Chapter 2 The Mahāvibhāṣā and the Sarvāstivāda System¶

The previous chapter presented the Sarvāstivāda's principal thesis: the three times really exist, and the intrinsic nature of dharmas always exists. It also promised to examine the system itself. This chapter therefore considers that system in detail: its foundational compendium, the Mahāvibhāṣā; its exhaustive catalogue of existence, the "five categories and seventy-five dharmas"; and several of its crucial explanatory mechanisms. Continuing the argument of 2.5, Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma carries the turn toward "dharma theory" to its extreme and offers one of the fullest forms of dharma realism.

1. The Mahāvibhāṣā and the Vaibhāṣikas¶

The central text of the Sarvāstivāda system is the Abhidharma Mahāvibhāṣā Śāstra. It is an enormous commentary on Kātyāyanīputra's Jñānaprasthāna, compiled in Kashmir around the second century CE. It records and adjudicates the divergent views of successive Sarvāstivāda teachers—including the four explanations of temporal difference discussed in the previous chapter—and determines the school's orthodox position.¹ The line that took it as authoritative became known as the Vaibhāṣikas, the Kashmir orthodoxy.

The text it comments upon, the Jñānaprasthāna, should be introduced first. Composed by Kātyāyanīputra, it was recognized by the Sarvāstivādins as their programmatic work. Tradition honored it as the "body treatise," surrounded by six other treatises like six legs. It is divided into eight sections: miscellanea, bonds, knowledge, karma, great elements, faculties, concentration, and views. These contain forty-four subsections that determine the school's position topic by topic in a question-and-answer format, from decisive stages of practice such as the "highest mundane dharma," through defilements (bonds), knowledge, karma, matter (the great elements), faculties, meditative concentration, and views. The Mahāvibhāṣā comments on it sentence by sentence and adjudicates the positions it records; its chapters correspond directly to the eight sections of the Jñānaprasthāna.

Tradition supplied this great compendium with an imposing origin story. The Kuṣāṇa king Kaniṣka is said to have convened five hundred arhats in Kashmir under the leadership of Vasumitra to compile it, an event Northern Buddhism calls the "Fourth Council." The account must be discounted in keeping with the method of this book. It belongs only to the Northern, Sarvāstivāda line; the Southern tradition recognizes just three councils and does not accept it. The spectacle of a king convening five hundred arhats also repeats the idealized template for councils discussed in 2.2 (compare the First Council). Once this packaging is removed, the conclusion that can be established is more modest: the Mahāvibhāṣā was indeed the great synthesis gradually compiled by the Kashmir Sarvāstivādins around the second century CE.

We must also explain how this system reached later readers. It was transmitted principally through Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakośa, which is a critical digest rather than a neutral summary (see section 5). Saṅghabhadra's Nyāyānusāra then defended the orthodox position. Our modern view of the Sarvāstivāda is therefore usually mediated by a critic's account. The relationship among these works can be sketched as follows:

2. The Five Categories and Seventy-Five Dharmas: A Catalogue of Existence¶

The Sarvāstivādins exhaustively classified everything that exists—every "dharma"—into five great categories and seventy-five types. This is the complete version of their catalogue of "what ultimately exists."

The forty-six mental factors are further divided into six groups:

Two categories particularly deserve attention. First, there are only three unconditioned dharmas, and nirvāṇa is included among them as cessation through discernment. This continues the point made in 1.5: the scope of not-self includes the unconditioned, while the Sarvāstivāda system goes further by assigning the unconditioned a place among what "really exists." Second are the conditioning forces dissociated from mind. This category contains forces treated as real although they are neither material nor mental: "acquisition" (possession), the "life faculty" that sustains one lifetime, the four characteristics of arising, duration, change, and cessation, and the collections of names, phrases, and phonemes—the minimal units of language. Treating "possession," "being alive," and even "words" as independently real dharmas exemplifies the system's tendency to reify functions. It is also one of its most heavily criticized features.

