with rebirth, but were a teaching on how we’re trapped in an illusory sense of duality, and how living in that illusory sense of duality causes us suffering.
And perhaps this list just happened to lend itself to being seen in terms of rebirth. Just stick a couple of extra nidanas at the beginning to represent a previous life, separate out examples of dukkha (birth and death) and see birth as being a future birth, and you now have the standard 12-step model explaining the cycle of birth and death over three lives. Perhaps there were social and religious reasons for why monks needed a fuller explanation of rebirth. I don’t know. I’m just trying to make sense of things in the scriptures that don’t entirely satisfy me.
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I’ve always considered namarupa/vinnana to really stand out in the 12 nidanas.
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It’s that way in Chinese Agamas, too. I searched for the standard translation of ignorance and looked at each passage quickly. It was luckily not too large of a dataset. There’s definitely an art to text search, finding the right expression that isn’t prohibitively common and yet captures all the cases that’s being searched for.
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A few things strike me about this. One is that the 12 nidanas are typically seen as forming a cycle (as in the image of the Wheel of Life). And yet namarupa-vinnana is itself is described as a cycle (explained further, in terms of the origination of suffering in the rest of the nidanas).
Also, the traditional interpretation of namarupa meaning “body and mind” just isn’t at all satisfying to me. There are plenty of words for “mind” in Buddhism, and “nama” is not typically used that way. The term namarupa isn’t one the Buddha invented, and its existing use at that time was to point to the differentiation of a nondual world into dualities (this v. that).
If vinnana is not neutral but is a mental tendency to separate and discriminate, then what it means for vinnana to cease to exist is very different compared to when we think of vinnana as a neutral process (simply the faculty by which we are conscious).
(Also I realized I’d been typing Skt. vijnana above so I corrected that!)
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Here’s an interesting sutta on nama:
“What oppresses everything?
What is nothing bigger than?
What is the one thing
that has everything under its sway?”
“Name oppresses everything.
Nothing’s bigger than name.
Name is the one thing
that has everything under its sway.”
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Thank you Gabriel. Please understand that during my more than 30 years in Thailand I have watched as the Sangha has drifted away from the practice of the Buddha’s Dhamma to concerning itself with Pali study and other purely academic matters. In fact following the death of my own Dhamma Father a couple of years ago, there is now no competent meditation teacher still alive up here in the North. When I first came here we were spoiled for choice; but now academic study has become the vogue. Perhaps my strength of feeling on this issue moves me to come across rather bluntly. No offence is meant; but I do regret seeing the essence of the Dhamma reduced to theoretical or historical speculation and opinion.
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