Dependent Origination

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The Buddha summarized his enlightenment in the concept, the "Principle of Dependent Origination."

This principle teaches:

-Everything comes into being and is maintained by a complex web of conditions.

-Nothing exists completely independent of anything else.

-Everything ceases when the conditions that maintain it cease.

-Existence is a ceaseless process of flux.

The twelve links of dependent origination describe a causal connection between the subsequent conditions of cyclic existence, each one giving rise to the next:
1. ignorance, 2. mental formations, 3. consciousness, 4. name and form, 5. the six sense gates (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body and mind), 6. contact, 7. feeling, 8. craving, 9. clinging, 10. becoming, 11. birth, 12. ageing and death.

- excerpt from Buddhist English (Elementary 1) published in 2014 by the Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism​​​