The Buddha was born in the sixth century B.C. It was an age of spiritual restlessness and society was moving away fast from its old religious moorings.Criticism of Vedic practices had started earlier, in fact, for even the Upaniṣads belittled the efficacy of sacrificial rites and laid emphasis on knowledge of Reality as the best path of attaining a blessed hereafter.

The flourish with which the discovery of dependent origination or causal concatenation is announced in the Pali canon,shows the importance the Buddhist monks and schoolmen attached to the formula. The real point is whether the rule of law governing the destinies of sentient existence was couched in the language of the dependent origination formula by the Buddha himself or some of his followers.

Between two opposite viewpoints of eternalism (whether absolutistic or dualistic) and annihilation-ism lies the creed of the Buddha that though there is no unchanging self (ātman), still it is not a function of matter and is not completely denuded of all causal efficacy when particular bodily embodiment ceases to exist. Negation of the soul (anātma-vāda) amounts only to this, that its entitative persistence is denied.

What then is nirvana—the final goal of all spiritual endeavour? A Buddha or an Arhat attains nirvana with residue (upādhi-śeṣa) here below—becomes a Jīvan-mukta,his body continues to function till death, but his soul ceases to acquire new karma.When the body drops off, he attains nirvana without residue (anupādhi-śeṣa) as no fresh embodiment takes place.