What we have learnt hitherto is that suffering depends on desire and desire on the senses.  For didactic purposes this is much, but as philosophy the result is small:  we have merely discovered that the world depends on name-and-form plus consciousness, that is on human beings.  The first two links of the chain (the last in our examination) do not leave the previous point of view—­the history of individual life and not an account of the world process—­but they have at least that interest which attaches to the mysterious.

“Consciousness depends on the sankharas.”  Here the sankharas seem to mean the predispositions anterior to consciousness which accompany birth and hence are equivalent to one meaning of Karma, that is the good and bad qualities and tendencies which appear when rebirth takes place.  Perhaps the best commentary on the statement that consciousness depends on the sankharas is furnished by a Sutta called Rebirth according to the sankharas[451].  The Buddha there says that if a monk possessed of the necessary good qualities cherishes a wish to be born after death as a noble, or in one of the many heavens, “then those predispositions (sankhara) and mental conditions (viharo) if repeated[452] conduce to rebirth” in the place he desires.  Similarly when Citta is dying, the spirits of the wood come round his death-bed and bid him wish to be an Emperor in his next life.  Thus a personality with certain predispositions and aptitudes may be due to the thought and wishes of a previous personality[453], and these predispositions, asserts the last article of the formula, depend upon ignorance.  We might be tempted to identify this ignorance with some cosmic creative force such as the Unconscious of Hartmann or the Maya of Sankara.  But though the idea that the world of phenomena is a delusion bred of ignorance is common in India, it does not enter into the formula which we are considering.  Two explanations of the first link are given in the Pitakas, which are practically the same.  One[454] states categorically that the ignorance which produces the sankharas is not to know the four Truths.  Elsewhere[455] the Buddha himself when asked what ignorance means replies that it is not to know that everything must have an origin and a cessation.  The formula means that it is ignorance of the true nature of the world and the true interests of mankind that brings about the suffering which we see and feel.  We were born into the world because of our ignorance in our last birth and of the desire for re-existence which was in us when we died.

Of the supreme importance attached to this doctrine of causation there can be no doubt.  Perhaps the best instance is the story of Sariputta’s conversion.  In the early days of the Buddha’s mission he asked for a brief summary of the new teaching and in reply the essential points were formulated in the well-known verses which declare that all things have a cause and an end[456].  Such utterances sound