Relation to the five aggregates

How do the seventy-five dharmas relate to the earlier classification into five aggregates? The correspondence is approximate. The category of matter corresponds to the aggregate of form. Mind, the primary act of consciousness, corresponds to the aggregate of consciousness. Feeling and perception, though mental factors, correspond separately to the aggregates of feeling and perception. The remaining mental factors together with the conditioning forces dissociated from mind correspond to the aggregate of formations. The unconditioned dharmas lie outside the framework of the five aggregates. The Sarvāstivādins refined the coarse classification of the five aggregates more than tenfold, assigning every member a precise definition and boundary. The five aggregates supply a descriptive framework at the level of the discourses; the seventy-five dharmas supply an analytic framework at the level of the treatises. Both address the same world of experience at different resolutions.

The four characteristics and infinite regress

Among the conditioning forces dissociated from mind are the four characteristics of arising, duration, decay, and impermanence (jāti, sthiti, jarā, anityatā), the four stages in the arising and cessation of a conditioned dharma. Each is itself regarded as a really existing dharma. But this conceals a self-referential problem. If the four characteristics are themselves conditioned dharmas, then each should have its own arising, duration, change, and cessation. What are the arising, duration, change, and cessation of "arising" itself? Pursued consistently, this produces an infinite regress.

The Sarvāstivāda solution distinguishes primary characteristics from subsidiary characteristics. A principal dharma has four primary characteristics; each primary characteristic in turn has four subsidiary characteristics; and the process stops there, because subsidiary characteristics require no further characteristics.² But the Sarvāstivādins offer a normative determination, not a logical derivation, for why subsidiary characteristics need no further subsidiary characteristics. At this point the system ends inquiry by stipulation. Both Sautrāntika and Madhyamaka critics regard such a stipulation as an arbitrary halt: once the question is accepted as meaningful but can be stopped only by decree, unresolved internal tension remains.

3. Six Causes and Four Conditions: The Skeleton of Causality¶

The five categories and seventy-five dharmas catalogue "what exists." To explain how these dharmas cause one another, the Sarvāstivādins also developed a theory of six causes, four conditions, and five results.³

The six causes (hetu, direct causes):

The four conditions (pratyaya, conditions in the broad sense) are the causal condition, covering the functions of the six causes; the immediately preceding condition, by which one moment of mind opens the way for the next; the object condition, by which an object of cognition supports consciousness; and the dominant condition, encompassing all other contributing circumstances.

The five results (phala) are the dominant result, the broadest category; the humanly produced result, generated with the aid of an instrument; the outflow result, a continuous result of the same kind as its cause; the ripened result, the morally charged result of karma, different in kind from its cause; and the result of separation, nirvāṇa attained through separation from the defilements.

The significance of this theory does not lie in the individual items but in the transformation it performs. It changes the "narrative" of the twelve links of dependent arising in the discourses into a "typology." Dependent arising tells a story of circulation through birth and death. The six causes and four conditions set out the logically possible types of causal relations among dharmas, converting a description of process into structural analysis. This implements in causal theory the major Abhidharma transition from "context-dependent teaching" to "ultimate teaching" discussed in 1.5. The pair "ripening cause → ripened result" specifically handles the fruition of karma across lives; together with unmanifest matter and acquisition, discussed below, it forms the Sarvāstivāda's complete mechanism for causal continuity.

4. Crucial Explanatory Mechanisms: Unmanifest Matter, Acquisition, and the Existence of the Three Times¶

For the catalogue to explain the world, it requires several supporting mechanisms. They all address the leading difficulty identified in 1.5: without a self, how can karma and continuity be established?

Unmanifest matter (avijñapti-rūpa, one of the material dharmas). The bodily or verbal act that constitutes wholesome or unwholesome karma—a manifest form—vanishes in an instant. The Sarvāstivādins maintain, however, that it simultaneously gives rise to an imperceptible, subtle material dharma called "unmanifest matter." This remains in the body as the continuing moral momentum of the act and, when conditions mature, produces its consequence.

