Abhidharma: The Systematic Teaching

The discourses are conversations. Somebody asks a question, the Buddha answers in terms the questioner can use, and a farmer gets a different answer from a philosopher. This is excellent pedagogy and terrible systematics, and within a few centuries the tradition had noticed.

The Abhidharma — Pali Abhidhamma, “concerning the Dharma” or “higher Dharma” — is the result: an attempt to state what the discourses teach in a single consistent technical vocabulary, without conversational context, metaphor, or concession to the audience.

It is the third of the “three baskets” of the canon, the least read, and the most influential on everything that came after it.

What it is trying to do #

The project starts from a distinction that the discourses use without theorising: the difference between how things are conventionally described and how they are ultimately constituted.

A chariot, in the canonical simile, is not found when you look for it among the wheels, axle, and pole. “Chariot” is a convenient designation for an arrangement of parts. The Abhidharma generalises this ruthlessly. Persons, tables, forests, and nations are conventional designations. What actually exists, at the ultimate level, are dharmas — the irreducible constituents of experience, each with its own defining characteristic, which cannot be further analysed away.

The programme then has three parts:

1. Enumerate the dharmas exhaustively. The Theravada Abhidhamma counts 82; the Sarvastivada counts 75; the later Yogacara list has 100. The differences are themselves significant.
2. Classify them — as material or mental, wholesome or unwholesome or neutral, conditioned or unconditioned.
3. State the relations between them — the conditions under which one gives rise to another. The Theravada Patthana lists twenty-four kinds of conditional relation and works through their permutations at a length that runs to thousands of pages.

The result is something like a complete phenomenological chemistry: a periodic table of experience plus the rules of combination.

Why it matters #

Four things follow from the dharma theory, and they shape all later Buddhist thought.

Non-self becomes precise. “There is no self” is now a specific claim: among the dharmas there is no dharma that is a self, and “person” is a designation for a bundle of them. See The Five Aggregates.

Impermanence becomes radical. Dharmas are momentary. The tradition progressively shortens the moment until, in the developed systems, phenomena arise and cease continuously, and apparent persistence is a succession of distinct events. This is not obvious from the discourses; it is an Abhidharma conclusion.

Meditation gets a map. A practitioner told to observe experience as it is needs to know what the constituents are. The Theravada Visuddhimagga uses the Abhidharma categories as the framework for insight practice, and the Vipassana traditions inherit it.

Ethics gets a mechanism. By classifying mental factors as wholesome or unwholesome and specifying which co-arise with which, the Abhidharma explains why particular states produce particular karmic results. See Mind and Mental Factors.

The texts #

Each school had its own Abhidharma, and the two surviving complete collections differ enough to show that the project was undertaken independently after the schools separated.

Theravada. Seven books, of which the Dhammasangani (enumeration), the Vibhanga (analysis), the Kathavatthu (points of controversy, entirely polemical), and the Patthana (conditional relations) are the most important. Buddhaghosa’s fifth-century Visuddhimagga is the systematic summary that most practitioners actually encounter.

Sarvastivada. Also seven books, culminating in the Jnanaprasthana, and then the vast Mahavibhasa commentary. Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakosha — verses presenting the system, with a prose commentary criticising it from a Sautrantika standpoint — is the single most important Abhidharma text outside Theravada, studied for centuries in China and still a core curriculum text in Tibetan monastic education.

Yogacara produced its own development, with Asanga’s Abhidharmasamuccaya and the 100-dharma list.

The Theravada holds that the Abhidhamma was taught by the Buddha to his mother in the Heaven of the Thirty-Three and recited by him to Sariputta. The Sarvastivada attributes its books to named disciples. Modern scholarship dates the material to roughly the third century BCE onwards, on linguistic and doctrinal grounds, with the Kathavatthu’s controversies reflecting debates that could not have existed in the Buddha’s lifetime.

The great disputes #

The Abhidharma project generated the questions that occupied Buddhist philosophy for the next thousand years.

Do past and future dharmas exist? The Sarvastivada — the name means “the doctrine that all exists” — said yes, on the grounds that a past object can be perceived in memory, that karma must exist to produce a later result, and that the Buddha spoke of past and future dharmas. The Theravada and Sautrantika said no: only the present moment exists. This is the school-defining dispute of Indian Abhidharma.

How long is a moment? If dharmas are momentary, how do arising, duration, and ceasing fit into a moment that has no parts? Considerable ingenuity went into this, including sub-moments and the positing of arising and ceasing as themselves dharmas.

What connects a cause to an effect separated by years? The Sarvastivada posited prapti, “acquisition,” a dharma that attaches a karmic potential to a continuum. The Sautrantika posited bija, seeds, in a subtle continuum — which the Yogacara later developed into the store-consciousness.

Are dharmas themselves empty? This is the question that produces Madhyamaka. Nagarjuna accepts the Abhidharma’s analysis of composite things into parts, and then applies exactly the same analysis to the parts, concluding that dharmas too lack intrinsic existence. Madhyamaka is best understood as the Abhidharma method carried through to a conclusion the Abhidharmikas did not want.

