not 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.

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