Abhidharma: The Systematic Teaching on Buddhist Resources

What Is the Abhidharma?

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:10:14 +0200

Of the three divisions of the Buddhist canon, the Abhidharma is the one almost nobody reads. The discourses are narrative and quotable; the Vinaya is full of incident; the Abhidharma consists largely of lists, definitions, and the systematic permutation of categories, sometimes for thousands of pages.

The Five Aggregates (Skandhas)

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:11:13 +0200

The five aggregates are the Buddhist answer to the question “what is a person?” — and the answer is that a person is not a thing but a process, exhaustively describable as five kinds of continually changing event, none of which is a self and none of which belongs to one.

Mind and Mental Factors

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:12:14 +0200

If the five aggregates are the Buddhist answer to “what is a person,” the analysis of mind and mental factors is the answer to “what is happening right now.” It is the most detailed layer of the Abhidharma, and the layer with the most direct bearing on meditation.