ence 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 can