Conditionality or Dependent Origination
The Principle of Conditionality, The Law of Causation and Conditioned Co-production are all translations of the Pali term paticcasamupada.
Buddhists believe that as part of his Enlightenment experience, the Buddha understood the nature of existence. He put his realisation, which is essentially beyond words, into the conceptual form of paticcasamupada, or The Principle of Conditionality.
This principle teaches that
- everything comes into being and is maintained by a complex web of conditions
- everything is part of the network of conditions maintaining something else
- nothing exists completely independent of anything else
- everything ceases when the conditions that maintain it cease
- the whole of existence is a ceaseless process of flux and change
- conditionality applies on all levels of existence from the physical environment to the human mind
Check out this interactive wheel of life
If this is, that comes to be;
from the arising of this, that arises;
if this is not, that does not come to be;
from the stopping of this, that is stopped.
Majjhima-Nikaya 11; Collection of Middle Length Sayings