Roderick S. Bucknell's article argues that the well-known twelve-link chain of Conditioned Arising (paṭicca-samuppāda) is a simplified and structurally distorted version of a more complex, branching ancestral doctrine that was altered during early oral transmission. He posits that different textual versions, such as the "looped," "branched," and "Sutta-nipāta" accounts, represent fragments or derivatives of this original form, in which consciousness (viññāṇa) arose from two distinct causal sources - one from ignorance and activities, and another from the interaction of sense organs (saḷāyatana) and sense objects, for which `nāma-rūpa` was the original collective term. The process of memorization and recitation, particularly in reverse, likely flattened this branching structure into a linear sequence, which in turn necessitated a scholastic reinterpretation of key terms like `nāma-rūpa` (as mind-body) and `viññāṇa` (as rebirth consciousness) to make the new, simplified chain coherent.
