Chapter 6 Core Controversies: Time, Causality, Mind, and Mental Factors¶

Part III concludes here. Examined school by school, the controversies of Abhidharma unfold along several consistent axes. This chapter first gathers those axes, then addresses something not previously discussed directly: the internal controversies did not develop in isolation, for powerful external opponents were engaged in the same struggle. It concludes with an assessment of the Abhidharma project as a whole.

1. Three Core Controversies¶

Placing the positions of the preceding chapters in a single table reveals the structure of their differences. The schools divided primarily along three axes: time, causality and continuity, and mind and cognition.

The Mahāsāṃghika line does not appear in the table and requires explanation. The Mahāsāṃghikas generally did not develop Abhidharma to the same scholastic degree as the Sarvāstivādins or Theravādins. They invested more energy in elevating the Buddha—through a conception of his body as transcending the world—and redefining the status of the arhat, without constructing a complete system of dharma characteristics. Surviving works associated with them, such as the Mahāvastu, are primarily biographical and narrative. Their response moved in another direction. They worked at the level of "what is liberation, and what is a Buddha," rather than subdividing the ontology of time, causality, and consciousness. This direction leads directly toward the rise of Mahāyāna in Part IV and does not unfold along the three axes of this chapter.

The table identifies the three controversies. Time concerns the existence of all three times versus the real existence of only the present (chapters 1, 3, and 4). Causality and continuity concern competing carriers—unmanifest matter, acquisition, seeds, the life-continuum, and the person—each bearing the load of "continuity without a self" (chapters 2–5). Mind and cognition concern the number of mental factors, the relations of association, and whether a fixed cognitive process exists (chapters 2 and 4). Rather than repeat the details, this chapter gathers them as different aspects of a single set of problems.

2. External Opponents and Pressures¶

The increasingly intricate Abhidharma systems did not develop in an internally sealed environment. The centuries in which the Buddhist schools flourished and early Mahāyāna arose were precisely those in which the Indian philosophical schools took shape and attacked one another. Buddhism stood amid formidable opponents:

The period also had an institution known as "debate" (vāda). Public debates were frequently held at royal courts, and victory or defeat affected patronage, prestige, and even conversion.² Meditative realization alone did not suffice in such an arena. A school needed rigorous doctrines that could both establish and refute positions, sound arguments, and an ontology capable of surviving interrogation. This forced every tradition, including Buddhism, to forge its thought into a debatable system.

A frequently overlooked causal relation should be identified here. In this book's view, the "ontologization" of Abhidharma arose not only from the inward tendency to search for a substance discussed in 3.1 but also from this external competitive pressure. When every opponent presented some real thing—the Vaiśeṣikas their atoms and categories, the Sāṃkhyas a permanent person, the Brahmanical traditions brahman and self, the Jains a real soul—Buddhists who retained only the simple, near-phenomenological description that "everything is merely an ownerless stream of phenomena" were disadvantaged in debate. It was too thin to answer the opponent's repeated demand: what exactly exists, wanders through rebirth, and cognizes? To respond, Buddhism too needed a solid inventory of existence. The Sarvāstivāda theory of atoms accordingly formed in a debating environment similar to that of Vaiśeṣika atomism,³ while increasingly substantial accounts developed around dharma-natures, intrinsic nature, conditions, and mental factors.

A concrete example shows how competition shaped the Sarvāstivāda system. Vaiśeṣika exhaustively classified existence under six categories: substance (dravya), quality (guṇa), action (karman), universal (sāmānya), particularity (viśeṣa), and inherence (samavāya). The five categories and seventy-five dharmas are structurally highly symmetrical. Both exhaustively inventory "all types of existence," distinguish substance-like dharmas from property-like mental factors, and explain how dharmas operate "together." The difference is that Vaiśeṣika uses "inherence" to explain how a quality belongs to a substance, while the Sarvāstivādins reject this special relation and use the "associated cause" (samprayukta-hetu) to explain why primary mind and mental factors arise in the same moment. One inventory was not copied from the other, but they became highly symmetrical by responding to the same philosophical questions. The surrounding realist environment encouraged every school to describe the world as a defensible catalogue of existence and led some Buddhist treatises toward increasingly reified formulations.

