Chapter 1: Mind, Matter, and Continuity—The Questions Abhidhamma Taxonomy Seeks to Answer¶

Chapter 0 ended with a question: what is this analytical system trying to answer? This chapter answers it.

The three terms in the title are three points of entry. Mind asks how awareness and its many functions are to be classified. Matter asks how rūpa is given in experience and how far it can be analyzed. Continuity asks how these two continue from moment to moment when there is no unchanging owner in between. The first two questions are developed in Chapters 2 and 3; the third runs through Chapters 4, 5, and 6. This chapter first introduces the tool shared by all three questions: the textual layer from which it comes, why analysis is worth carrying this far, and the format by which it defines a dhamma. Once the tool is clear, the lists in the next four chapters will no longer look like masses of entries waiting to be memorized.

The chapter closes with a small example: a phone vibrates on the table and you turn to look. The same event is told twice, once in the language of the discourses and once in the language of Abhidhamma. The difference between the two tellings is a miniature of every problem addressed in this part.

Five textual layers. Part I, Part 3, Chapter 4 has already sketched the transmission. Here only the textual strata need to be completed, because every number cited later in this part must be traceable to its layer.

The first layer is not a set of systematic treatises. The Dhammasaṅgaṇī enumerates dhammas citta by citta; the Paṭṭhāna combines the twenty-four conditions with phenomena into more than 130 configurations; the Kathāvatthu is a record of debates. In the second layer, the Visuddhimagga is not part of the Abhidhamma Piṭaka, but it reorganizes Abhidhamma materials into the sequence of virtue, concentration, and wisdom and in practice became the gateway through which later readers approached the Abhidhamma. The compendium in the third layer compresses the entire system into nine chapters and fewer than fifty pages. It is the principal basis of this part and the standard introduction taught across Theravāda countries today. The commentaries of the fourth layer fill in definitions omitted by the compendium; many numbers now treated as common knowledge come from this layer. The fifth is where the tabular edition used here belongs.¹

One fact should be entered in the record at once: the layer cited most frequently in this part is the latest one. This is not a shortcut. The compendium is the system's own retrospective organization and therefore shows most clearly the final form in which it chose to present itself. Yet precisely because it is late, the distance between it and the first layer is itself material for study. Section Six of this chapter takes up one such distance.

What analysis is for. A system that divides citta into eighty-nine types, cetasikas into fifty-two, and rūpa into twenty-eight invites an obvious verdict: excessive elaboration. Before passing that verdict, we should ask what the system is trying to accomplish.

Part 13, Chapter 3 has already observed that the early discourses define all five aggregates with verbs: form is afflicted, feeling feels, perception recognizes, formations form, and consciousness cognizes. None of the five definitions supplies composition, location, or material. The objects classified are activities, not parts. The argument for not-self operates on this list of verbs, questioning each in turn: which of them can produce a title deed showing mastery over itself?

Abhidhamma takes over precisely this list of verbs. What it does may be summarized by three questions. What is to be contemplated? The discourses say to contemplate body, feeling, mind, and dhammas, but each of the four establishments of mindfulness still has to be divided—how far? In what unit is it to be contemplated? What is the smallest object of a single act of contemplation: a whole person, a stretch of emotion, or something else? How finely must one contemplate? At what point is the analysis sufficient, and when does further division become pointless?

These are not theoretical questions but working questions. The four establishments of mindfulness require the practitioner to identify what is occurring now. Identification needs names; names need boundaries; boundaries need criteria. The terminology of the discourses suffices for instruction but not for cell-by-cell comparison. If one is told to contemplate feeling, for example, is a moment of discomfort the same item as a moment of aversion, or are they two? The discourses supply no uniform rule. Abhidhamma fills out the terminology into a standing working format by which any present field of experience can be named item by item.

The system is therefore operational before it is anything else. This book holds that the first criterion by which it should be judged is whether its entries can be used for identification. What can be identified is its achievement; what cannot be identified but remains registered is its burden. Section Five will formulate this criterion more precisely, and Chapter 7 will use it for the final accounting.

