Chapter 5. The rise of Abhidharma¶

Essay 2 closes with the rise of Abhidharma, which also prepares for Essay 3's examination of the schools' philosophies. Earlier chapters established the connections. Chapter 1.5 explained that the Buddha left the theoretical problem of "continuity without a self" outside his teaching. Chapter 2.2 identified matrices as the source of Abhidharma and argued for an early common origin. Chapter 2.4 described the intense debates of the age of the schools. Connecting those observations shows how a new genre and a new way of doing philosophy emerged. The present chapter examines their formation, their work, and the scale of the change they represented. The main claims of individual schools are reserved for Essay 3.

1. From matrices to the Abhidharma collection, the formation of a genre¶

"Abhidharma" literally means "concerning the teaching" or "higher teaching" and was formerly rendered in Chinese as "对法" or "胜法." It refers to a systematic arrangement of the teaching at a further, reflective level.

As 2.2 noted, its source was the mātṛkā, a classified list that condensed teachings into an outline. The practice was already present in the discourses, as when Sāriputta recited teachings arranged from one to ten items in the Saṅgīti Sutta. Abhidharma developed gradually from such lists. First, each item received a precise definition. The items were then cross-classified, and finally the method became independent of the discourses in systematic treatises of its own.¹

A pair of terms expresses the central change. The suttas teach through "adapted exposition" (pariyāya), offering suitable similes and guidance to particular people in particular circumstances. Abhidharma presents itself as "ultimate exposition" (nippariyāya), addressing no particular audience and using no analogies, but stating directly how things ultimately are.

2. Two sets of seven treatises, the Abhidharma canons¶

The most completely preserved Abhidharma canons are two independent sets. They are different texts, rather than translations of one another, confirming the judgment in 2.2 that each school built its own upper levels of Abhidharma. Yet both use matrices, definitions, and classification, and share a substantial core.

Both sets contain chronological layers. Works closest to the discourses, such as the southern Vibhaṅga and the Sarvāstivāda Saṅgītiparyāya and Dharmaskandha, do little more than rearrange and define topics from the discourses, and remain close to them in form. Later works become more abstract and systematic. The southern Paṭṭhāna explains mutual conditioning through twenty-four kinds of condition, while the Sarvāstivāda Jñānaprasthāna supplies the most extensive framework.¹ The movement from discourse toward treatise shows the genre taking shape. A point anticipated in 2.2 can also be added here. The Saṅgītiparyāya is itself an Abhidharma expansion of Sāriputta's Saṅgīti Sutta, a concrete textual illustration of the traditional association of Abhidharma's origins with Sāriputta.

An origin legend and a common objection¶

The southern tradition also has a more miraculous origin story, which provides an opportunity to clarify a frequently contentious objection. According to the legend, in the seventh year after awakening the Buddha ascended to the Heaven of the Thirty-Three (Tāvatiṃsa). Over a rains retreat, he taught the whole of Abhidharma to the gods, headed by his deceased mother Māyā, who had been reborn there. Each day when he descended to the human world for his meal, he gave Sāriputta the day's "outline" (naya), which Sāriputta then elaborated for five hundred disciples. The commentary describes the process through a comparison. "The Buddha stands on the shore and points to the sea with his hand. The elder then expounds the vast ocean on that basis."² The account belongs to the commentaries in Buddhaghosa's tradition, around the fifth century CE. It is not contained in the Abhidharma canon.

The reason for the legend is that Abhidharma does not open with "Thus have I heard," and its genre does not resemble a discourse delivered by the Buddha on a particular occasion (2.2). The story of personal teaching in heaven fills the resulting gap in its claim to be the Buddha's word. By inventing a special origin, the tradition effectively conceded that its provenance was questionable under the ordinary criteria.

A common objection follows. If we expose the Mahāyāna legend that Nāgārjuna entered the nāga palace and retrieved the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras, discussed in Essay 4, is the story of the Buddha teaching in heaven not equally baseless? Half the objection is right, while the other half oversimplifies the problem.

The present book accepts the valid half without qualification. Both are legends, and the same standard of demythologization applies to each. The present book accepts neither the Buddha's journey to the Heaven of the Thirty-Three nor Nāgārjuna's descent to a nāga palace as a historical event. Claims that authorize scripture through channels beyond the human world are uniformly rejected as historical facts. No exception is made for one's own tradition.

