The Trap of the Twelve Links of Dependent Origination
This is my third critique of the monk Ilmuk. As I made clear in the previous two discussions, Ilmuk is not the only person whose claims I am challenging. My criticism also concerns Theravada Buddhism, which calls itself early Buddhism. I do not accept that label. In my view, a later school built on rebirth is presenting itself as Buddhism at its beginning.
This time I want to examine the twelve links of dependent origination, which occupy a central place in that teaching. Let me state my conclusion plainly. The twelve links are a Frankenstein fabricated in later times: a construction bearing the name of dependent origination that is difficult to explain in genuinely interdependent terms. Holding on to it as the essence of Buddhism leads into a trap rather than toward understanding Buddhism. I want to explain what that trap looks like and why I call it a fabrication made for rebirth.
Students of Theravada are not the only people caught in this trap. People in Korea who say they practice Mahayana, as well as professors and monks who explain Buddhism, start inventing connections that make no sense when they reach the twelve links. I have repeatedly criticized people who speak sensibly about other things and then stumble here. Instead of competing to offer the most plausible explanation, we should first ask whether the thing being explained was properly constructed in the first place.
Ilmuk’s lecture is titled “Where Do I Come From, and Where Am I Going?” I examined roughly the first fifteen minutes of his one-hour-and-seven-minute lecture on the twelve links at Jetavana Seonwon. During the broadcast I played the original at one and a half times normal speed, and at one point the OBS picture froze and had to be reset. But the question we need to examine is simple. Are the twelve links really Buddhism’s answer to “Where do I come from, and where am I going?” My answer is no. The thumbnail’s statement, “The twelve links were fabricated for rebirth,” is not clickbait. It is the core of this discussion.
Who Is Supposed to Come from Somewhere and Go Somewhere Else?
Who am I? What am I? Where do I go when I die? Did I suddenly come into being one day, or was there something before that? These are not questions unique to Buddhism. They are humanity’s own questions, asked ever since people began thinking of themselves as an “I.” In ancient India, they came to the forefront in the thought of the Upanishads and the shramanas.
I do not intend to present historical stories as established certainties. Even the period in which Gautama Siddhartha is said to have lived is given as a broad range, such as between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE, with different accounts in different regions and among different writers. I do not think we can even be certain of the historical Buddha’s existence. What I want to examine is how Buddhism answered the questions asked in the age in which Gautama is said to have lived.
Buddhism’s answer is that things arise dependently, and that there is anatman. Dependent origination and the twelve links are not the same expression. Dependent origination means arising within relationships. Something does not suddenly pop into being out of nowhere. We are the result of material processes coming together and dispersing. Our minds and mental activity are not independent things floating apart from our bodies and the world.
When someone asks, “Where do I go after I die?”, what exactly is supposed to go? A true self, soul, or atman that survives the body and moves into another one? Something that suddenly enters a fetus in its mother’s womb and takes up residence there? I do not consider that Buddhism’s answer. Anatman is precisely the rejection of that kind of atman.
Memorizing non-self as nothing more than “I do not exist” misses the point. The claim is not that we should erase the bodies and minds that are present now. It is that existing things arise within relationships and therefore cannot exist independently or remain permanent. If you then reintroduce a being that keeps living while changing bodies, you are diligently explaining non-self only to turn around and talk about atman.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that something like a soul exists. Is it permanent or impermanent? If it is impermanent, could it not suddenly disappear? In that case, the guarantee that it must continue into another life disappears too. To call it impermanent while explaining rebirth as something that necessarily continues is inconsistent. Saying “a new birth” or “being born again” does not solve the problem. To me, the concept itself has not escaped an elementary-school level of thinking.
Do Not Separate Mind and Craving from the Body
Ilmuk says the twelve links explain what a being is, where it comes from and goes, and how it lives after birth. Because suffering occurs through the mind, he says, we need to understand how mind and consciousness arise and the mechanism by which actions form karma and past events influence the present. I question the starting point itself. Is a being that moves independently of the body already being assumed?
