Chapter 2: The Seventy-Five Dharmas—Another List¶

The first chapter handed over two instruments: the distinction between substance and function, and the criterion separating the real from the nominal. Instruments have to be laid against something before their weight can be felt, and this chapter is where they land: the Sarvāstivāda list of dharmas. Part I, Part 3, Chapter 2 already set out all seventy-five dharmas in five categories item by item, and this chapter does not repeat them. It asks something else: how was this table arrived at, what does the arrangement itself assert, and on what grounds does it dare to claim that it is complete?

Chapters 2 and 3 of Part 14 read through the mental and material dhammas of the Theravāda eighty-two, position by position. Put the two lists side by side and the easiest thing to do is compare the totals: eighty-two against seventy-five, a difference of seven. That seven is the least informative number in the whole comparison. The differences are spread across five positions and run in opposite directions; only after they cancel does the small remainder appear. What is worth looking at is the movement within each position, and where each tradition has filed the same piece of work.

The first thing to say is that this table is itself a later product. The formula "seventy-five dharmas in five categories" does not occur in the Mahāvibhāṣā. In two hundred fascicles the figure seventy-five never appears as a count of dharmas, and the term "five categories" is never used as a rubric of classification. When the Mahāvibhāṣā discusses dharmas it still works within the old frameworks of the discourses—aggregates, bases, elements—and it classes name-bodies, phrase-bodies, and syllable-bodies as "included in the aggregate of formations dissociated from mind," a portion of the aggregate of formations rather than a category standing alongside matter and mind.¹

The arrangement into five categories was fixed by the Abhidharmakośa. Vasubandhu gathered judgments scattered across two hundred fascicles into a single table: eleven material dharmas, one mind, forty-six mental factors, fourteen dharmas dissociated from mind (citta-viprayukta-saṃskāra), and three unconditioned, seventy-five in all. In the Chinese tradition this table became the school's signboard; but it is a redaction of Sarvāstivāda doctrine, not that doctrine itself.²

The situation on the Theravāda side is the same. The figure eighty-two comes from the Abhidhammattha Saṅgaha, the work of Anuruddha in the eleventh century; the seven canonical books do not arrange things this way.³ Both lists are the late consolidations of their respective traditions, and each was set in order for its predecessors by a single gifted compiler. What this part compares are two acts of compilation, not the whole of two traditions. That has to be said at the outset, or every difference noted below risks being traced to the wrong source.

None of which means the two tables cannot be compared. Redactions are worth reading precisely because the redactor had to choose: what to merge into one slot, what to split into two, what to leave without a slot at all. The choices are written on the face of the table, and are easier to see than judgments scattered through a treatise. Those choices are what this chapter reads.

The difference between the two lists does not fall in one place. The figures first.

Seventeen plus six, less fourteen, less two, comes to exactly seven. The four divergences run in different directions, and only after they cancel does that small figure emerge. Looking at totals alone, one would suppose the two lists broadly alike; taken position by position, the largest divergence is in matter, the second largest in the dharmas dissociated from mind, and these two run opposite ways.

More to the point, those seventeen items did not simply vanish. The four characteristics of matter on the Theravāda side—production, continuity, decay, impermanence—govern the arising and passing of material phenomena; the Sarvāstivāda moved the same work into the dissociated category, establishing arising, duration, change, and cessation as four characteristics governing all conditioned dharmas together, not matter alone. The Theravāda life faculty as matter maintains the physical body while a separate life faculty among the mental factors maintains the mental side, each established in its own place; the Sarvāstivāda establishes a single life faculty, files it under the dissociated category, and lets that one item cover both.³ The same work needs doing, both traditions do it, and the slot sits in a different category. That is a comparison with content in it; addition and subtraction of totals is not.

The sections that follow read through the positions in turn, in the order of the Abhidharmakośa: matter first, the unconditioned last.