The four ultimate realities. Abhidhamma gathers all dhammas into four classes: citta, cetasika, rūpa, and Nibbāna. Citta is awareness itself. Cetasikas are the various functions that arise and cease together with citta and share the same object. Rūpa comprises twenty-eight material phenomena. Nibbāna is unconditioned. The four classes contain eighty-two dhammas in all: one citta (expanded by function into eighty-nine or 121), fifty-two cetasikas, twenty-eight kinds of rūpa, and one Nibbāna.²

Why these four? The first three divisions are inherited from the discourses: name and form, with name further divided into consciousness and the remaining mental phenomena. The fourth is added—and added conspicuously. Nibbāna is unconditioned; the other three classes are conditioned. To place the unconditioned beside the conditioned in a single table is to announce that the table is not merely a list of phenomena but a list of everything that ultimately exists. Chapter 6 directly addresses the cost of this move. Here the question need only be posted: why must a catalogue prepared for contemplation reserve a cell for something that belongs to no aggregate, neither arises nor ceases, and is associated with no citta?

A horizontal comparison can be made at the level of numbers. Theravāda has eighty-two ultimate realities; Sarvāstivāda has seventy-five dharmas. The two lists and their principles of division differ. Sarvāstivāda establishes a separate class of fourteen formations dissociated from mind—acquisition, non-acquisition, vitality, homogeneity, arising, duration, alteration, cessation, and the rest—an entire category absent from Theravāda.³ The next part unfolds this difference. For now, it is enough to note that whenever this part speaks of Theravāda restraint, Sarvāstivāda is the point of comparison.

Ultimate reality and concept. This distinction is the foundation of the entire project. An ultimate reality is a dhamma identified by its own characteristic. A concept is a designation, something established over dhammas by names and language. Persons, vehicles, houses, directions, time, and shape all fall on the side of concepts. Only ultimate realities are objects of insight contemplation.

The distinction first gives the system a crucial discipline. To say that a vehicle is not an ultimate reality is to say that there is no corresponding existent under the name vehicle. What can be identified is only an aggregate of material phenomena together with the mind's act of imposing that designation on the aggregate. The same applies to a person and to a self. The system thus possesses an internal line of defense: whatever can be discussed only as a whole and cannot be separately identified at any moment is excluded from the table. Chapter 7 argues that the system exercises restraint; the first place where that restraint appears is here.

The danger begins here as well. Once the distinction has been made, another question follows: what is the status of an ultimate reality itself? Is it an identifiable texture, or is it something established in its own right? For now, note a supporting etymology: one traditional explanation of the word dhamma is “that which is borne by conditions.” It is borne rather than bearing, and the word form itself places it in a passive position. Karunadasa uses this to argue that an Abhidhamma dhamma was never conceived as a substrate supporting properties.⁴ This book agrees with the etymological reading but holds that etymology cannot constrain use. Section Six describes how use followed another road.

The fourfold defining method. To define a dhamma, four columns are filled: characteristic, function, manifestation, and proximate cause. The characteristic is what distinguishes the dhamma from every other dhamma. Its function is what it accomplishes. Its manifestation is the manner in which it appears in contemplation, or the result it leaves. Its proximate cause is the nearest condition necessary for its arising.

Contact may serve as an example. Its four columns are filled as follows. Characteristic: touching the object. Function: causing object and consciousness to impinge upon one another. Manifestation: arising through the conjunction of base, object, and consciousness, and leading to the arising of feeling, perception, and formations. Proximate cause: the object appearing at a sense door.⁵ Once all four columns have been filled, the term contact has a boundary. It is not tactile sensation in the psychological sense; it is the meeting of an object and consciousness at any door. The advantage is plain: an abstract term has been compressed into four questions that can be checked.

This four-column format has a history. Bhikkhu Bodhi points out that it derives from an ancient pair of exegetical texts and was not invented by Abhidhamma. Abhidhamma institutionalized it as a uniform format for the whole table.⁶ Institutionalization matters because a discourse may explain a term differently according to context; once the four columns have been fixed, the term has a fixed seat across the table.

This book uses these four columns as a criterion for evaluating the whole system. Where all four can be fully filled, we have phenomenology: something identifiable in experience, with a repeatable mode of identification. Where the columns cannot be filled but are filled nevertheless, we have metaphysics: their contents have been supplied to keep the table regular, yet cannot be checked in experience. The criterion does not decide in advance which cells fall into which class. It supplies a method of inspection, one applied category by category in the chapters that follow.