Our minds and mental activity arise in conjunction with our bodies. What could craving be if it is not a bodily phenomenon? We cannot simply say that craving arises without any conditions and that everything then arises because of craving. We have to ask where the mind came from and where craving came from. Cutting away their relationships with the body and the world and installing craving as the cause of everything is not what I mean by dependent origination.
Let us speak in twenty-first-century terms. Our minds are based on the body and are influenced by inborn dispositions, DNA, education, society, and culture. Standards form under those conditions, and according to those standards we come to want or dislike things. Some desires are directly linked to bodily activities such as eating, defecating, and urinating. Eating something delicious, seeking pleasures associated with dopamine in the brain, and avoiding pain are further examples.
Seeing the mind as a phenomenon of material activity is therefore entirely different from imagining an unknowable thing called mind that exists separately and moves from body to body. If we abandon an explanation of mind and craving arising within relationships and instead lead with words such as existence and rebirth, we smuggle an independent something back into the account. What matters is what the explanation actually presupposes, not how often it uses the word non-self.
The Three-Life Interpretation and the Momentary Interpretation Are Not the Same Story
Ilmuk explains that the twelve links reveal the causes of the beginning of this life and what happens after this life ends in death. This is the theory of two sets of cause and effect across three lives. It is a representative interpretation of the twelve links, but it assumes rebirth from the outset. It lays out a past life, the present life, and the next life, then describes one causal connection from the past to the present and another from the present to the future. Three lives are connected through two sets of causation.
There is another approach. The Yogacara interpretation of one set of cause and effect across two lives reads the twelve links in terms of a past life, the present life, and one causal connection between them. Nor are these the only two interpretations. Ever since the old Buddhist schools were debating one another, different schools and branches have explained them differently. This is not a confusion that suddenly appeared today.
Looking at those differences, I ask why the explanations vary so much if the causation is clear. If we could readily determine which cause produces which effect, why would people say so many different things about what should be evident to everyone? In my view, there has never been an answer to the twelve links that everyone can find convincing. What is not causation has been presented as causation in a flimsy construction, leaving interpreters to fill the gaps.
Of course, disagreement among interpretations does not by itself prove that the twelve links are illusory. It is not in itself a direct causal argument or conclusive evidence. It is one reason for wondering why people keep offering different translations and interpretations. I want to examine that suspicion alongside the problems in the actual construction.
Ilmuk says there is also an interpretation that treats all twelve as occurring in a single moment for the purposes of practice, and that he does not see the two interpretations as very different. How are they not very different? Explaining how a present life arises from a past life and leads to a future life is quite different from explaining a phenomenon occurring right now. Has the latter not discarded the premise of rebirth? Saying that it is useful for practice cannot erase that distinction.
If It Already Exists, Why Must It Be Born Again?
Let us trace the twelve links backward. Aging and death arise because of birth. Birth arises because of becoming or existence, existence because of clinging, and clinging because of craving. We then move backward through feeling, contact, the six sense bases, name-and-form, consciousness, formations, and ignorance. Being able to recite the terms in sequence is a different matter from understanding their causation.
Is the beginning not already strange? If birth arises because of existence, what is being born when it already exists? Interpreting that link as karma changes the story again. We are told that clinging produces karma and that this karma forms the next life. Some explain the same position as existence, others as karma. Before switching interpretations, they should show why the connection holds.
The claim that clinging causes existence has the same problem. Must there not be a being to do the clinging? If it has not yet been born, who clung to what? Stringing together the claims that craving creates a desire to grasp, grasping creates karma, and karma produces another birth does not automatically reveal an actual cause-and-effect relationship.
Now follow the logic in the opposite direction: remove the cause and the result should disappear. If there is no clinging, there should be neither birth nor aging and death. But how does someone who has already been born avoid aging and dying? Does removing craving and feeling remove birth and death? I want to question even the premise that craving can completely disappear in a human being. Listing twelve terms in order is not an answer.
