Dependent Co-Arising

Dependent co-arising (Sanskrit: pratītyasamutpāda) is the central ontological doctrine of Buddhist philosophy, articulated most rigorously by the second-century philosopher Nāgārjuna. It holds that nothing possesses svabhāva — self-nature — no thing exists by its own power, from its own side, independent of the conditions that give rise to it. Everything arises in dependence on other things, which themselves arise in dependence on further things, in a web of mutual conditioning with no first cause and no unconditioned ground. Macy's doctoral work traced the structural parallel between this ancient Buddhist insight and the cybernetic concept of feedback, arguing that two traditions separated by twenty-five centuries had arrived at the same view of reality through different methods. The convergence, she argued, is diagnostic of the reality itself.