Matter comes to only eleven, and the criterion has already shown its underside here. The Sarvāstivāda material dharmas are the five faculties—eye, ear, nose, tongue, body; the five objects—form, sound, odour, taste, tangibles; and unmanifest matter, eleven in all. The Theravāda twenty-eight were read item by item in Chapter 3 of Part 14 and are not rearranged here; what is supplied is the reasoning on the Sarvāstivāda side.³

That reasoning is plain enough. The five faculties and five objects are the ten material bases among the twelve, canonical rubrics that need no further justification; and these ten can be analysed down to atoms and no further, so by the criterion of the first chapter they count as real. Beyond the nine items that correspond to these, the Theravāda establishes nineteen further material dharmas, and the Sarvāstivāda accepts none of them. The four great elements are absorbed into the base of tangibles—solidity, fluidity, heat, and motion just are what is touched, and need no four separate slots. The two sexual faculties are absorbed into the body faculty, nutriment into the bases of odour, taste, and tangibles; the heart-basis the Sarvāstivāda does not want at all, since for it the mind faculty is simply the immediately preceding consciousness, mental and not material. The delimiting element is the interval between material clusters, which the Sarvāstivāda calls the element of space, judges to be visible and resistant matter, includes in the base of form, and does not establish as a dharma in its own right. The three mutable phenomena—lightness, malleability, wieldiness—are states of matter, not constituents that can be separated out. The four characteristics are the marks of arising and passing in matter, for which the Sarvāstivāda has other arrangements. As for the two intimations, bodily and vocal: the Sarvāstivāda grants that body and speech make things manifest, but it hangs the matter on action and establishes unmanifest matter instead.¹

The arithmetic thus comes out as follows: nine plus nineteen gives the Theravāda twenty-eight, ten plus one gives the Sarvāstivāda eleven, a difference of seventeen. The one extra item on the Sarvāstivāda side is unmanifest matter.

Unmanifest matter (avijñapti-rūpa) is peculiar to the Sarvāstivāda; the Theravāda has nothing answering to it. It is a kind of matter left in the body after the taking of precepts or the performance of an act, not outwardly displayed, and it exists to explain one thing: how the substance of a precept persists after ordination, and how an act remains attached after it has been done. What establishes this item is not indissolubility but the fact that without it something cannot be made to work. The first chapter said that the first question to ask is by which criterion an item is established as real; here is the first exception, and it occurs in the very category that looks most like observable phenomena.⁵

Worth a separate remark is how the criterion works in both directions in this position. The same criterion keeps nineteen items out of the material category and lets fourteen into the dissociated category; the reason for exclusion is that they are not constituents that can be separated out, and the reason for admission is that without them something cannot be made to work. These are not one reason. Applied consistently, the first would abolish the dissociated category entire; applied consistently, the second leaves no ground for keeping the mutable phenomena and the characteristics of matter outside the door. That this table falls seventeen short of the Theravāda in matter and runs fourteen ahead of it in the dissociated category is owing precisely to two criteria being used separately in two places.

Mind is a single item. The Sarvāstivāda category of mind lists exactly one dharma: mind. The Theravāda likewise has a single ultimate for consciousness, opened out into eighty-nine or one hundred twenty-one according to object, plane, and associated factors.³ This is where the two are closest, and the closeness brings out one thing: where individual difference is located is itself a doctrinal claim.

The Sarvāstivāda hands difference over to the mental factors entire. Mind has no varieties of its own; the difference between a wholesome and an unwholesome mind lies not in the mind but in the factors associated with it. Mind merely cognizes, and the character of that cognizing is settled by whatever factors accompany it. The Theravāda procedure looks different but works the same way: the eighty-nine minds are classified by their associated factors and their plane, the only difference being that the Theravāda writes each combination out as a named entry on the table, while the Sarvāstivāda does not.