Acquisition (prāpti, one of the conditioning forces dissociated from mind). What makes a dharma "belong" to a particular sentient being? The Sarvāstivādins posit acquisition as a real dharma that attaches another dharma to an individual's continuum. When you "acquire" greed, that greed counts as yours; abandoning a defilement means replacing its "acquisition" with "non-acquisition." Defilements, wholesome qualities, and even past actions remain registered to a person across time through acquisition.

The existence of the three times (discussed in detail in the previous chapter). The permanent existence of the intrinsic nature of dharmas in all three times is the general premise underlying these accounts of continuity. Unmanifest matter can persist, acquisition can bind, and karma can ripen across lives because past and future dharmas never cease to exist intrinsically.

Taken together, these three ideas reveal the Sarvāstivāda strategy for solving "continuity without a self." Whenever a function requires a bearer—maintaining karma, possessing a quality, or connecting the three times—the school posits another really existing dharma to perform it. In this book's view, this is the full development of the "ontologizing" tendency identified in 2.5. Rather than accept continuity as a process without an owner, it assigns an entity to each function. The result is stable, but its theoretical cost is high.

5. Internal Criticism: Vasubandhu and Saṅghabhadra¶

The most famous critic of this edifice emerged from within it. Vasubandhu composed the Abhidharmakośa: its root verses present Vaibhāṣika orthodoxy, but his own commentary repeatedly answers from a Sautrāntika perspective. He questions acquisition as an unnecessary entity—continuity itself is enough to explain why a quality "belongs" to a stream, so why posit an additional acquisition?—reduces the role of unmanifest matter, and unsettles the doctrine that the three times exist.² Saṅghabhadra, an orthodox Sarvāstivādin, responded with the Nyāyānusāra, defending the Vaibhāṣika position point by point.

This internal controversy highlights the principal targets of later criticism: the mechanisms that reified functions—acquisition, unmanifest matter, and the existence of the three times—were precisely the features subjected to repeated scrutiny. The Sautrāntikas of the next chapter drastically reduce them and explain karma and continuity through "seeds." Later, Mahāyāna Madhyamaka attacks the very concept of "intrinsic nature" and argues that no dharma possesses one (Part V), while Yogācāra takes over the entire catalogue of dharmas and reconstructs it within "consciousness-only"—its catalogue of one hundred dharmas descends directly from these seventy-five.

6. The System's Importance¶

The Sarvāstivāda system is the extreme form of Abhidharma dharma realism: it offers the most complete catalogue of existence and is more willing than any other system to preserve causality and continuity by adding real dharmas. Precisely because it developed this project most fully, it became the principal target of later opponents. Any attempt to refute the claim that "dharmas possess intrinsic nature" had first to address the Sarvāstivāda.

In fairness, however, even those who criticized and rejected the system continued to speak its language. Its categories—primary mind and mental factors, matter, associated and dissociated forces, conditioned and unconditioned dharmas—together with its minute analysis of psychological phenomena became the common vocabulary of subsequent Buddhist philosophy, including the Mahāyāna schools that opposed it. The Yogācāra catalogue of one hundred dharmas is its direct descendant. Even Madhyamaka, in arguing for "emptiness," first relies on the Sarvāstivāda's determinations of the characteristics of dharmas in order to identify its objects of criticism. Later schools rejected the Sarvāstivāda, yet preserved its categories and continued to employ them in constructing new systems. Its influence on later thought can be summarized in a diagram:

The next chapter turns to the Sautrāntikas. We will see how they retain only the present, use "seeds" to explain what unmanifest matter and acquisition were intended to explain, and offer a more economical account than the Sarvāstivāda's cumbersome mechanisms.

Further Reading¶

• Collett Cox. Disputed Dharmas: Early Buddhist Theories on Existence. Tokyo: International Institute for Buddhist Studies, 1995. (On ontological controversies surrounding acquisition and other conditioning forces dissociated from mind.)

References¶