This is why I call the twelve links a Frankenstein. Ignorance, birth, and aging and death were added to an account of why people quarrel and suffer, joining entirely different problems into a single line. The earlier six-link account asked why we fight, become angry, and fall into disputes. I do not regard that as a verbatim record of the Buddha’s words either, but at least we can identify the phenomenon whose causes it is investigating. Adding rebirth makes the connections a mess.
Does Putting Ignorance at the End Finish the Explanation?
Ilmuk’s explanation proceeds backward until it reaches ignorance and stops. He says the Buddha did not continue tracing causes indefinitely because all problems begin with not knowing the truth he had realized. But what have we learned merely by putting the word ignorance there? Ignorance is avidya. This term belongs not only to Buddhism but also to Hinduism, Yoga, and Vedanta.
In texts such as the Yoga Sutras, avidya is described as fundamental ignorance and an obstacle to liberation. The structure is that the present ego is not the true self, and that true knowledge and awareness must remove this ignorance. This leads to finding the true self, escaping rebirth, and uniting with Brahman. Within that framework, what was unknown and what must become known at least connect in its own fashion. It is precisely that structure that I call anti-Buddhist.
Consider the root vid as well. I explain it in connection with the English word vision. The word Veda likewise connects with knowing and having seen. The Vedas mix ancient Indian mythology and philosophy with political matters, sacrificial rituals, praise of gods, and demands made of people. The important point here is that knowledge begins with seeing and observing. Knowing through seeing develops into the meanings of knowledge and wisdom.
On that reading, avidya means not having seen and not having known. What has not been seen? In the Hindu explanation, it is the true self, atman. One undergoes rebirth because one does not know that true self. We can read the pairing of ignorance and rebirth in that structure. But does the explanation still fit if we carry it unchanged into a Buddhism that rejects atman? I do not think it does.
I am not establishing who influenced whom first. Something originating in Buddhism might have influenced Hinduism, Hinduism might have influenced Buddhism, or there might have been mutual influence. Let me be clear that I do not know the historical direction. What I am criticizing is the logic now being presented. Buddhism’s account of mutual relatedness is not the same as an explanation that we undergo rebirth because we do not know an invisible true self.
If Defilements Cause Ignorance, What Causes the Defilements?
Putting ignorance at the beginning immediately raises another question. Is ignorance then an absolute something that exists without a cause? Ilmuk anticipates such criticism from non-Buddhist schools and says ignorance also has a cause and is conditioned. Citing the Discourse on Right View in the Majjhima Nikaya, in which Sariputta appears, he says defilements are the cause of ignorance.
I cannot help laughing here. Something outside the twelve links is brought in and attached to them. We started with birth to explain aging and death, worked backward through clinging and craving, and finally arrived at ignorance. Now ignorance is caused by defilements. But do defilements not require a human being? Must one not be born to have defilements? What has been explained by placing human defilements before an account of rebirth that begins before birth?
Moreover, ignorance itself is included among those defilements. Sensual desire, desire for existence, and ignorance are commonly given as three, while the Abhidhamma lists four. Yet ignorance is explained by defilements, and when we look into the defilements, ignorance appears again. Is ignorance caused by ignorance and craving? Is this an explanation or shit? At the very least, should the speaker not make sense within his own logic?
Ilmuk says foolishness produces craving and clinging, and that when these defilements intensify, the mind becomes clouded and cannot see the truth, strengthening ignorance again. Ignorance produces defilements, and defilements reinforce ignorance. This, he says, shows that ignorance is conditioned rather than absolute. Then where is the exit within that logic? We were told to remove ignorance, but defilements cause ignorance and ignorance is included in defilements. How are we supposed to resolve that cause?
I say that the twelve links are difficult to interpret because the construction itself is a mess. Even so, anyone attempting to interpret a mess should at least maintain a coherent argument in their own words. Adding that foolishness makes us more foolish cannot answer a question that began with aging and death. Bringing in another scripture and attaching another term does not complete the explanation. It exposes how unclear the original connection was.