Logic and epistemology: an intellectual by-product of the pressure to debate

This competition directly promoted the development of logic (hetuvidyā) and epistemology (pramāṇa-vāda, theory of the sources of knowledge). To win a debate, one first had to know its rules: what counts as a valid argument—the proposition, reason, and example—and what counts as genuine cognition—direct perception and inference. Dignāga, around the fifth or sixth century, founded Buddhist logic and epistemology. His Pramāṇasamuccaya criticizes the realist assumptions of Vaiśeṣika and Sāṃkhya and constructs a rigorous Buddhist theory of knowledge. It recognizes only two valid sources: direct perception (pratyakṣa) and inference (anumāna), excluding the Brahmanical category of verbal testimony as Vedic revelation. Dharmakīrti, around the seventh century, carried the theory to its height, joining logic closely to Sautrāntika–Yogācāra epistemology and producing one of the most rigorous philosophical systems in Indian intellectual history.² Epistemology arose as a by-product of the external pressures surrounding Abhidharma but ultimately exceeded Abhidharma itself. It no longer concerned only disputes among Buddhist schools; it systematically reconstructed epistemology in the public, cross-sectarian arena of Indian debate. Part VIII will return to this development in detail.¹

This path toward epistemology creates a noteworthy tension with one feature of the early discourses. In the Kesamutti Sutta (AN 3.65, commonly called the Kālāma Sutta), the Buddha tells the Kālāmas not to establish belief on ten bases. These explicitly include pure reasoning (takkahetu), deductive inference (nayahetu), and acceptance of a view after consideration (diṭṭhinijjhānakkhanti). Among the sixty-two views criticized in the Brahmajāla Sutta (DN 1), the "reasoner and investigator" (takkī vīmaṃsī) who constructs metaphysical claims about self and world through speculation also forms a distinct category. The positive mode of knowledge indicated by the early discourses is knowledge and vision of things as they are (yathābhūtañāṇadassana): directly seeing through meditation that conditioned things are impermanent, painful, and not-self. It is wisdom as insight and fundamentally differs from "direct perception" (pratyakṣa) in Dignāga's sense, which the text treats as immediate sensory cognition; the two should not be conflated. This early orientation makes the culture of Abhidharma controversy and the later rise of epistemology historically ironic. The tradition most explicit in warning against reliance on inference developed one of the most rigorous theories of knowledge in Indian philosophy. The irony is not accidental. It reveals precisely how the external pressure described in this chapter reshaped the tradition from within.

3. Concluding Assessment: Ontologization, Construction, and the Irony of "Do Not Proliferate"¶

Bringing the internal and external forces together allows Part III to be summarized in several conclusions.

First is the shared tendency toward ontologization. The controversies over time, causality, and consciousness differ on the surface, but share an underlying impulse: to install a real bearer for "continuity without a self" and to organize flowing experience into an enumerable catalogue of existence. Half the impulse came from the habit of seeking an ultimate ground within (3.1), and half from the pressure toward reification created by the external arena of debate (the preceding section). The schools answered differently but faced remarkably similar problems.

Second is their constructed character. Precisely because the systems are constructions rather than copies of reality, their numbers conflict. Is primary mind one or eighty-nine? Are there forty-six or fifty-two mental factors? Are conditions four plus six or twenty-four? Do all three times really exist, or only the present? Is the carrier a seed, the life-continuum, or a person? If these were literal inventories of "ultimate reality as it is," independent schools working with care should not have produced such divergent results. Their disagreements show that the systems incorporate extensive selection and convention.

Third is the irony of "do not conceptually proliferate." Abhidharma originally served liberation. It analyzed body and mind so that practitioners could see impermanence and relinquish grasping—a connection most successfully preserved by the Southern tradition through meditation (see 3.4). But once analysis acquired momentum of its own, it became increasingly elaborate and gradually formed a scholastic body of treatises. At a certain point, the means—analysis—eclipsed the end—liberation. A tradition that placed "do not conceptually proliferate" (papañca, 1.5) among its foundational teachings ultimately developed one of ancient India's largest and most precise conceptual systems. In this book's view, the irony offers an essential perspective from which to examine later Buddhist transformations; Volume III will develop it separately. One classification must be clarified. Attachment to views and systems—clinging to views—is, according to dependent arising, a product of "with craving as condition, clinging" and therefore the result of craving, not ignorance or delusion itself. This transformation should consequently be analyzed primarily under "greed" or grasping.

A balanced statement is required. This does not mean that Abhidharma labored in vain. It forged Buddhist thought into a genuinely systematic philosophy. Its vocabulary of dharma characteristics and precise distinctions among psychological phenomena became the shared language of every later Buddhist tradition, including the Mahāyāna movements that rebelled against it (as noted in 3.2). The problem lies not in "analysis," but in "mistaking the results of analysis for reality's final hand."

Was another path available—one that avoided adding still more bearers and instead stepped back to question the premise that "each dharma possesses its own intrinsic nature"? Yes. Historically, Nāgārjuna's Madhyamaka took this step through "emptiness." It no longer asked "which bearer should be established?" but "what reason is there to think that any intrinsic nature can be established?" Yet the reservation at the end of the preceding chapter must be repeated. Madhyamaka is the historical form that the move actually took, a choice produced under historical conditions, not necessarily the ideal form. In this book's view, the better path would have been to return to a silent, nonsystematic phenomenological position closer to the Buddha's original intent. Such a position, however, could not defend itself in the debating environment described in section 2. Part III ends here. The next part turns to Mahāyāna, first asking how it arose and then examining how Madhyamaka turned Abhidharma dharma realism back into a problem.

References¶