One possible misunderstanding should be removed. These are not four definitions but four aspects of the same dhamma; without any one of them, the definition is incomplete. The column of proximate cause is especially important, for it fastens every dhamma to conditions. Whatever can be assigned a proximate cause cannot be self-sufficient. This is the column least susceptible to ontologization. Chapter 7 will return to it.

An old catalogue, newly cut. Abhidhamma did not discard the five aggregates. It retained them intact on the table and supplied a correspondence:⁷

The table reads smoothly, but every row performs a rewriting. The aggregate of form changes from a class of activity into twenty-eight entries. The aggregates of feeling and perception each contract into one cetasika. The aggregate of consciousness unfolds into eighty-nine cittas. The aggregate of formations is obtained by subtraction: fifty-two minus feeling and perception leaves fifty. Nibbāna is assigned a separate cell outside the table because it belongs to no aggregate.

The benefit should be stated first, because it is real. The table connects the five aggregates to the entire nervous system of the analysis. Once one knows that the aggregate of feeling is this one cetasika, one can trace its fourfold definition, the cittas with which it is associated, and the positions it occupies in a cognitive process. Five terms that otherwise require separate explanation become five regions of the larger table. Pedagogically, this is an enormous convenience.

The cost lies in grammar.

The act of forming, and those fifty items. Consider the aggregate of formations. The discourses define formation with a verb: they form the conditioned; they form form as form, feeling as feeling, perception as perception, formations as formations, and consciousness as consciousness. The Chinese parallel says that the defining mark of the formation aggregate is making: what does it make? It makes form.⁸ The definiens is something being done.

Chapter XIV of the Visuddhimagga still observes this definition. It says that whatever has the characteristic of forming is collectively called the aggregate of formations. This is a definition by characteristic, of the same kind as the one in the discourses. More important is its manner of enumeration: it lists the constituents separately for each citta. For the first wholesome citta of the sense sphere, Buddhaghosa counts thirty-six formations: twenty-seven invariably present, four present in one case or another, and five variable. The aggregate of formations accompanying a greed-rooted citta has seventeen items; that accompanying a hatred-rooted citta has eighteen.⁹ Within the same book, the number changes because it changes with the citta. At no point does Buddhaghosa supply one flat list of fifty.

The number can vary because the catalogue had not yet been closed. When the Dhammasaṅgaṇī enumerates dhammas citta by citta, it ends with an open clause: whatever other non-material, dependently arisen dhammas are present on that occasion. Bhikkhu Bodhi notes that the clause presupposes an open universe of cetasikas. The commentaries closed it by naming the entries one by one under the heading “or-whatever” dhammas.¹⁰ The four “present in one case or another” among Buddhaghosa's thirty-six use precisely this still-open passage.¹¹

Once the opening had been closed, the compendium fixed the total number of cetasikas at fifty-two. At this point—and only at this point—the aggregate of formations could first be defined by subtraction: remove feeling and perception from the fifty-two cetasikas, and the remaining fifty are the aggregate of formations.

For subtraction to work, the denominator must first be closed. This is the most important observation in this section. Closing an open catalogue that varied with each citta into a fixed list is the step by which formation changed from the activity occurring now into “those fifty items.” This book holds that the reification of the five aggregates was announced by no doctrine; it took place in a cataloguing procedure. Nothing in the procedure itself is objectionable. Every step had a reason: teaching required a determinate number; cross-reference required fixed entries; meditation instruction had to answer students' questions. Yet by the end of the procedure, the grammatical character of formation had changed. Originally a nominal form of a verb, it referred to the act of forming. Thereafter it was a list, referring to fifty things. No one announced the change because no one had ever made it as a single decision.

Two limits on this claim. For the judgment to stand, two boundaries must be drawn.

First, defining the formation aggregate by subtraction is already found in the Dhammasaṅgaṇī. In each citta-by-citta enumeration, the aggregate of formations consists of the associated dhammas minus feeling and perception. What changed was not the presence of subtraction but the nature of its denominator: from open and citta-specific to closed and permanent. The object of this section is the denominator.

