pratītyasamutpāda

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Glossarypratītyasamutpāda

Sanskrit Noun

pratītyasamutpāda

dependent origination
प्रतीत्यसमुत्पाद
རྟེན་ཅིང་འབྲེལ་བར་འབྱུང་བ་, རྟེན་འབྲེལ་
緣起

Basic Meaning

The notion that all phenomena arise in dependence on causes and conditions.

Has the Sense of

In Madhyamaka thought it is used to describe the relative level of the truth. Since phenomena come into being interdependently at this level, they are therefore empty of inherent existence at the ultimate level.

Read It in the Scriptures

Because there are no phenomena
That are not dependently arisen,
There are no phenomena
That are not empty.  
~ Nāgārjuna. Mūlamadhyamakakārikā Chapter 24, Verse 19.
On this topic
Book
An Introduction to Buddhism (Takasaki)
This book is based upon notes prepared by the author for general lectures on Buddhism which he has been giving to students at a number of universities in Tokyo since around 1960. The initial version of the present work first saw the light of day as part of a textbook for university students entitled Bukkyo ippan 仏教一般 (Buddhism in General) which was compiled in concert with professors specializing in Chinese and Japanese Buddhism and published by the Department of Buddhist Studies at Komazawa University in Tokyo. Then, at a later date, the author was approached by the Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai (University of Tokyo Press) to write an introductory work on Buddhism for the edification of the general reading public. By permission of the Department of Buddhist Studies at Komazawa University, he accordingly extracted those sections of the above textbook which he had himself written ("Outline of Buddhism" and "Indian Buddhism"), to which he then made some additions and corrections and also appended a brief history of Buddhism covering not only India but also China and Japan. This was then published in 1983 under the title of Bukkyo nyümon 仏教入門 (An Introduction to Buddhism), of which the present work is an English translation. (Takasaki, preface to the English version, iii)
Takasaki, Jikidō. An Introduction to Buddhism. Translated by Rolf W. Giebel. Tokyo: Tōhō Gakkai, 1987. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/en/files/2018/06/Takasaki-Jikido_An-Introduction-to-Buddhism.pdf
Video
Dorji Wangchuk at the 2019 Tathāgatagarbha Symposium
Dorji Wangchuk discusses critiques of Buddha-nature theory as non-Buddhist and as opposed to the Buddha's teaching on dependent arising. In particular, he looks at how Rongzom Chökyi Zangpo interprets the tathāgatagarbha theory in relation to the pratītyasamutpāda theory.
Wangchuk, Dorji. "Rong-zom-pa on the Tathāgatagarbha and Pratītyasamutpāda Theories." Paper presented at the University of Vienna Symposium, Tathāgatagarbha Across Asia, Vienna, Austria, July 2019. Video, 45:33. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0slogomESI8.
Article
Nehangyō kyōtengun ni okeru kū to jitsuzai
Suzuki, Takayasu. "Nehangyō kyōtengun ni okeru kū to jitsuzai" (The Non-emptiness of the Tathāgata in the Mahāparinirvānasūtra-Group). Tōyō bunka kenkyūsho kiyō (Bulletin of Institute of Oriental Culture) 139 (2000): 109–46.
Suzuki, Takayasu. "Nehangyō kyōtengun ni okeru kū to jitsuzai" (The Non-emptiness of the Tathāgata in the Mahāparinirvānasūtra-Group). Tōyō bunka kenkyūsho kiyō (Bulletin of Institute of Oriental Culture) 139 (2000): 109–46.
Book
Saṃsāra, Nirvāṇa, and Buddha Nature
This is the third volume in the Dalai Lama’s definitive and comprehensive series on the stages of the Buddhist path.
Dalai Lama, 14th, and Thubten Chodron. Saṃsāra, Nirvāṇa, and Buddha Nature. Library of Wisdom and Compassion 3. Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2018.
Article
Tathāgatagarbha, Emptiness, and Monism
The tathāgatagarbha doctrine is one of the most significant Buddhist doctrines to have come under the scrutiny of scholars in recent times.2 One of the more interesting aspects of this doctrine is that it focuses attention on the nature of the Buddhist “absolute” or highest truth in such a way as to make clear many of the problems and concerns of the Buddhist community after the advent of the doctrine of emptiness (śūnyatā). This is so because, while on the one hand the tathāgatagarbha is identified with emptiness (“The wisdom of the tathāgatagarbha is nothing but the Tathāgata's wisdom of emptiness”3), on the other hand this emptiness, which for Nāgārjuna and more so for Candrakīrti was a “non-affirming negation,” is redefined in terms of affirmative predications of the highest order (e.g. astitva, mahā-ātman, eternal, etc.). That an investigation of the tathāgatagarbha requires one to ask fundamental questions about the nature of the Buddhist absolute—e.g. is there an “absolute” in Buddhism, and if so, what are its characteristics, how does it differ from the substantialism of the ātmavāda, etc.—is also indicated by the fact that both those who assert tathāgatagarbha to be an absolute or monistic doctrine and those who interpret it in orthodox Buddhist terms do so based on the same line of reasoning, i.e. that tathāgatagarbha is but an expression of pratītyasamutpāda and śūnyatā. The difference is that the former group of scholars see Mahāyāna in general as monistic while the latter do not. This essay is concerned with this question of the equation of pratītyasamutpāda, śūnyatā, and tathāgatagarbha and the related issue of whether or not tathāgatagarbha thought represents a form of Buddhist monism.(Hubbard, introductory remarks, 1–2)

