[Buddha-l] Re: Where does authority for "true" Buddhism come from?

[Stephen Hodge]

Erik Hoogcarspel wrote:

> Well I think the 12 nidaana's are just pseudo causal, because it's a one 
> way street, a spiral at the best, which is nothing but a curved line. 
> Ignorance causes consciousness etc. and not the other way around.

Or possibly the 12 nidanas do not involve causality per se at all -- look 
closely at the standard wording for each of the links: "x arises in 
dependence upon Y".  Dependence is not quite the same thing as causality.

Also there is a lot of confusion about the standard 12 nidanas, because most 
people (past and present) are unaware that it is a rather clumsy conflation 
of two separate processes intended to account for suffering, one perceptual 
and the other what we might term existential.

1.    vijñāna -> nāma-rūpa -> ṣaḍ-āyatana -> sparśa -> vedanā [= duḥkha]
2.    tṛṣṇa -> upādāna -> bhava -> jāti -> jarā-maraṇa [= duḥkha]

These earlier forms of the PS can be found in the Nikayas.  Sometime after 
these two sets got conflated, avidyā and saṃskāra were stuck on at the 
beginning for reasons that concern a different concept of the path and its 
goal.  It would therefore seem unlikely that the Buddha actually taught the 
12-fold PS -- it is more probable that he primarily taught List 2 and 
sometimes possibly List 1.

Best wishes,
Stephen Hodge