Do Not Attach the Big Bang to Not Knowing When Rebirth Began
If rebirth has continued, we can ask when it began. Ilmuk explains that its beginning is unknowable and could not be discovered even by the Buddha’s wisdom. Beings have existed from an unknowable past, contaminated by defilements and undergoing rebirth. He then brings up questions in modern science, such as what preceded the Big Bang, where the universe’s beginning lies, and the multiverse.
This is one of the bad habits of people who discuss religion. When their own story gets stuck, they attach science wherever they can. Christianity does this too. What do unanswered scientific questions about what preceded the Big Bang have to do with the rebirth being discussed here? Does the existence of something unexplained mean that we must accept another unexplained claim?
Living things are combinations based on matter. Think about how long living organisms have existed in the universe. Are we being told that beings underwent rebirth even before the Big Bang, when there were no organisms? What was being reborn then? I cannot accept an account that separates life from matter, presents it as an existence that has always continued, and borrows the name of science only when convenient.
Ilmuk says that even though we do not know the beginning, we can know that abandoning defilements ends rebirth. But returning to the twelve links after hearing that changes nothing. Ignorance, formations, consciousness, name-and-form, the six sense bases, contact, and feeling are laid out, and we are told to resolve ignorance. How does someone already born cut off their birth and death? Neither the three-life interpretation nor the two-life interpretation answers that question.
“They Are All Conditioned” Cannot Fill the Missing Connections
Ilmuk emphasizes that every factor in the twelve links is formed through conditions. Aging and death depend on birth, birth on existence, formations on ignorance, and ignorance itself on defilements. Therefore, he explains, all the factors are impermanent, suffering, and non-self. Repeating that something is conditioned does not automatically establish the connections between the alleged conditions.
The problem remains whether the relevant link is translated as existence or karma. If one is born because of existence, one already existed before being born. If that existence arose because of clinging, we must ask where the being that clung came from. If ignorance means not knowing the truth of impermanence, suffering, and non-self, who did not know it before birth, and who is supposed to learn it? Mixed with rebirth, the account is strange. Treated purely as the causation of present phenomena, it becomes strange again when birth and aging and death intrude.
The momentary interpretation faces the same problem. Why does aging and death appear in an account of a brief mental process? Are we simply supposed to reinterpret it as birth, aging, and death within a moment? If the explanation were clear, there would be less reason to argue over differing accounts. Yet whichever way it is explained, it leaves us puzzled. It is like imagining the appearance of an elephant one has never seen and declaring, “This is what an elephant looks like.”
Eventually the explanation brings in the Four Noble Truths: craving produces suffering, the cessation of craving brings the cessation of suffering, and the Noble Eightfold Path is the method for ending craving. At that point I stopped playing the lecture. Adding the Four Noble Truths and other teachings while interpreting the twelve links does not make the relationships among the twelve items understandable. After hearing all that and looking at the links again, do we really know why formations arise from ignorance or name-and-form from consciousness?
At least the Hindu account says to find the true self. There is a real self beyond the present body or ego, invisible but available to be known. But Buddhism speaks of anatman because it tells us not to search for such a thing. The direction I see in Buddhism is following the path of tormenting the body, fasting, and cutting off desire to find something unobservable, then recognizing that this is not the way. Reinstalling the framework of ignorance, true self, and rebirth reverses that direction.
Do Not Read the Sutta Nipata as the Words of a Single Period
Let us now examine the construction from which the twelve links emerged. During the broadcast I showed several translations of the Sutta Nipata that I own. Beopjeong’s older translation has the character of an earlier translation through Japanese and Chinese characters, and I also have Seok Jihyeon’s version. I added that I was not certain whether the latter was Korea’s second translation. More recently, some have tried translating directly from Pali, though English and Japanese translations may also be consulted in interpretation. Having put considerable effort into translating it myself, I know Pali is not easy to render.
First, we must abandon an assumption. Calling the Sutta Nipata an old scripture does not mean every part of it consists of the oldest words composed at the same time. Nipata means a collection of suttas. A collection of things transmitted from long ago can also include interpretations attached to them and newly written scriptures. Ancient material and later material can occupy the same volume.