Second, Theravāda has no formations dissociated from mind. As noted above, Sarvāstivāda establishes acquisition, non-acquisition, vitality, homogeneity, arising, duration, alteration, cessation, and other dharmas as a separate class of formations dissociated from mind. That move adds an entire set of entities to the formation aggregate. Theravāda did not take it. The reification described here is therefore a lighter kind: nothing has been added; a table of functions has merely come to be read as a register of things. Lighter does not mean absent. Chapter 7 shows where its cost lands.

Four ways of cutting the same materials. The chapter on compendium of categories carries this further. It provides not one correspondence but four: aggregates, bases, elements, and truths. The same ultimate realities are cut once into five aggregates, once into twelve bases, once into eighteen elements, and once into four truths. The twelve bases are the six internal and six external bases, dividing cognition by its gateways. The eighteen elements add the six consciousness elements to the twelve bases, dividing cognition by its three-sided structure.¹²

It is worth looking at the shape taken by the aggregate of consciousness under these cuts, because it most clearly shows the relation between division and entity. Cut by aggregates, the eighty-nine cittas form one block, the aggregate of consciousness. Cut by elements, the same cittas are distributed among seven consciousness elements. The eye-, ear-, nose-, tongue-, and body-consciousness elements each comprise two cittas, ten in all—the so-called two sets of fivefold consciousness. The mind element comprises three cittas: five-door adverting and the two receiving cittas. The mind-consciousness element comprises the remaining seventy-six. Ten plus three plus seventy-six remains eighty-nine.

The same dhammas form one heap when cut as the aggregate of consciousness and seven heaps when cut as seven consciousness elements. Which is their true shape? The question is already mistaken. The cuts serve different purposes of contemplation; they do not describe an internal structure. Yet when several cuts are placed side by side in one table, they resemble several blueprints of the same piece of furniture, and blueprints always seem to point to a determinate object. This book holds that a second pressure toward reification arises here: the mere act of juxtaposition suggests something being juxtaposed.

Three positions in scholarship. The preceding judgment is not a scholarly consensus, so the opposing positions must be set out accurately.

Ronkin argues for transformation. In her account, Abhidhamma took terms used in the discourses to describe continuous processes and reapplied them to discrete momentary events. Dhammas changed from phases in a process into types of event; the eighty-two Theravāda dhammas and seventy-five Sarvāstivāda dharmas are products of this rewriting.¹³

Karunadasa and Gethin argue for continuity. Karunadasa's argument has already been mentioned: a dhamma is borne by conditions, and apart from its intrinsic nature there is no separate thing called a dhamma; such refinement does not yet involve a view of existence contrary to early Buddhism. Gethin's study of the treatment of the aggregates in early Abhidhamma concludes that the Nikāyas and early Abhidhamma can be viewed as a broadly coherent whole.¹⁴ That conclusion does not support the argument of this section. Gethin stands on the other side.

This book occupies a position between the two, while focusing on something different from either. At the doctrinal level, it agrees with the continuity account: Theravāda Abhidhamma never formulated an ontological thesis contrary to the early teachings; it always understood itself as analysis. But change need not occur at the level of doctrine. The argument here is that the format changed, and a change of format requires no announcement and leaves no declaration in any treatise. An open catalogue varying with each citta and a fixed list of fifty items can be doctrinally identical yet entirely different in use. The former can only name phenomena in the present act of contemplation; the latter can be memorized away from contemplation, tabulated, and counted as components of the world. The doctrine did not change. What one could do with it did.

This is the double aspect to which this part will repeatedly return: the same operation is both an achievement and a burden. Chapter 7 takes account of both.

Two readings of intrinsic nature. Abhidhamma defines a dhamma by the word sabhāva: what has its own nature is a dhamma. The term admits of two readings.

The first reads it as an identifiable texture. To say that a dhamma has its own nature means that it has its own characteristic, by which it can be distinguished from other dhammas in contemplation. The own nature of the earth element is hardness; that of contact is touching the object. On this reading, intrinsic nature is a term of identification, not a claim about a mode of existence. To say that a dhamma has its own nature is to say that it occupies a seat in the table that cannot be confused with another entry.

The second reads it as an essence established in itself. A dhamma has intrinsic nature because it is, in itself, what it is, not dependent upon another to become itself. On this reading, intrinsic nature is ontological, and this is precisely the kind attacked by Madhyamaka.

