Chapter 6. Core controversies: time, causation, consciousness, and mental factors¶

Essay 3 comes to a close here. The preceding chapters show that the schools' Abhidharma debates revolve around a few recurring questions. This chapter first brings those questions together, then addresses something not yet discussed directly: these internal disputes did not take place in isolation, for a group of powerful external opponents was contending with Buddhism at the same time. It ends with a concluding examination of the entire Abhidharma project.

1. Three core controversies¶

Placing the positions from the preceding chapters in one table makes the structure of the schools' disagreements clear. They divide chiefly along three axes: time, causation and continuity, and consciousness and cognition.

The absence of the Mahāsāṃghika line from this table requires explanation. As a whole, the Mahāsāṃghikas did not develop Abhidharma into a scholastic system to the same extent as Sarvāstivāda or Theravāda. They devoted more effort to elevating the Buddha (conceiving his body as transcending the world) and redefining the status of arahants, without constructing a complete system of dharma categories. Their surviving treatises, such as the Mahāvastu, are chiefly historical and biographical. The Mahāsāṃghika response took a different direction. It worked at the level of "what liberation is and what a Buddha is," rather than subdividing the ontology of time, causation, and consciousness. This direction leads directly to the Mahāyāna of Essay 4, instead of developing along this chapter's three axes.

The table identifies all three controversies. The dispute over time opposes the reality of all three times to that of the present alone (Chapters 1, 3, and 4). The dispute over causation and continuity concerns the bearers: unmanifest matter, possession, seeds, bhavaṅga, and pudgala. Each provides something to shoulder "continuity without a self" (Chapters 2–5). The dispute over consciousness and cognition concerns the number of mental factors, their relations of association, and whether to posit a cognitive process (Chapters 2 and 4). This chapter will not restate them item by item, but bring them to a close as different facets of the same set of problems.

2. External opponents and pressures¶

Abhidharma's increasingly detailed system did not develop in a closed world of internal disputes. The centuries from the flourishing of the early schools to the beginnings of Mahāyāna were precisely the period when Indian philosophical traditions were taking shape and attacking one another. Buddhism was surrounded by powerful opponents:

There was also an institution of "debate" (vāda): public contests, often held at royal courts, whose outcomes affected patronage, reputation, and even conversion.¹ To hold one's ground in this arena, personal realization was not enough. One needed a rigorous doctrine capable of refutation and establishment, strong arguments, and an ontology that could withstand questioning. This compelled every school, Buddhism included, to forge its thought into a system that could be debated.

A causal connection often overlooked should be made explicit. This book holds that Abhidharma's "ontologization" came not only from the inward tendency to seek an ultimate ground discussed in 3.1, but also from this pressure of external competition. Every opponent presented something real: Vaiśeṣika atoms and categories, Sāṃkhya's permanent spirit, the Brahmanical Brahman-self, and Jainism's real souls. In this setting, Buddhism was disadvantaged in debate if it clung only to the simple, almost phenomenological description that "everything is merely an ownerless stream of phenomena." That was too thin to withstand the opponents' successive demands: "What, then, is existing, undergoing rebirth, and cognizing?" To withstand them, Buddhism too had to present a solid inventory of existents. Sarvāstivāda atomism thus took shape in a context of debate similar to that of Vaiśeṣika atomism,² while its long list of intrinsic being, own-nature, conditions, and mental factors increasingly took on the character of entities.

A concrete example shows how this competition shaped Sarvāstivāda. Vaiśeṣika exhausts existence through six categories: substance (dravya), quality (guṇa), action (karman), universal (sāmānya), particular (viśeṣa), and inherence (samavāya). Sarvāstivāda's inventory in five categories is highly symmetrical with it in structure (for the origin of this name, see the note in 3.1). Both exhaustively catalogue "all types of existence"; both distinguish substantial dharmas from mental factors with the character of properties; and both must explain how dharmas act "together." The difference is that Vaiśeṣika uses "inherence" (samavāya) to explain a quality's inhering in a substance, whereas Sarvāstivāda rejects this special relation and instead uses the "associated cause" (samprayukta-hetu) to explain why principal consciousness and mental factors arise together in the same moment. Neither inventory copied the other, but their responses to the same philosophical questions produced a high degree of symmetry. A chronological limit must be observed: the symmetry lies in the method of cataloguing, not in the total, because both the name "seventy-five dharmas in five categories" and the number seventy-five come from later commentaries and appear in neither of the two original treatises. Seen in this light, the external realist environment encouraged the schools to describe the world as a defensible inventory of existents and brought some Buddhist treatises increasingly close to expressions of substantial reality.