If we treat the entire book as the Buddha’s words, we fail to distinguish those layers. There are old verses, later commentaries intended to explain them, and still later prose. Contradictions can be understood in terms of those different layers. The presence in one book of both the six-link account and traces of a more expanded construction should be viewed in that way.
The Sutta Nipata has five chapters, and the one I focus on here is the fourth, the Atthakavagga, or chapter of eight-verse discourses. It contains four core eight-verse texts: the Cave, the Evil or Anger, the Purity, and the Supreme. These four form the old core, but one discourse is added in front as an introduction and eleven more afterward, making sixteen in total. The four core texts are the second through fifth.
I also paused over the word eight. The eight in atthaka can be considered in connection with October and octopus. October is now the tenth month but was originally based on the eighth, and an octopus has eight legs. I also explained the Korean word yeodeol, eight, as having the same origin as atthaka and octo. They may sound different to others, but to me their sounds are very closely related. I brought this up to explain that the chapter’s name centers on discourses composed of eight verses.
Yet the explanations added afterward also bear the name discourse. Should we not distinguish a later writer’s commentary on ancient verses from something the Buddha actually said? Naming a text a discourse does not turn its author into the Buddha. This is also the context in which I read the fourth chapter’s eleventh discourse, the Kalahavivada Sutta, or Discourse on Quarrels and Disputes.
The Six-Link Account Asks Why We Fight
The explanation I examined during the broadcast said this discourse contains forms of “primitive dependent origination and the primitive Four Noble Truths.” I first distinguished what that wording should mean. It should refer not to the primitive form of dependent origination itself, but to an earlier form of the construction later called the twelve links. I have also repeatedly said that the Four Noble Truths—suffering, its origin, its cessation, and the path—were formulated later. Buddhism is not a religion concerned only with eliminating pain. It seeks wisdom.
Look at the opening questions in the Discourse on Quarrels and Disputes. Where do quarrels and disputes arise? How do lamentation, sadness, and stinginess arise? Where do conceit, arrogance, and maligning others come from? The questions are not limited to suffering alone. They ask about the concrete phenomena of fighting, grieving, being stingy, showing off, and slandering people. The starting point is not why we are born and die or how we move from a past life into another.
The answer proceeds as follows. Quarrels and disputes arise because there are things we like, hold on to, and cling to. We fight physically and verbally because we insist, “This is my land,” “What I say is right,” or “I am right.” It is not difficult to understand that attachment to what we regard as good and right can lead to conflict. Where is any need for birth or aging and death in that explanation?
Then where does clinging come from? From wanting. Whether we call it craving, greed, or kama, the important issue is not the label but how we come to want it. Where does that wanting arise? From pleasant or unpleasant experiences. I try an apple and find it delicious. I want to eat more apples, and because I want more, I hold on to them. Anyone can recognize this sequence in personal experience.
The same applies to aversion. I am burned by fire and experience heat and pain, so I do not want to go near it. After an experience of nearly drowning, someone may dislike swimming and even avoid boats. Pleasant and unpleasant experiences lead to wanting or avoiding certain things. Human beings operate through bodily processes such as dopamine. We can explain this without treating mind as a separate entity.
Attachment to ideas is no different. I hear something and it seems right. I come to want it, cling to it, and eventually fight over it. Liking apples and clinging to the thought that I am right are connected within this account. The point is not to memorize and believe terms, but to see how experience, wanting, clinging, and conflict relate to one another.
Where, then, does pleasant or unpleasant experience come from? Contact. An apple must enter my mouth and meet my tongue before I experience its deliciousness. I explain this as close to receiving, the meaning I give to feeling in the five aggregates of form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness. Likes and dislikes arise through meeting and receiving things with the five senses—eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and body. These five stages—quarrels and disputes, liking and clinging, wanting, pleasant and unpleasant experience, and contact—are not difficult to understand even in a brief explanation.