The Mahāvibhāṣā preserves an interesting discussion in this position. The discourses speak of three names—mind, mentality, consciousness—and the question is whether there is any difference among them. One view holds that there is none: mind just is mentality, mentality just is consciousness; the sounds differ but the substance does not, as fire is also called flame and also called blaze, one fire with ten names, the names differing while the substance does not. Another view holds that there is a difference, and that it lies in name, in time, in designation, and in sense: what is past is called mentality, what is future is called mind, what is present is called consciousness; within the elements it is designated as mind, within the bases as mentality, within the aggregates as consciousness; mind has the sense of lineage, mentality the sense of gateway of production, consciousness the sense of accumulation.¹

Notice the tack the second view takes. It offers four kinds of difference, and not one of them falls on the substance of mind itself. Difference in name is a matter of appellation, difference in time a matter of position, difference in designation a matter of which framework the thing is entered into, difference in sense a matter of which side it is identified from. The party that asserts a difference likewise never says that there are several minds; it says only that one and the same thing can be identified from several points. Which settles the claim that mind is one: on either view mind remains single, and the work of individuation is pushed elsewhere.

The cost of pushing it elsewhere is the subject of the next section. If mind carries no varieties of its own, then whether a given mind is wholesome or unwholesome, with or without outflows, is settled entirely by the associated factors; the factors are therefore not mere appendages of mind but the bearers of its varieties. How the forty-six are grouped is accordingly not an editorial detail of a list but a claim about how mind is constituted.

The mental factors fall into six groups, and the grouping is itself a claim. The Sarvāstivāda divides its forty-six into six: ten universal grounds, ten grounds of the universally wholesome, six grounds of the universally defiled, two grounds of the universally unwholesome, ten grounds of the limited defilements, and eight indeterminate. The Theravāda does not divide this way; it runs through factors universal to all consciousness, occasional factors, unwholesome factors, and beautiful factors—seven, six, fourteen, and twenty-five.³ Matching the two item by item yields little; what can be matched is the basis of the grouping.

Take the word "ground" first. Fascicle sixteen of the Mahāvibhāṣā offers three readings. On the first, the great one is mind: these ten dharmas are the place where mind arises, they are the ground of the great, and hence are called grounds of the great. On the second, mind is called great because its substance and function are superior, and the great just is the ground, being the basis on which the mental factors rest. On the third, feeling and the rest, ten in number, are called great because they pervade all classes of mind, and mind is their ground, hence "great grounds."¹ The three differ over whether "great" denotes mind or the ten dharmas, but all three share one sense: a ground is a field, the surface on which activity can occur. Since the grouping uses this word, what the grouping states is the range within which each set of factors operates.

Now for how that range is fixed. The Mahāvibhāṣā asks itself why exactly ten dharmas of the great grounds are named. The first layer of answer is a stock phrase: because the author of the treatise wished it so. That phrase is one of the standing formats of the treatise, and Part 16 will treat it on its own account.¹ But the passage does not stop there; it goes on to supply a substantive criterion: a dharma is included in this set if it can be found in every element, every plane, every destiny, every birth, every kind, and every mind. Six universals in a row—this is a checkable procedure, not something to be settled by an appeal to the author's wish.

The names of the six groups now have content. The great grounds are unconditionally pervasive; the wholesome grounds pervade every wholesome mind; the defiled grounds pervade every defiled mind; the unwholesome grounds pervade every unwholesome mind; the limited defilements arise singly; and the indeterminate are those that fall under none of the above. The basis of the grouping is range of pervasion, running from widest to narrowest, with one residual slot at the end. This is a table arranged by coverage.

The basis on the Theravāda side is different. The seven universals and the six occasionals are divided by whether or not they pervade, which follows the same logic as the Sarvāstivāda; but the fourteen unwholesome and the twenty-five beautiful are divided by moral quality, and have nothing to do with coverage. The two traditions use one measure for the first half and part company in the second: the Sarvāstivāda erects a separate group for the pervaders of the wholesome, the defiled, and the unwholesome respectively, still counting coverage; the Theravāda arranges directly by quality and leaves the question of coverage to the table of factor-combinations for each individual mind.

