The Bhikṣuṇī Maṇimēkhalai

297 - Noble Truths and the Twelve Conditions
age and death. The resulting anxiety and helplessness are evils that
spring out of the previous series of present action.
Desire, attachment and ignorance, these and the birth resulting
therefrom, constitute action in the present and cause future birth.
Consciousness, name and form, organs of sense, contact, sensation or
experience, birth, age, disease, and death, these are the consequential
experience in life, both present and future. These are full of evil, of
deeds and of consequences resulting from these deeds, and thus
constitute suffering. Being such, they are all impermanent.
While the nature of release (Vīḍu) consists in the understanding that
there is nothing like soul in anything existing. 120 Consciousness, name
and form, the organs of sense, contact, sensation, birth, disease, age
and death, with the resulting anxiety and helplessness, these
constitute disease. For this disease the causes are ignorance, action,
desire, attachment and the collection of deeds. For suffering and birth,
attachment is the cause; for bliss and cessation of birth,
non-attachment is the cause. Words that embody this idea constitute
the ‘Four Truths’, namely, suffering, the [229] cause of suffering,
removal of suffering, and the way to remove suffering.
There are four kinds of questions and answers:–
(1) To give a deliberate reply;
(2) to separate the component parts of an issue and answer these
separately;
120 This it must be noted refers to ātman or individual self, not Ātman, the
Universal self. This is an improvement introduced by the Satyasiddhi
School of Buddhism, according to Chinese authority, by Harivarman, the
chief disciple of Kumāra labdha; vide Yamakami Sogen’s Systems of
Buddhist Thought, p.178.