I Will Not Pretend to Understand What I Do Not Understand about Name-and-Form
The sixth stage is a little harder. Contact is said to arise because of name-and-form. Name-and-form is commonly explained as mind and matter. Read that way, one might say that mind and matter make contact possible. My own understanding, however, is closer to the attribution of meaning to matter or material objects. We attach a name to form, assigning names, concepts, and meanings.
This is why I call understanding name-and-form the alpha and omega of Buddhism. Understanding what meaning we assign to things lets us examine the wanting and clinging that follow. There is also room to read the account as saying that the subsequent problems would unravel if we did not assign meaning. But that does not mean I completely understand the statement that name-and-form is the direct cause of contact.
Let me state clearly that I cannot easily explain this part either. When I do not know, I say I do not know. If I understood it securely, I would explain it so that you could readily understand it too. But why contact occurs because of name-and-form, and how to explain that direct causation, remain difficult for me. The ease of the first five stages gives me no reason to pretend I also understand the final connection.
Nor does discussing the six links as a precursor to the twelve mean that I revere the entire six-link account as the Buddha’s own teaching. The questions are framed as if addressed to the Buddha, and the answers as if spoken by him. Yet I regard this, too, as a later writer’s attempt to interpret the old eight-verse texts. A later person wrote their own thoughts and attached the Buddha’s name. We must distinguish the fact that it at least investigates the causes of real problems from the claim that it is therefore the Buddha’s speech.
What Happens When Birth and Aging and Death Are Added to an Inquiry into Causes
In the Sutta Nipata’s third chapter, the Great Chapter, there appears an account of suffering arising in a sequence, though it is not identical to the standardized twelve links. We can already see a construction somewhat more developed than the six-link account. We need to recognize that the book contains writings from different periods: the old four eight-verse discourses, the explanations appended to them, and prose in the second and third chapters. My explanation is that these gradually became standardized as the twelve links.
Once they are fixed, people call all of them the Buddha’s words. Then they fight over how the twelve links should be interpreted. But what changes if we polish the interpretation while leaving untouched the problem that the construction was made later? Formations, ignorance, and birth and death are attached to an account involving name-and-form, contact, wanting, and clinging, and we are asked to read the result as a single profound truth. That is what I mean by a Frankenstein.
Consider especially the placement of birth as the cause of aging and death. If we age and die because we were born, are we supposed to avoid being born in order not to age and die? Has a specific cause been discovered, or has the entire problem simply been pushed into the word birth? People commonly speak of birth, aging, sickness, and death, so why is sickness missing here? Would saying that we become sick merely because we were born count as explaining the cause of illness?
I suggested that addressing bodily problems might make something like reversing aging possible. Investigating aging and dealing with its contributing factors is different from saying that we age because we were born. How far science might eventually go is a separate question, but we can at least consider what it means to seek concrete causes. Joining birth with aging and death and speaking of liberation through never being born again is not that kind of causal investigation.
This is why the final point of the twelve links matters. The six-link account began with real questions: why do people fight, become angry or depressed, and malign one another? Change the endpoint to aging and death, and the subject becomes rebirth and escape from birth and death. A path toward understanding actual disputes becomes a path toward never being born again. It is because of that transformation that I say the twelve links were made for rebirth.
Will Buddhism Become a Religion for Never Being Born Again?
The aim of never being born again so as not to repeat aging and death is what I call the Jain direction. Recall the story of Gautama Siddhartha practicing austerities for six years until his bones showed. I do not know whether that is actual history. In that story, however, extreme fasting illustrates an attempt to eliminate bodily desire completely.
If even the wish to eat is an action and karma, one seeks to eliminate the demand for food in order to create no karma at all. I call it foolish to make the suppression of bodily demands and death by starvation a means of liberation. It rejects the body in pursuit of perfect purity. The story of Gautama abandoning that path can be read as recognizing the error of believing in and searching for an unknown something merely because he had been told it existed.
There is no separate jiva or atman; the world is interdependent. That is the transition I read in Gautama’s story. How, then, does solving birth and death and avoiding death return to the center? The Buddha also aged and died. Answering that he will not be born again merely redirects the original question elsewhere, does it not?