One more sentence in the same fascicle deserves recording. Explaining why mental factors must arise in association with mind, the Mahāvibhāṣā gives as the reason that conditioned dharmas are feeble in nature and must depend on one another before any work gets done. Three similes follow in a row: two bundles of reeds standing by leaning on each other, many cords together able to drag a great timber, many people joining hands able to cross a great river.¹ This is a halt. Why can factors not arise alone? Because conditioned dharmas are by nature feeble, feeble enough to require company. Why they should be feeble by nature is not pursued further. The first chapter met the same manner of closing once already, at substance and function: a simile followed by a statement that no further question should be pressed. This is the second instance, the same in shape, moved one position over. A few more will be met in this part, and Chapter 7 will set them side by side.

The dharmas dissociated from mind are the weight of this category, and the weight of this chapter. The Sarvāstivāda establishes fourteen: possession, non-possession, homogeneous character, the fruit of non-perception, the attainment of non-perception, the attainment of cessation, the life faculty, arising, duration, change, cessation, name-body, phrase-body, and syllable-body. The Theravāda has no such category. Among the eighty-two, a dhamma is either consciousness, or a mental factor, or matter, or nibbāna; a fifth possibility does not exist. These fourteen extra items are the largest structural difference between the two lists.³

Grouped by the work they do, the fourteen fall into three bundles.

The first bundle is attachment: possession (prāpti) and non-possession. They answer the question of what warrants saying, of a given dharma and a given person, that this dharma is his. Defilements are abandoned and arise again, the noble path is gained and lost; for such statements to hold, something must be responsible for tying a dharma to a continuum, and something else for describing the state of not yet being tied.

The second bundle is class and span: homogeneous character, the life faculty, the fruit of non-perception, the attainment of non-perception, and the attainment of cessation. Homogeneous character answers how living beings fall into kinds; the life faculty answers what maintains a single lifetime at a determinate length; the fruit and the two attainments answer what warrants saying, during the stretch in which no mind arises, that the continuum has not been broken.

The third bundle is temporal marks and verbal expression: arising, duration, change, cessation, name-body, phrase-body, and syllable-body. The four characteristics answer to the passage of conditioned dharmas through time; the three bodies answer to the unit in which linguistic expression is to be reckoned.

The three bundles do different work, but their character is identical. Not one of the fourteen is an observed phenomenon. Acquisition is not something that can be experienced, homogeneous character is not an object that can be pointed at, the four characteristics are not within reach of eye or ear, and name-, phrase-, and syllable-bodies are not the sounds themselves. All of them are positions established so that something else can be made to work. The first chapter distinguished three provenances for Abhidharma entries; this entire category belongs to the third, added so that the system of notation itself will stand up.⁴

The Mahāvibhāṣā says as much itself. Fascicle fourteen asks why this treatise on name-, phrase-, and syllable-bodies is composed; the first layer of the answer is the customary "because the author wished it so," and the second gives the real reason: in order to stop other schools and display one's own doctrine. Some hold that name-, phrase-, and syllable-bodies are not real dharmas, and the Dārṣṭāntikas are that party; some hold that they have sound as their own nature, and the Śabdikas are that party; to stop these two and display one's own doctrine this treatise is composed, since name-bodies and the rest are real dharmas, included in the aggregate of formations dissociated from mind.¹ The motive for the legislation is written in the open: this item is established as real because two opponents had to be refuted.

Measure this category by the three questions of the first chapter and the result is almost uncomfortably tidy. First question, by which criterion is the item established as real: not one of them by indissolubility, all of them by the impossibility of making things work without them. Second question, what would be lost by not establishing it: the first bundle, the attachment between act and result; the second, the continuity of the series; the third, the temporal structure of conditioned dharmas and the reality of language. Third question, what does establishing it cost: for every item added in this category, one must ask what accounts for that item in turn. Does possession itself require a possession; do the four characteristics themselves require characteristics? Both questions were in fact raised in the Mahāvibhāṣā, and Chapter 4 takes them one at a time.

The Theravāda's lack of this category has its own evident cost. The attachment of act to result, the continuity of the series, the units of language—for these the Theravāda either relies on the sequence of cognitive process and mental factors, or leaves the matter within the relation of conditions without reifying it. Chapter 7 of Part 14 said that this slot is empty; empty means that nothing has been legislated there, not that no problem exists there. The Sarvāstivāda reifies these problems wholesale, at the cost of an entire category of unobservables on its list; the Theravāda declines to reify, at the cost of leaving several treatments at the descriptive level with no warrant given. Each road runs its own way, and the verdict of Chapter 7 has to come down at this point.