Notes:

1. (In title and not shown) This was originally written in 1994; the publisher seems to have fallen into a black hole, so I am putting it out here myself; I have not changed it (other than fonts and some formatting issues) in order to keep the historical in perspective. I think that I still agree with myself, especially with the idea that tathāgatagarbha represents more of a dualism than a monism and thereby leads to ethical problems with the less-than-real (accidental) kleśa.

2. Many of the questions considered here have been treated in David Ruegg's recent publication Buddha-nature, Mind and the Problem of Gradualism in a Comparative Perspective (Delhi: Heritage Publishers 1992); see especially Chapter One.

3. Jikido Takasaki, A Study of the Ratnagotravibhāga (Uttara-tantra), (Rome, 1966), p. 302. Hereafter cited as Ratnagotravibhāga.
Hubbard, Jamie. "Tathāgatagarbha, Emptiness, and Monism.” Online Publications of Jamie Hubbard, May 2009 (originally written in 1994). https://sophia.smith.edu/~jhubbard/publications/papers/TG-Emptiness-Monism.pdf.
Book
The Buddhist Unconscious
This is the story of fifth century CE India, when the Yogacarin Buddhists tested the awareness of unawareness, and became aware of human unawareness to an extraordinary degree. They not only explicitly differentiated this dimension of mental processes from conscious cognitive processes, but also offered reasoned arguments on behalf of this dimension of mind. This is the concept of the 'Buddhist unconscious', which arose just as philosophical discourse in other circles was fiercely debating the limits of conscious awareness, and these ideas in turn had developed as a systematisation of teachings from the Buddha himself. For us in the twenty-first century, these teachings connect in fascinating ways to the Western conceptions of the 'cognitive unconscious' which have been elaborated in the work of Jung and Freud.
      This important study reveals how the Buddhist unconscious illuminates and draws out aspects of current western thinking on the unconscious mind. One of the most intriguing connections is the idea that there is in fact no substantial 'self' underlying all mental activity; 'the thoughts themselves are the thinker'. William S. Waldron considers the implications of this radical notion, which, despite only recently gaining plausibility, was in fact first posited 2,500 years ago. (Source: Routledge)
Waldron, William S. The Buddhist Unconscious: The Ālaya-Vijñāna in the Context of Indian Buddhist Thought. Routledge Critical Studies in Buddhism. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. http://abhidharma.ru/A/Raznoe/0061.pdf.
Article
The Clarity Aspect
When the Buddha taught that all beings have buddhanature, says Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, he wasn’t contradicting the teachings on emptiness—he was clarifying them.
Khyentse, Dzongsar. "The Clarity Aspect." Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly, June 17, 2017.
Article
The Idea of Dhātu-vāda in Yogācāra and Tathāgata-garbha Texts
Yamabe, Nobuyoshi. "The Idea of Dhātu-vāda in Yogācāra and Tathāgata-garbha Texts." In Pruning the Bodhi Tree: The Storm over Critical Buddhism, edited by Jamie Hubbard and Paul L. Swanson, 193–204. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997.
Yamabe, Nobuyoshi. "The Idea of Dhātu-vāda in Yogācāra and Tathāgata-garbha Texts." In Pruning the Bodhi Tree: The Storm over Critical Buddhism, edited by Jamie Hubbard and Paul L. Swanson, 193–204. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997.
Book
The Philosophy of Buddhism
The translation of Erich Frauwallner's Die Philosophie des Buddhismus, first published in 1956, opens up a classic introduction to Buddhist thought to a broader English language readership. The book covers the period of early canonical literature with examples of its philosophically relevant ideas, followed by the principal philosophical concepts of systematic Sravakayana Buddhism. In the main part of the book, Frauwallner presents the first survey of the development of the philosophical systems of Mahayana Buddhism. He was well aware of the limitations in presenting only the Buddhist philosophy of the "classical", i.e., the systematic period, and does not seem to have been ready to add the philosophically creative new postsystematic tradition of Buddhist epistemology and logic, a major subject of his subsequent years of research.

Frauwallner's way of translating was straightforward: to remain as close as possible to the original text while presenting it in a clear and readable way in order to convey an accurate impression of its meaning. For technical terms in the source materials he maintained a single translation even when various meanings were suggested. For clarity regarding such variations of meaning he relied on the context and his explanation.