And is there only suffering in life? Eating an apple can make us happy, as can playing with friends, being in love, or playing games. We live in a world containing both joy and its absence. How can we compress that world into the claim that everything is suffering? I want to ask whether being born again, if it were possible, might not be a good thing instead. In my view, as expressions such as the Four Noble Truths and “everything is suffering” hardened into doctrine, Buddhism became rigidly identified with solving suffering alone and lost its original shape.
We can see a similar hardening after the six-link explanation. The account moves beyond saying that a cause must be addressed to describe a state free both from perception of perception and from mistaken perception, yet neither without perception nor with perception extinguished. It attempts to go beyond name-and-form, even beyond the attribution of names and concepts. Understanding causes then shifts into reaching a particular meditative state.
I also regard these passages as additions that later people diligently composed. Such a state comes to occupy the position of cessation in the Four Noble Truths, followed by a path identified with the truth of the path and the Eightfold Path. If we identify the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path with Buddhism itself, we lose sight of the questions and explanations that preceded them. I am not proposing the six links as a perfect answer. I am asking what was added and how those additions changed the character of the question.
Interpretations That Mix Fetal Development with Rebirth
Some explain the sequence in which consciousness, name-and-form, the six sense bases, contact, feeling, and craving arise as the actual process of rebirth. They read it as something entering a fetus, followed by fetal development, the emergence of senses, and a person’s birth. What does that have to do with the questions in the six-link account? An inquiry into why people fight and come to want things has suddenly become a process in which a soul enters a fetus.
One person explains it across three lives, another across two, and another through momentary arising and passing away. Because only the terms are laid out, people attach whatever stories they want. I call these explanations bullshit. That may sound harsh, but I have no intention of dressing up a situation in which people fail to explain actual causation while presenting mutually different stories as profound interpretations.
The moment rebirth occupies the center of Buddhism, the religion itself changes. Where anatman once challenged the idea of an independent self going somewhere, the question becomes how that self reaches its next life. Buddhism becomes a religion of rebirth. Mind is a phenomenon arising from the body, yet people imagine it as a soul and debate when they entered their mother’s womb. Why add an unknowable something instead of recognizing that I was born because my parents had sex?
I cannot give a precise year in which the twelve links were created. What I am saying is that the different writings and constructions gathered into the Sutta Nipata allow us to see layers of formation. We should distinguish the old material transmitted in verse—such as the fourth chapter’s eight-verse discourses, the old portion of the fifth chapter excluding its first discourse, and the Rhinoceros Discourse in the first chapter—from later commentary and prose. Recall the discourse that speaks of being like the wind uncaught in a net, like a lion unstartled by sounds, and wandering alone like a rhinoceros horn.
We must distinguish the supposition that ancient verses were memorized and transmitted from the fact of later people writing additional material. A collection bearing the name of suttas includes not only old suttas but newly composed explanations. Yet even the further-developed twelve links are accepted without question as the Buddha’s speech, and professors and monks keep serving up reheated explanations. Why continue explaining something whose causation is not even easy to understand? I am asking them to stop doing precisely that.
The Dream of Defeating the Body and Postponing Study to the Next Life
Near the end of the broadcast, a viewer remarked that while people today are being urged to have children, Buddhism’s aim of liberation and not being born again also seems problematic. I went further and criticized the idea of defeating the body, as in claims that an arahant has no sexual desire. People do not actually demonstrate flying through supernatural powers, reading minds, seeing past lives, or exercising the divine eye. Instead, they construct perfection through claims about whether sexual desire remains.
Who teaches a spider to mate? Why do plants flower? Must wolves and dogs be taught to have sex? Who teaches female fish to lay eggs and males to release sperm over them? We need to understand the basis of bodily desires. Demanding complete victory over the body’s requirements without that understanding is not understanding at all. Buddhism is a religion of understanding, yet people begin by declaring that they will uproot craving completely.