Treating the two accounts as equivalent in every respect, however, erases structural differences. Even regarded as legends, the things they serve to cover are different:

The last two rows are decisive. Once the ascent to heaven is set aside, Abhidharma still has early evidence independent of the legend. Abhidharma collections transmitted separately by the schools share a core, as argued in 2.2. The matrix method already occurs in the discourses, and even the legend entrusts the human transmission to Sāriputta, saying that the Buddha supplied only an outline. The pattern agrees in direction with the historical judgment that the Abhidharma core is early and represents disciples' systematic arrangement of the Buddha's teaching. Once the nāga palace is set aside, Prajñāpāramitā and other Mahāyāna sūtras lack early corroboration across schools, and their textual history points to a late origin. The difference does not diminish their intellectual value, but it produces a different answer to whether they are historically the Buddha's words.

The present book rejects both origin myths under the same standard. Yet a legend and the evidential standing of the material to which it is attached are separate questions. The legends are symmetrical, while the evidence for the material is not. Equating "both are absurd" with "both are equally credible or incredible" is precisely where the objection oversimplifies. The legend also supplies a third connection to Sāriputta. From the Saṅgīti Sutta in 2.2, through the Saṅgītiparyāya in the previous section, to the origin legend, Sāriputta is repeatedly placed at Abhidharma's beginning. Legends cannot be accepted in full, but the repeated attribution is itself a feature of the historical evidence that deserves notice.

3. Abhidharma's procedures of definition, classification, and analysis of conditions¶

Abhidharma's work can be divided into the following procedures:³

1. Definition. Each dharma is assigned an "intrinsic nature" (svabhāva), the defining characteristic that distinguishes it from other dharmas.
2. Classification. Dharmas are repeatedly cross-classified under multiple categories, including the five aggregates, twelve sense bases, and eighteen elements; wholesome, unwholesome, and indeterminate; and tainted and untainted. The Dhātukathā and Yamaka locate each dharma within such classificatory schemes.
3. Analysis of mind. The core of Abhidharma is a detailed analysis of "mind and mental factors" (citta and cetasika). A moment of consciousness is divided into a principal mind and associated mental factors, whose associations and conditioned co-arising are specified. It is the "phenomenology of mind" described in 2.2.
4. Analysis of conditions. The method explains how dharmas condition one another. The southern Paṭṭhāna lists twenty-four kinds of condition.

A particular act of seeing illustrates the procedures. The discourses state concisely, "The eye contacts form, and eye-consciousness arises." Abhidharma expands the statement into an "eye-door cognitive process" (cakkhu-dvāra-vīthi). In the complete eye-door process with a very great object, one moment of past life-continuum (atīta-bhavaṅga) is followed by two moments in which the object's impact causes the life-continuum to vibrate and then be arrested. Five-door adverting, eye-consciousness, receiving, investigating, and determining follow. Seven moments of impulsion (javana) then handle wholesome or unwholesome responses, and two moments of registration (tadārammaṇa) complete the act of visual cognition. Including the past life-continuum, the sequence spans seventeen mind-moments; the fourteen beginning with five-door adverting are process consciousness proper. Each moment of consciousness arises and ceases with its own arrangement of mental factors.⁴ Once the analysis is complete, "the eye sees a flower" contains neither a "self" looking at the flower nor a stably existing "flower." There is only a sequence of momentary dharmas without autonomy, each conditioned by the preceding moment and ceasing as the next arises.

The original purpose of the analysis was to serve practice. Breaking "person" and "self" down through successive layers into streams of momentary dharmas, each arising and ceasing without autonomy, aimed at seeing things as they are (yathābhūta) and ending attachment to self and substantial objects. The analysis itself extended insight (vipassanā). Abhidharma described its task as "laying out the Buddha's insight in a map precise in every detail."

Momentariness as the system's structural premise

The analysis depends on a premise running through the whole system. All conditioned dharmas arise and cease moment by moment, and no dharma remains identical across adjacent moments. The doctrine of momentariness (khaṇavāda) is not explicitly stated in the discourses. Abhidharma gradually derived it from "all conditioned things are impermanent." If every dharma passes through a transition from arising to ceasing, the same dharma is in a different state at different times. Pursuing the argument leaves only the two endpoints, arising and ceasing. Each moment is a separate unit, with the preceding moment ceasing and the following moment arising. Although they continue through conditions, they are not the same thing.³

The premise is logically neat, but immediately produces difficulties about continuity between moments, the persistence of karmic results across lives, and the basis of memory and identity. Such difficulties are the sources of the debates examined in Essay 3. Sarvāstivāda's "real existence in all three times" supplies a first repair to momentariness, Sautrāntika's "seeds" a second, and Vātsīputrīya's pudgala a third. Momentariness produced problems which the schools addressed differently, and conflicts among their solutions generated further debate. Abhidharma therefore both organized inherited teachings and introduced new theoretical problems. The problems then drove further differentiation in Buddhist philosophy.