Both readings can find textual footholds, and a chronology can be traced. Ronkin's study of the Paṭisambhidāmagga argues that sabhāva is first used there as a defining term for dhamma. In the hands of the sixth-century commentator Mahānāma, the term is read as sat-bhāva, existence or a state of existence, and the ontological reading becomes fixed.¹⁵ If this chronology is correct, the second reading was not the starting point of Abhidhamma but a later phase. Karunadasa's counter-reading is also powerful. He notes that if arising, duration, and cessation were real dhammas, secondary characteristics would have to be posited for them in turn, producing an infinite regress. Abhidhamma itself refuses that path. A system genuinely committed to reading dhammas as independent entities would not apply the brakes here.¹⁶

This chapter does not decide between the two. It need only record that this word is the most important fork in the rest of the part. When Madhyamaka confronts it, Madhyamaka attacks the second reading, but Theravāda itself may not have stood wholly on that side. Most of the restraint defended in Chapter 7 depends on the first reading; most of the vacancies identified there lie in the unguarded space between the two.

One cognition, told in two languages. The first seven sections have described the framework. Whether the framework works can be seen only by running it once.

The scene is simple: a phone vibrates on the table, and you turn to look.

First, tell it in the language of the discourses. There is contact; there is the arrival of resistance, which is form; discomfort or expectation follows, which is feeling; recognition that the phone is vibrating is perception; the intention to turn has formed, which is formation; awareness throughout is consciousness. Five verbs, and the account stops. The language of the discourses has good reason to stop here. Its task is for the practitioner to see, on the spot, that none of these five things is self. Once that has been seen, the task is complete.

Now tell it in the language of Abhidhamma. This time we are given a fixed worksheet, each cell with a name, a position in sequence, and its own configuration of cetasikas. Citta was resting in bhavaṅga, the underlying current of continuity that does not take an external object. The vibration strikes the body door. Bhavaṅga first vibrates for two moments and is arrested. Five-door adverting arises and directs the stream toward that door. Body-consciousness arises and merely receives the touch. Receiving then takes up the object; investigating determines what kind of object it is; determining decides how to respond. Seven javanas follow, and only in this segment is kamma made. Two registrations then follow the object and take it once more, after which the stream falls back into bhavaṅga. The complete process ends here, having used seventeen mind-moments. A mind-door process then takes over, connects the preceding objects, and only then assembles the concept phone.¹⁷

A traditional simile may be read beside this sequence. A person asleep beneath a tree is bhavaṅga. A mango falls to the ground: the object strikes the door. The person wakes: adverting. He opens his eyes and looks: eye-consciousness. He reaches out and picks up the fruit: receiving. He inspects it: investigating. He smells it: determining. He eats it: javana. He swallows the lingering taste: registration. Then he sleeps again, returning to bhavaṅga.¹⁸

The second account adds three things to the first. First, it locates kamma in the javana segment. The preceding adverting, sense consciousness, receiving, and investigating do not make kamma; only the seven javana moments do. This is not merely classificatory refinement. It has practical consequences: why one offense is light and another grave depends on which cetasikas arise in the javana phase, not on the event by itself. Second, it gives a worksheet with no observer. In the first account, the five verbs can still easily be heard as “I see” and “I think.” In the dozen or so cells of the second, no cell is called the one who sees. Each is the result of the previous cell and a condition for the next. Third, it gives contemplation an operational unit. If told to contemplate the impermanence of mind, what exactly is contemplated? The first account cannot specify; the second can: the arising and ceasing of any cell in this sequence.

The cost is present in the same account. Once one asks which dhammas are present in this cognition, the worksheet becomes a register. Every cell was originally an event occurring now; every item in a register is something that can be counted away from the scene. Nominalization occurs here. It is necessary—without this question the system cannot be taught or consulted—but the moment the question is asked, the aggregates and dhammas have moved a small step away from ongoing activities toward enumerable things. The cataloguing procedure described in Section Six is reenacted in every student.

The next four chapters provide precisely this register. They should be read with both levels in view: it is an extraordinarily fine-grained worksheet, and a register extraordinarily easy to mistake for a list of the world.

To Chapter 2. Once the fourfold defining method becomes a defining machine, the first object it processes completely is mind. The eighty-nine cittas are not eighty-nine minds, but eighty-nine specifications produced by crossing several axes through one kind of event. The next chapter begins there.

References¶