Dependent Origination & Emptiness | Leigh Brasington

Dependent origination sits at the center of the Buddha’s teaching, not as a doctrine to believe but as a description of how experience actually works—how one thing conditions the next, how suffering arises and, just as conditionally, ceases. In this series we follow Leigh Brasington’s book Dependent Origination & Emptiness, which reads this teaching not as cosmology but as something watchable in present experience. Brasington holds the traditional formulations lightly and keeps returning us to what can be seen directly: contact giving rise to feeling, feeling to craving, craving to the whole familiar machinery of clinging and becoming. His guiding move is a simple one—dependent origination is an investigation into why there is suffering, and what it depends on, moment to moment.

Throughout the series we’ll walk the twelve links, then loosen them from any fixed reading and relocate them into ordinary experience, where they can be observed rather than merely believed. Each class offers a lens for inquiry: how proliferation grows out of a bare feeling-tone, how the sense of a solid self is itself a conditioned process, how the middle way steps past both “it exists” and “it doesn’t.” From there the course opens into emptiness—not as a metaphysical claim but as the flip side of dependent origination, two descriptions of the same reality. The invitation throughout is to meet experience as it arises, with curiosity rather than reactivity, and to notice the freedom that shows itself when the conditions for clinging are no longer fed.

This study arc is built to support that seeing. Through reading, discussion, meditation, and shared reflection, we’ll explore how a teaching this old speaks directly to the texture of contemporary life. The aim is not to master a philosophy but to cultivate a way of looking—one that brings clarity and steadiness to the ordinary rhythms of our days. Dependent origination and emptiness are not separate teachings, and neither is a conclusion to be reached; both are pointers, continually turning us back toward the possibility of release from stress in the midst of ordinary experience.

Each class will focus on the reading and theme listed in the table below. Class recordings will be linked and posted on a weekly basis. A free online copy can be found here. A physical copy of the book can be purchased from lulu.com.