The Day a Single Teaching Transformed a Life

The Twelve Links of Dependent Origination at GL–Shedra I

The Teaching That Landed

At the very beginning of Giao Long Monastery’s GL–Shedra I curriculum, students encounter the ancient doctrine of the Twelve Links of Dependent Origination (Pali: dvādasa-nidāna). Scholars emphasise that this chain of causation shows how ignorance, craving and attachment unfold moment by moment, lifetime by lifetime.
During lecture-hours our Khenpo paused, looked directly into the eyes of the students, and said: “If you see how your suffering begins, you may also see how it stops.”

A Real Story from Outside the Monastery

Consider the case of Maya, a young woman in her early thirties who had suffered from recurring panic attacks, insomnia and a sense that life was “just pain”. In psychotherapy she kept revisiting the same pattern: from a sense of aimlessness → anxiety → over-consumption → fatigue → more anxiety. In one of her sessions she was introduced to the idea of the Twelve Links as applied to everyday life: feeling → craving → clinging. She wrote: “When I recognised that my ‘grasping’ after peace was itself the cause of my unrest, something shifted.”
Although Maya’s story comes from the realm of modern psychology rather than monastic training, it aligns precisely with the teaching: one link unexamined can feed the next, generating the cycle of suffering. The doctrine is thus not a remote abstraction but a practical map for transformation.

Application in the GL–Shedra I Context

At Giao Long, students spend one term examining each of the links in small groups: Ignorance, Formations, Consciousness, Name & Form, Six Sense Bases, Contact, Feeling, Craving, Grasping, Becoming, Birth, Old Age & Death. With meditation practices tied to each link, and guided reflection by Geshe and

Khenpo, learners bring these teachings into their lived experience rather than merely memorise them. Through this methodology, a seemingly theoretical doctrine becomes medicine for the mind.

Why It Matters for the Student

This teaching is pivotal because it offers what most modern education cannot: not just information, but insight. Many students arrive at the monastic college seeking knowledge, but what they discover is clarity about how their mind works. They learn to trace their habitual pain back to its root conditions—and thus acquire the power to intervene. In so doing, the knowledge becomes self-liberation rather than mere content.

For your lesson

From an academic standpoint, the Twelve Links doctrine occupies a central place in Buddhist philosophy because it reveals a conditioned chain of existence (pratītyasamutpāda) which underpins both samsaric experience and the possibility of awakening. In GL–Shedra I, by integrating contemplative reflection, group dialogue and doctrinal study, the student engages with this doctrine both intellectually and experientially. The result is a learning process that is simultaneously rigorous, transformative and grounded in lived reality—exactly the objective of the undergraduate path at Giao Long.