A worked example: the moment of seeing #

Abstract description makes the Abhidharma sound drier than it is. It is easier to see the point in a worked case, and the tradition’s favourite is the arising of a single act of visual cognition.

Conventionally: “I saw a mango and wanted it.”

In Theravada Abhidhamma terms, that episode is a rapid sequence of distinct mind-moments (cittas), each with its own function, each accompanied by a specific set of mental factors, and each conditioning the next. The standard analysis of a full sense-door process runs to seventeen moments: the stream of passive consciousness is disturbed; attention turns to the sense door; visual consciousness arises, taking the visible object; the object is received, investigated, and determined; then seven moments of javana, the phase in which the mind actively responds and in which karma is generated; then two moments of registration; and the stream subsides.

Several things fall out of this.

“I” appears nowhere. There is no seer standing behind the sequence. Each moment arises conditioned by the previous one and ceases.

Only the javana phase is karmically active. The bare seeing is a result, not an act. This is the Abhidharma’s precise answer to a practical question: a practitioner cannot prevent a sight from arising, but the response is where the moral weight is. The whole of mindfulness practice can be described as intervening in the gap before javana.

The desire is a specific factor. Greed (lobha) is one of the enumerated unwholesome factors, arising with a particular class of consciousness, and incompatible with certain wholesome factors that cannot co-arise with it.

Whether experience really has this structure is a fair question, and the tradition’s answer is that advanced insight practice discloses it. What is not in doubt is that the framework gives the practitioner an unusually fine-grained vocabulary for what is happening.

How the schools differ in emphasis #

It is worth knowing which Abhidharma you are reading, because the differences are not trivial.

Theravada Abhidhamma is strongly oriented towards meditation and ethics. Its 82 dhammas include 52 mental factors classified by moral quality, and its great systematising work, the Visuddhimagga, is structured as a manual of practice — purification of conduct, then concentration, then wisdom.

Sarvastivada Abhidharma is more metaphysical and more interested in ontology for its own sake: the status of past and future, the nature of time, the mechanics of causation. It generated the most technically demanding arguments and the sharpest disagreements.

Yogacara Abhidharma, in Asanga’s Abhidharmasamuccaya and the 100-dharma list, reorganises the inherited material around consciousness, adding the store-consciousness and the afflicted mind to the standard six consciousnesses.

A reader who meets the Abhidharma through modern Theravada meditation manuals and then opens the Abhidharmakosha is in for a surprise; they are recognisably the same enterprise, but their centres of gravity are far apart.

The criticism #

The standard objection, made from within Buddhism, is that the Abhidharma reifies. Having dissolved the self into dharmas, it treats the dharmas as ultimately real things with intrinsic natures (svabhava) — which reintroduces exactly the kind of substantial existence the analysis was supposed to eliminate, one level down.

Nagarjuna presses this hard, and the Madhyamaka tradition regards it as decisive. The Abhidharmikas’ reply is that svabhava here means only “defining characteristic,” not independent substance, and that without some floor to the analysis nothing is left to explain anything.

A second objection is practical: that the system’s complexity becomes an end in itself. Chan made this objection into a whole style, and the Chinese Buddhist tradition after the 845 persecution largely dropped the scholastic apparatus.

Abhidharma as psychology #

A great deal of modern writing presents the Abhidharma as an ancient psychology, and the comparison is genuinely illuminating: it is a detailed, non-substantialist, process-oriented analysis of mental events, developed from introspective observation, with an account of how states condition one another that has no obvious Western premodern parallel.

Two cautions. The Abhidharma’s purpose is soteriological — the classification of factors as wholesome and unwholesome is about what leads to liberation, not about mental health. And its claims include a great deal that is not psychology in any modern sense: rebirth-linking consciousness, the realms of existence, the material constituents of bodies in the formless spheres.

The comparison is useful. The identification is not.

Sources & further reading #

Bhikkhu Bodhi (ed.), A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma (Buddhist Publication Society, 3rd ed. 2000) — the Theravada system, via Anuruddha’s Abhidhammattha Sangaha, with an excellent guide. Vasubandhu, Abhidharmakośabhāṣyam, trans. Leo M. Pruden from de La Vallée Poussin’s French, 4 vols. (Asian Humanities Press, 1988–90) — the Sarvastivada system and its critique. Collett Cox, Disputed Dharmas: Early Buddhist Theories on Existence (IIBS, 1995) — on the Sarvastivada thesis and its opponents. Noa Ronkin, Early Buddhist Metaphysics (Routledge, 2005) — the best philosophical treatment of how the dharma theory developed. Rupert Gethin, The Foundations of Buddhism (Oxford, 1998), ch. 6.

Related articles #

• What Is the Abhidharma? — the texts, history, and claims in detail
• The Five Aggregates — the primary analysis of the person
• Mind and Mental Factors — the taxonomy of mental events
• Nagarjuna and the Middle Way School — the critique
• Non-Self (Anatta) Explained — the doctrine being made precise
• Buddhist Philosophy — the wider tradition