On the night of his awakening, the Buddha applied the formula of interdependent origination to the question "What is the cause of suffering?" The pathology of the human condition, too, can be mapped out as a complex interdependent arising involving ignorance, craving, grasping, and the view of oneself as a self who suffers. All these factors arise and cease together in patterns of interrelationship that can be seen and understood.
The solution to the problem of suffering is also discovered using the formula. It turns out that there is an interdependent relationship between the mind and body on the one hand and suffering on the other. When ignorance informs decision making, or craving manifests in experience as an attitude toward feelings, then suffering arises; but when these factors do not arise, then neither does suffering. Consciousness along with its affiliated aggregates will always arise and cease, but whether these are bound up with suffering depends upon certain specific relationships. If there is no craving, then feeling arises and passes away without suffering. If there is no ignorance, then decisions are made without accumulating unwholesome dispositions. If there is no regarding of phenomena as "mine," then the self who suffers is not constructed.
