Does dependent origination remove the need for a Creator?

Dependent origination (paticca samuppada in Pali) is the teaching that nothing arises alone. Each thing comes to be because something else is there. Buddhists call those things its conditions. The Pali texts, the scriptures of Theravada Buddhism, give the rule in a short formula. In English it is often put as "when this exists, that comes to be". The translation below says "this" both times. When one thing is there, the next follows. When it goes, the next goes too. A fire works this way: it burns while there is fuel and dies when the fuel runs out. The texts place this teaching at the centre. The Buddha is quoted as saying that whoever sees it sees the teaching. When Ananda called it plain, the Buddha told him not to say that, because it is deep. So this is no side idea, and any answer must take it seriously.

The Pali texts usually set the teaching out as twelve links, and Samyutta Nikaya 12.1 lists them. They are ignorance, choices, consciousness, name and form, the six sense fields, contact, feeling, craving, grasping, continued existence, rebirth, and old age and death. The English shown here calls each one a "requirement" for the next. That means the next does not arise without it. The following discourse, 12.2, explains each link. Ignorance, for example, is not knowing about suffering, its origin, its end and the way to its end. The first discourse then says what the list is for: "this entire mass of suffering". After that it runs the other way. When ignorance ends, choices end, and so on down the line. Twelve is the usual number, not the only one. The Great Discourse on Causation (Digha Nikaya 15) has only nine of the links, and ignorance is not among them. So the list is a tool with one job. It shows where suffering comes from, so that a person can cut it off.

The Buddhist case has three parts. First, conditions are enough. Asked whether old age and death are made by oneself or by another, the monk Sariputta says neither. He also denies that they arise by chance. Each link simply has the link before it as its requirement. Second, no start is needed. The Buddha says no prior point of ignorance is found. Third, the pattern stands by itself. It holds whether or not a Buddha appears. The Visuddhimagga, the classic Theravada manual by Buddhaghosa (5th century CE), quotes an older verse that draws the conclusion. It is not one of the Buddha's own discourses, but it speaks for the tradition. No god or Brahma causes the round of birth, it says, and only parts roll on. So the claim is plain. If every event has its condition, there is nothing left for a Creator to do.

Islam agrees with part of this. The things of this world do depend on other things. The Qur'an also says that all on earth will perish, and that people are in need. Muslims do not deny that seeds grow and that fires burn while they have fuel. So the two sides do not differ on whether things depend. They differ on what that dependence shows. The Buddhist path teaches a person to let go of what passes. The Qur'an says to turn to the One who does not pass. That is the question this page tests: does a world of dependent things need nothing beyond it, or does it point beyond itself?

The first way to read the teaching is the way the list itself reads. Its subject is suffering. It starts from ignorance and ends in old age and death. It says how suffering grows and how it can end. It does not ask why there are minds to be ignorant, or why there is anything to crave. A doctor can trace how a fever passes from one patient to the next. That tracing may be exact. It still says nothing about who made the human body. The Buddha himself left the question of whether the cosmos is eternal undeclared, so he did not treat this teaching as the answer to it. On this reading, then, dependent origination cannot remove a Creator. It never reaches the subject.

The second reading is wider. One discourse speaks of "the origin of the world" in these terms. Mahayana teachers such as Nagarjuna apply the idea to all things, and many Buddhists today do the same. Then the question comes back with more force. Samyutta Nikaya 12.20 calls each link impermanent, conditioned and liable to end. On the wide reading, that is true of everything that arises. Now a thing that can end is not a thing that must exist. It is there, but it might not have been. The same holds for a person's whole chain, which is taught so that it can be brought to an end. So nothing in the picture has its being from itself, neither one link nor all twelve together. Think of a line of mirrors, each shining only with light from the mirror before it. You can say where each mirror's light came from. You have still not said why there is any light. The page "Why is there something rather than nothing?" gives this argument step by step. The section "A chain with no first link" on "Did the Buddha believe in God?" applies it to the round of rebirth. What the twelve links add is this: a Buddhist need not be persuaded that each link depends. The texts already say so.

The strongest Buddhist reply is this. The round has no first point. So every link has a link before it, and none is left without a cause. What is there still to ask? Begin with the wording. The texts say that no first point "is found", and that the round has no "known" beginning. That speaks of what can be traced. This page takes the reply at its strongest all the same, as a round with no beginning at all. Now see what the Pali text does next. Anguttara Nikaya 10.61 says no prior point of ignorance is found. Its next sentence begins "And yet". Ignorance has a specific condition, it says, and is not unfueled. The condition it goes on to name is another part of the round, not a Creator. This page claims no more than the text says. But the text does show one thing. For the Buddha, having no beginning did not settle what a thing depends on. He kept the two questions apart. So a Buddhist cannot close the second question by answering the first.

Now take the reply at full strength. Each link is explained by the link before it. There is no first link, so no link is left unexplained. Nothing, it seems, is left over. But something is. Picture a book that has always been copied from an older copy, with no first copy. Ask why this copy says what it says, and the answer is the copy before it. That answer works for every copy. Two questions are still untouched. Why are there any copies at all? And why are they copies of this book and not another? Each answer took an older copy for granted. In the same way, explaining each link by another link assumes that there are links. It does not say why. The page "Could the universe have always existed?" uses the same picture. So ask it of the round itself: why is there a round of dependent things at all? Only three answers are possible. The first is that one of the links explains it. But every link is part of what is being asked about. The second is that there is no reason. A Buddhist is free to say so. But the Buddha would not accept "no cause or reason" for what a person feels, or "by chance" for any link. The first discourse of the Digha Nikaya also sets aside the view that "the self and the cosmos arose anomalously". That word means by chance. It would be strange to refuse that answer for one feeling and accept it for all of them together. The third answer is that the round rests on something that is not one more dependent link. That is the only answer that neither goes in a circle nor gives up asking for reasons. It is the one the Qur'an gives. Notice what this argument does not do. It does not say that the whole must depend because each part does. It asks one question and counts the possible answers.