Logic and the theory of valid cognition: intellectual by-products of the pressure of debate

This competition also directly advanced logic (hetuvidyā) and the theory of sources of valid cognition (pramāṇa-vāda). Winning a debate required knowing its rules: what counts as a valid argument, with its thesis, reason, and example; and what counts as true cognition, through perception and inference. Dignāga, who lived around the fifth to sixth centuries CE, founded Buddhist logic and the theory of valid cognition. His Pramāṇasamuccaya criticized the realist premises of Vaiśeṣika and Sāṃkhya and established a rigorous Buddhist epistemology. It recognized only two valid sources of cognition: perception (pratyakṣa, direct apprehension) and inference (anumāna, reasoning), excluding Brahmanical "authoritative testimony," or Vedic revelation. Dharmakīrti, who lived around the seventh century CE, then brought this theory to its height, closely joining logic to Sautrāntika–Yogācāra epistemology to form one of the most rigorous philosophical systems in Indian intellectual history.¹ The rise of the theory of valid cognition was a by-product of the external pressure on Abhidharma, but it eventually surpassed Abhidharma itself. It was no longer merely a dispute over positions within the early schools, but a systematic reconstruction of epistemology in the public arena of debate across traditions. This line will be examined further in Essay 6, on Yogācāra.³

A tension between this development toward the theory of valid cognition and a certain underlying character of the early discourses deserves mention. In the Kālāma Sutta (AN 3.65, Aṅguttara Nikāya), the Buddha warns the Kālāmas against establishing beliefs solely on ten sources, explicitly including mere reasoning (takkahetu), inferential deduction (nayahetu), and acceptance of a view after repeated reflection (diṭṭhinijjhānakkhanti). Among the sixty-two views criticized in the Brahmajāla Sutta (DN 1), "reasoners" (takkī vīmaṃsī), who construct metaphysical accounts of self and world through speculation, form a distinct category. The positive form of knowing toward which the early discourses point is knowledge and vision of things as they are (yathābhūtañāṇadassana): directly seeing through meditation the impermanence, suffering, and lack of self of conditioned formations. This is an insight of wisdom, fundamentally different from "perception" in Dignāga's sense (pratyakṣa, direct sensory apprehension); the two should not be conflated. This underlying character lends historical irony to Abhidharma's culture of debate and the later rise of the theory of valid cognition: the tradition that most explicitly warned against reliance on inference developed the most rigorous epistemology in the history of Indian philosophy. The irony reveals exactly how the external pressure discussed in this chapter reshaped a tradition's inner form. It was no accident.

3. A concluding examination: ontologization, construction, and the irony of "do not proliferate concepts"¶

Bringing the internal and external forces together, the whole of Essay 3 can be drawn into a few judgments.

First, a shared tendency toward ontologization. The controversies over time, causation, and consciousness differ on the surface, but beneath them lies the same tendency: to install a real bearer for "continuity without a self" and organize flowing experience into an inventory of existents that can be counted. Half of this tendency comes from the habitual inward search for an ultimate ground (3.1); half comes from the pressure toward substantial reality created by the external arena of debate (the preceding section). The schools' answers differ, but the problems they confront are closely related.

Second, their constructed character. It is precisely because these systems are constructions, not copies of reality, that their counts conflict: forty-six mental factors or fifty-two; four plus six conditions or twenty-four; all three times real or only the present; seeds, bhavaṅga, or pudgala as bearer. If these really were faithful inventories of "ultimate reality," schools working independently should not arrive at such widely differing results. The disagreements themselves show that these systems contain a great many choices and conventions.

The number of types of consciousness does not belong on this list. As 3.4 explained, Theravāda's eighty-nine are types obtained by cross-classifying a single ultimate dharma along several axes. In this slot, both branches posit only one dharma; there was never a discrepancy.

Third, the irony of "do not proliferate concepts." Abhidharma originally served liberation. It analyzed body and mind in order to see impermanence and relinquish grasping. Theravāda best preserved this purpose through its ties to meditation (see 3.4). But once analysis acquired its own momentum, it grew increasingly elaborate, gradually becoming a scholastic system of treatises. At a certain point, analysis, the means, overshadowed liberation, the end. A tradition that included "do not proliferate concepts" (papañca, 1.5) among its fundamental teachings ultimately developed ancient India's largest and most intricate conceptual system. This book regards that irony as a key perspective on the transformations of later Buddhism, to be developed separately in Volume 3. One classification must be specified: attachment to views and systems, or clinging to views, is a product of "craving conditions clinging" within dependent origination. It is a result of craving, not ignorance or delusion itself. This course of change should therefore be viewed chiefly from the perspective of "greed."

A balancing word is needed: this does not mean Abhidharma labored in vain. It forged Buddhist thought into a truly systematic philosophy. The vocabulary of dharma categories and the fine distinctions among mental phenomena that it left behind became the common language of all subsequent Buddhism, including the Mahāyāna that rose against it, as 3.2 already noted. The problem lies not in "analysis" but in "taking the results of analysis as the world's ultimate underlying reality."

There is another path: to stop adding bearers and step back to question the premise that "each dharma has its own nature." Historically, Nāgārjuna's Madhyamaka took this step through "emptiness." It no longer asked "which bearer should be posited"; the question became "what reason is there to think that any own-nature can be established?" But the reservation at the end of the preceding chapter on the Vātsīputrīyas must be repeated: Madhyamaka was the form this step actually took in history, a choice formed under historical conditions, and not necessarily the ideal one. In this book's view, a more desirable course would have been a return to a silent phenomenological stance that establishes no system (the Buddha's original intent). But that path could not be maintained in the environment of debate described in Section 2 of this chapter. Essay 3 ends here. The next part turns to Mahāyāna, first examining how it arose, then how Madhyamaka made Abhidharma's realism about dharmas a problem once again.

References¶