We now seem to have reached an ultimate principle and basis, namely, the craving for life which transcends the limits of one existence and finds expression in birth after birth.  Many passages in the Pitakas justify the idea that the force which constructs the universe of our experience is an impersonal appetite, analogous to the Will of Schopenhauer.  The shorter formula quoted above in which it is said that the sankharas come from tanha also admits of such an interpretation.  But the longer chain does not, or at least it considers tanha not as a cosmic force but simply as a state of the human mind.  Suffering can be traced back to the fact that men have desire.  To what is desire due?  To sensation.  With this reply we leave the great mysteries at which the previous links seemed to hint and begin one of those enquiries into the origin and meaning of human sensation which are dear to early Buddhism.  Just as there could be no birth if there were no existence, so there could be no desire if there were no sensation.  What then is the cause of sensation?  Contact (phasso).  This word plays a considerable part in Buddhist psychology and is described as producing not only sensation but perception and volition (cetana)[448].  Contact in its turn depends on the senses (that is the five senses as we know them, and mind as a sixth) and these depend on name-and-form.  This expression, which occurs in the Upanishads as well as in Buddhist writings, denotes mental and corporeal life.  In explaining it the commentators say that form means the four elements and shape derived from them and that name means the three skandhas of sensation, perception and the sankharas.  This use of the word nama probably goes back to ancient superstitions which regarded a man’s name as containing his true being but in Buddhist terminology it is merely a technical expression for mental states collectively.  Buddhaghosa observes that name-and-form are like the playing of a lute which does not come from any store of sound and when it ceases does not go to form a store of sound elsewhere.

On what do name-and-form depend?  On consciousness.  This point is so important that in teaching Ananda the Buddha adds further explanations.  “Suppose,” he says, “consciousness were not to descend into the womb, would name-and-form consolidate in the womb?  No, Lord.  Therefore, Ananda, consciousness is the cause, the occasion, the origin of name-and-form.”  But consciousness according to the Buddha’s teaching[449] is not a unity, a thinking soul, but mental activity produced by various appropriate causes.  Hence it cannot be regarded as independent of name-and-form and as their generator.  So the Buddha goes on to say that though name-and-form depend on consciousness it is equally true that consciousness depends on name-and-form.  The two together make human life:  everything that is born, and dies or is reborn in another existence[450], is name-and-form plus consciousness.