Dreaming of a complete, perfect, utterly pure being makes study leave reality behind as well. In fact, I originally intended to criticize a different Ilmuk video. I had seen a scene in which someone asked what to do because they could not understand the teaching well and did not think they could become a Buddha in this life. His answer, as I recall its substance, was to accumulate merit in this life, be born in a better place with a better body in the next, and become a Buddha then. But I had not saved the title or bookmarked it and could not find it again, so I brought the lecture on the twelve links instead.
That account also assumes rebirth. On a foundation of fantasies about Buddhahood and the actual existence of the six supernatural powers and the three realms, it recommends the next life. This is being said in the twenty-first century. I ask how it differs from believing that God created the world in a week. Ancient people speaking of hells and heavenly realms because they had not explored beneath the ground, the deep ocean, or beyond the sky is one thing. Accepting those stories as the actual structure of the world today is another.
When I consider how badly religion can damage people, I sometimes wonder why I included Buddhism in my channel’s name. Buddhism influenced me greatly, but these elements were less prominent in the Buddhism that influenced me. When I turned toward the world to talk about Buddhism, I encountered far too many people immersed in superstition, talking about the Buddha without knowing what Buddhahood means, or reciting books without questioning a single sentence.
There are also fantasies of enlightenment in which one must answer every question immediately and must never hesitate. People immersed in those dreams claim to be enlightened. However, I am not saying that Ilmuk claimed enlightenment for himself. I explicitly distinguished that point: since he has not made that claim, I cannot criticize him on that basis. What I am asking here is why he simply recites what is in the scriptures.
Instead of a parrot sitting in a human posture, one should become a human being. When I speak of becoming a Buddha, I mean becoming truly human. Buddhism requires observing, questioning, and thinking. Memorizing scriptural sentences while abandoning thought cannot accomplish that. The sheer number of people explaining the twelve links does not guarantee that their explanations are right.
The Rabbit’s Chair and a Sign Saying “Anyone”
Let me end with a story about guesswork: “The Rabbit’s Chair,” which I have introduced before. One day a rabbit builds a chair, places it on a mountain, and puts up a sign saying “Anyone.” The rabbit probably means that anyone may sit down and rest. That is a reasonable interpretation of a chair with that sign. I joked that someone in Korea might read it as permission for anyone to take the chair away.
But the wording leaves out a subject and a specific context. It does not say what “anyone” may do. A donkey arrives first, puts a heavy load on the chair, and lies down nearby to sleep. Instead of reading it as an invitation to sit and rest, the donkey treats it as permission for anyone to use the chair for luggage. It might even feel grateful that someone provided a place to put things.
The next group arrives and sees food on the chair beside the sign “Anyone.” What will they think? That anyone may eat it. They munch away and then, perhaps feeling a little sorry, leave some of what they were carrying in its place. The next group reads it the same way. The chair and the lettering stay unchanged, but the meaning changes with the circumstances. The story ends like a fairy tale in which things turn out well for the donkey and everyone else.
What interests me here, however, is not the happy ending but the structure of interpretation. Without knowing the rabbit’s intention, each visitor guesses at the meaning according to their own situation. Interpretations of the twelve links resemble this. Terms such as ignorance, formations, and consciousness are placed in a line, ending with birth and death. Faced with a kind of code whose sequence, context, and intended meaning are unclear, one person reads it one way and another reads it differently.
Can they know that their interpretation is the right answer? They do not know, do they? Why speak as if they have discovered the correct answer? How are the old two-life and three-life interpretations, or today’s momentary arising and passing away, different from attaching one’s own ideas to that sign? If I invented thirty links instead of twelve and offered a plausible-sounding explanation, would that also be accepted as a profound teaching? Piling up words like a swindler does not produce understanding.
I am telling people to stop explaining this construction as if they were handling and prodding a corpse. Recognize it as a Frankenstein. My conclusion is that the twelve links are not the same as Buddhist dependent origination: they are a construction fabricated for rebirth. Go beyond memorizing terms and adding interpretations, and ask whether the connections are actually explained. Do not present guesswork as the right answer when you do not know. Recover the work of observing, questioning, and thinking. That is why I urge people to leave the trap of the twelve links.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.