Some Buddhists answer that the links are not a line at all. They lean on each other, so nothing needs anything outside them. The texts give this a footing. In one discourse the Buddha traces the links back as far as consciousness. It "turns back from name and form, and doesn't go beyond that", he says. Sariputta gives the picture of two sheaves of reeds leaning together, and he says it of consciousness and of name and form. Pull one sheaf away and the other collapses. That picture is honest about one thing: neither sheaf can stand alone. Two things that cannot stand alone do not gain the power to stand by being two. Each holds the other up only if both are already there, and the picture does not say why they are. And sheaves of reeds that lean together are still standing on the ground. Picture a ring of people, each held up by the next, with no one touching the floor. No one would stay up. So leaning explains how the parts fit together. It does not explain what bears them. Things that depend on each other are still dependent.

Samyutta Nikaya 12.20 says this pattern holds whether or not Realized Ones (Buddhas) arise. In the text the Buddha did not make it. He awoke to it and taught it. So the pattern is not one more link. It stands over all twelve. That raises a question: what is this law, and why does it hold? Early Buddhists argued about this very passage. The Kathavatthu, a book of the Pali canon, records people who used it to say the causal law is unconditioned. It rejects them, since Nibbana is the unconditioned and there cannot be two. A Buddhist may say the law is no separate thing, only the way conditions behave. Then the question is why they behave so steadily. A law does nothing by itself. It says what follows what. It does not put anything there to follow. The Qur'an says that heaven and earth "stand by His Command", and it counts this among His Signs. So regularity is no rival to a Creator. It is one more thing that points to Him.

A Buddhist may point out that the texts do name something unconditioned. Anguttara Nikaya 3.47 says it shows no arising, no vanishing and no change. Udana 8.3 even reasons towards it: if there were no freedom from what is made and conditioned, no escape would be found. So the Pali texts do not teach that all things without exception depend. That is worth noticing, but it must not be overstated. This unconditioned is Nibbana (nirvana), and it is not God. Buddhists do not say that it is, and neither does this page. In these texts it is where the chain stops, not what the chain comes from. They do not say that it holds up the links, or knows, or hears. So they offer a way out of the chain, and they leave open why there is a chain to leave.

It is easy to picture God (﷾) as link number zero, at the start of the chain. The reply then comes quickly: no first point is found. But Islam's claim is larger than that. The Qur'an does teach that creation began, and it calls God the First and the Last. The page "Could the universe have always existed?" gives the reasons to think the past did begin. Yet the argument on this page does not rest on finding a start. It rests on what holds things now. The Qur'an says Allah (﷾) sustains the heavens and the earth, lest they cease. It calls Him the Living, the Self-subsisting, who feels no fatigue in guarding them. Every creature seeks its need from Him. So He is not one more condition among conditions. The fire burns and the seed grows because He made them so and keeps them so. That is why a long round, or an endless one, would not remove Him. Even a chain with no start would need holding up. And only what depends needs a cause. He does not depend. Nor is He there by chance, for what exists by its own nature cannot fail to exist. The page "If everything needs a creator, who created God?" explains this.

The Qur'an gives the answer in two verses. It calls Allah (﷾) al-Samad, which Yusuf Ali renders "the Eternal, Absolute". Ibn Abbas explained the word as the One to whom all creatures turn in their needs. And it says to all people that they have need of Allah (﷾), while He is free of all wants. Ibn Kathir explains that created things need Him in every movement and every stillness, and that He has no need of them at all. Put those verses beside the twelve links. The Buddha looked at the world and saw need in every link. The Qur'an agrees, and it says where that need leads: the dependent points to the One who depends on nothing. Reason can show the need for such a One. It takes revelation to say who He is and what He asks. That changes what a person does next. A chain can only be cut. But a Lord can be called on, and He says, "I am indeed close". This message came through the Qur'an, brought by Muhammad (ﷺ), Allah's (﷾) Messenger to all people. It asks to be tested: consider it with care, and see whether it holds together. Anyone who has followed the links this far has one more thing to ask: what holds them. Muslims invite you to weigh the Qur'an's answer.

Many Buddhists hold that conditions explain all that arises, that no first point is found, and that the pattern needs no maker. So a Creator has no work to do.

Some Buddhists reason that a whole is only a name for its parts, as the texts say of a chariot. So there is no whole that needs a cause. Only the links are there.

Vasubandhu argued that the world does not come from a single cause called God, because things arise one after another.

Vasubandhu (4th to 5th century CE), an Indian Buddhist teacher, in the Abhidharmakosa

Nagarjuna taught that nothing exists by its own nature, and he denied any foundation for dependence. On his view the chain of dependence has no end-point, and he did not take this to mean that nothing exists.

Nagarjuna (about 150-250 CE), a Mahayana teacher

Some Buddhists say that one who truly sees the links stops asking about first beginnings. Like the man hit by a poisoned arrow, a person should treat the wound and leave the rest.