4. The major change from "how to practice" to "what ultimately exists"¶

Pursuing the analysis to its conclusion produced a consequential change.

Abhidharma arrived at a "theory of dharmas." It reduced all experience to dharmas as the smallest real units, each with an intrinsic nature, arising and ceasing momentarily in dependence on conditions. Persons and all larger objects existed only by "designation" (prajñapti), while dharmas alone "really existed." Existence consequently had two levels, conventional designation and ultimate dharmas, an early form of the distinction between conventional and ultimate truth. An exhaustive inventory was then required, including unconditioned nirvāṇa and space as well as every other dharma.

The description of momentary arising and ceasing applies to conditioned dharmas. It does not apply to the unconditioned dharmas listed in the final box.

The inventory divides all dharmas into the conditioned (saṃskṛta), which arise and cease through conditions, and the unconditioned (asaṃskṛta), which exist independently of conditions. Conditioned dharmas arise and cease momentarily, while unconditioned dharmas do neither. All schools classify nirvāṇa as unconditioned, which is not itself the problem. The difficulty is that Abhidharma requires every dharma to have an intrinsic nature, so nirvāṇa as a dharma must have one too. The southern answer identifies nirvāṇa's intrinsic nature as "the subsiding of suffering" (dukkhūpasama). The move places nirvāṇa within the inventory of dharmas as something really existent, an unconditional ultimate reality without arising or ceasing, rather than merely the blank state left after greed, hatred, and delusion have ended. The conclusion that "nirvāṇa has an intrinsic nature" later became one of Madhyamaka's targets. Nāgārjuna's account of emptiness asserts that all dharmas, including nirvāṇa, lack intrinsic nature, requiring a re-examination of the entire basis of dharma realism. The connection is marked here for development in Essay 4.

The present book regards the change as a major one. As 1.5 explained, the Buddha's teaching was practical and almost phenomenological, describing the flow of experience in order to end suffering. Abhidharma turned the description into an ontology, moving from "experience flows in this way" to "dharmas with intrinsic natures are the ultimately real entities." The theoretical boundary identified in 1.5 had been crossed. Further problems followed. First, arguments arose over whether dharma entities endure in all three times, whether only the present is real, and whether a pudgala exists in addition, the subjects of Essay 3. Second, several centuries later, Mahāyāna Madhyamaka would criticize intrinsic nature itself, and Nāgārjuna's account of emptiness was directed precisely against Abhidharma's dharma realism, as Essay 4 explains.

Essay 3 examines exactly where the change went wrong and how it was opposed step by step. A preliminary distinction is needed. Abhidharma's analysis of mind, mental factors, and cognitive processes remains phenomenological in itself, continuing the early account of a flow of phenomena. The problem lies in two subsequent moves, rather than analysis as such. One makes each momentary phenomenon into an ontological "ultimate dharma" with an intrinsic nature. The other fixes cognition into set forms, such as the southern five-door and mind-door processes. Essay 3 shows how the schools increasingly treated the mechanism as something real, and how it was simplified and criticized. The discussions cover Sarvāstivāda's "acquisition" and unmanifest form in Chapter 2, Sautrāntika's simplification through "seeds" in Chapter 3, disagreement between northern and southern systems about the numbers of kinds of mind, mental factors, and conditions in Chapter 4, and the overall assessment in Chapter 6. The last considers the irony that elaborate analysis can itself obstruct liberation.

The purpose of the chapter is to explain how Abhidharma first arranged Buddhist teaching into systematic philosophy. Shared methods, including matrices, analysis of dharmas, and the phenomenology of mind, formed the schools' common basis. Divergent claims, including real existence in all three times, seeds, and the pudgala, are examined separately in Essay 3. The resulting dharma realism is also what Mahāyāna criticizes in Essay 4. The next essay turns to the schools' positions themselves.

References¶