The same approach was taken by the translator of the present book. Although his translation attempts to be faithful to the 1994 edition of Die Philosophie des Buddhismus, he inserted helpful additional headlines into the text and considerably enlarged the index. All other additions by the translator are given within square brackets. Besides this, he created an Appendix, which contains one of Frauwallner's more important articles "Amalavijnana and Alayavijnana" (1951) to complement the long Yogacara section of the book, a bibliography of selective publications after 1969. The URLs for many of the source materials were also conveniently provided. (Source: Motilal Banarsidass)
Frauwallner, Erich. The Philosophy of Buddhism (Die Philosophie des Buddhismus). Translated by Gelong Lodrö Sangpo with the assistance of Jigme Sheldrön, under the supervision of Ernst Steinkellner. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2010. Originally published 1994 by Akademie-Verlag as Die Philosophie des Buddhismus (Berlin).
PhD Diss
The Ālayavijñāna in the Context of Indian Buddhist Thought: The Yogācāra Conception of an Unconscious
Abstract

The thesis focuses on the relations between mind and karma and the continuity of life in saṃsāra based upon a concept of mind, the ālayavijñāna, as presented in the texts of Asaṅga and Vasubandhu of the Yogācāra school of Indian Buddhism, A.D. 4-5th centuries. It has been the topic of many sectarian disputes as well as the springboard for several far-reaching doctrinal developments, so it is desirable to examine it within its early Indian Buddhist context.
      The first section presents the multivalent viññāṇa of the Pali Canon and related concepts. It demonstrates that the major characteristics later predicated of the ālayavijñāna were present in an unsystematized but implicit form in the viññāṇa of the early discourses.
      The next section describes the systematic psychological analysis developed by the Abhidharma and its consequent problematics. It argues that the incongruity of Abhidharmic analysis with the older unsystematized doctrines led to major theoretical problems concerning the key concepts of kleśa and karma, to which the Sautrāntika school offered the concept of seeds (bija).
      The third section, based primarily upon the texts translated herein, depicts the origination and gradual development of the ālayavijñāna within the Yogācāra school from a somatic "life principle", to an explicitly unconscious mind, to its final bifurcation into an unconscious afflicted mind (kliṣṭa-manas) and a passive respository of karmic seeds, the latent loci of kleśa and karma, respectively.
      The last section compares the ālayavijñāna systematically with Freud's and Jung's concepts of the unconscious, concluding that their respective philosophical milieus led both traditions to conceptions of unconscious mental processes as necessary compensations for strictly intentional epistemological models.
      In the appendix the major texts presenting the ālayavijñāna, Chaps. V and VIII.37 of the Saṃdhinirmocana Sūtra, part of the Viniścaya-saṃgrahaṇī of the Yogācārabhūmi, and Ch. 1 of the Mahāyāna-saṃgraha, are translated and extensively annotated in order to contextualize the minutiae of this concept of mind with its canonical precursors and its Abhidharmic contemporaries. (Source: ProQuest)
Waldron, William S. "The Ālayavijñāna in the Context of Indian Buddhist Thought: The Yogācāra Conception of an Unconscious." PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1990.
Term Variations
Key Term pratītyasamutpāda
Topic Variation pratītyasamutpāda
Tibetan རྟེན་ཅིང་འབྲེལ་བར་འབྱུང་བ་, རྟེན་འབྲེལ་  ( tenching drelwar jungwa, ten drel)
Wylie Tibetan Transliteration rten cing 'brel bar 'byung ba, rten 'brel  ( tenching drelwar jungwa, ten drel)
Devanagari Sanskrit प्रतीत्यसमुत्पाद
Chinese 緣起
Chinese Pinyin yuánqǐ
Japanese Transliteration engi
Buddha-nature Site Standard English dependent origination
Karl Brunnhölzl's English Term dependent origination
Richard Barron's English Term interdependence, occurring in/ coming into being through interdependent connection, interdependent origination
Jeffrey Hopkin's English Term dependent-arising
Dan Martin's English Term Emerging through containment-connection.
Gyurme Dorje's English Term dependent origination
Ives Waldo's English Term Interdependent origination
Term Information
Usage Example apratītya samutpanno dharmaḥ kaścin na vidyate

yasmāt tasmād aśūnyo hi dharmaḥ kaścin na vidyate

གང་ཕྱིར་རྟེན་འབྱུང་མ་ཡིན་པའི།
།ཆོས་འགའ་ཡོད་པ་མ་ཡིན་པ།
།དེ་ཕྱིར་སྟོང་པ་མ་ཡིན་པའི།
།ཆོས་འགའ་ཡོད་པ་མ་ཡིན་ནོ།

Nāgārjuna. Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, XXIV.19
Source Language Sanskrit
Basic Meaning The notion that all phenomena arise in dependence on causes and conditions.
Has the Sense of In Madhyamaka thought it is used to describe the relative level of the truth. Since phenomena come into being interdependently at this level, they are therefore empty of inherent existence at the ultimate level.
Term Type Noun
Definitions
Rangjung Yeshe Dictionary dependent origination. The natural law that all phenomena arise 'dependent upon' their own causes 'in connection with' their individual conditions. The fact that no phenomena appear without a cause and none are made by an uncaused creator. Everything arises exclusively due to and dependent upon the coincidence of causes and conditions without which they cannot possibly appear.
Wikipedia wikipedia:Pratītyasamutpāda
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