This paper focuses on the theory of dependent arising in Candrakīrti’s Yuktiṣaṣṭikāvṛtti, and aims to analyse how Candrakīrti, who claims himself a Pratītyasamutapādavādin and Mādhyamika, considers the stages and role of dependent arising in his practice system. In his commentary on the Yuktiṣaṣṭikākārikā, Candrakīrti assesses Nāgārjuna’s motivation for composing the work with reference to Nāgārjuna’s understanding of dependent arising, namely: insight into dependent arising is the cause for people to arouse belief and bring about good accumulations, and to become a noble person or a “chief of Munis” (Munīndra, i.e., Buddha). In his Yuktiṣaṣṭikāvṛtti, there are two kinds of dependent arising to which Candrakīrti refers: (1) the traditional theory of dependent arising related to arising and ceasing, and spread out over a span of three lives; and (2) dependent arising equating to emptiness as emphasized in Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. For Candrakīrti, people who had cultivated an understanding of emptiness in their past lives, such as Śāriputra, can know directly dependent arising in the second sense of emptiness above, even if what they heard were the teachings of dependent arising characterized by the first sense above, i.e., arising and ceasing. As for those who have not yet cultivated an understanding of emptiness in a previous life, Candrakīrti mentions two kinds of path (mārga) regarding dependent arising. One is the “path of arising and ceasing” (skye ba dang ’jig pa’i lam, *utpādavyayamārga), in which people study traditional dependent arising, the four noble truths, as well as other Abhidharma teachings. This path is applied to eliminate their view of non-existence, thereafter to understand the nature of impermanence, and to serve as an antidote to attachment to conditional factors. The second path is the “thorough knowing” of the non-arisen nature of dependently arisen things, related to traditional dependent arising, viz. karma and its fruit and so forth, and aims to serve as an antidote to the “knot of psycho-physical complex of attachment to one’s clinging that ‘this is true’(idaṃsatyābhiniveśa- parāmarśa-kāyagrantha)”. This path, in which people finally take all of the four noble truths as non-arisen through understanding that all dependently arisen things are not arisen by their intrinsic nature, leads people to liberation through the realization of reality in one moment.