The unconditioned gains two. The Sarvāstivāda establishes three unconditioned dharmas: space, cessation through discernment, and cessation not through discernment. The Theravāda has one nibbāna.³ The two extra items each have their own provenance and their own difficulties.

Cessation not through discernment is a cessation not obtained by the discriminating wisdom. The definition given in fascicle thirty-two of the Mahāvibhāṣā is exactly this negative form: this cessation is not obtained through discerning wisdom, hence it is called cessation not through discernment, being a fruit not of discernment. Then by what is it obtained? By the deficiency of conditions: when one faces in one direction, the forms, sounds, odours, tastes, and tangibles of the other directions cease, and the mind and mental factors that might have taken them as objects, their conditions being incomplete, absolutely fail to arise; through this failure to arise, cessation not through discernment is obtained.¹ The definition falls on the side of never arising, not on what has already ceased; the adjudication in the same fascicle puts it more flatly still: this cessation is obtained only with respect to future dharmas that will never arise.

What makes this item defensible is of a piece with the dissociated dharmas: without it one situation has nowhere to be placed—that something will never happen at all, and that "never" must itself have a status. But it brings more trouble than it settles. The same fascicle compares which is more numerous, cessation through discernment or cessation not through discernment, and concludes that the latter is many and the former few, on the ground that cessations not through discernment are as numerous as conditioned dharmas, while cessations through discernment are only as numerous as dharmas with outflows.¹ That the count of an unconditioned dharma should be reckoned off the count of the conditioned is a sentence that gives away its character. More awkward still, cessation not through discernment (apratisaṃkhyā-nirodha) attaches to a continuum by way of possession, and possession is an item in the category dissociated from mind; an unconditioned dharma needs a conditioned one before it can stand in any relation to a particular person.²

Space is the most easily attacked of the three. Fascicle seventy-five of the Mahāvibhāṣā separates space from the element of space with great care: space is not matter, the element of space is matter; space is invisible, the element of space is visible; space is unresistant, the element of space is resistant; space is without outflows, the element of space is with outflows; space is unconditioned, the element of space is conditioned. Five contrasts, one side the unconditioned space, the other the conditioned interval.¹

There is a reason for separating them so carefully, which is that the word in the discourses will not behave. The same place raises the objection itself: a discourse says that the World-Honoured One stroked space with his hand and addressed the monks—could the Buddha have stroked an unconditioned dharma with his hand? The answer: what is spoken of there is the element of space, merely using the word "space." The same fascicle also has the simile of a painter painting upon space, and a verse saying that beasts return to the thickets and birds return to space.¹ In all these usages, space means the visible, palpable interval. The Sarvāstivāda's remedy is to assign every such scriptural usage to the element of space, leaving only its own defined space (ākāśa) as unconditioned. The move is of a piece with what the first chapter said about the word "all": the word is taken over from the discourses and then reassigned a use.

The difficulties do not end there. When fascicle seventy-seven divides the three moral qualities it says: wholesome dharmas are the wholesome five aggregates together with cessation through discernment; unwholesome dharmas are the unwholesome five aggregates; indeterminate dharmas are the indeterminate five aggregates together with space and cessation not through discernment.¹ The three unconditioned are parted here, cessation through discernment falling under the wholesome, space and the other cessation under the indeterminate. A dharma established as really existent, unconditioned, is in quality indeterminate, does nothing whatever by way of function, and has for the whole content of its existence that it does not obstruct the arising of matter. Vasubandhu's objection in the first chapter of the Abhidharmakośa is already on the table: non-obstruction is a negative formulation, and if the entire content of a thing is that it does not get in the way of something else, on what ground is it counted real?²

Here the reader meets for the first time the double role of the Abhidharmakośa. The same book is at once the most complete redaction of Sarvāstivāda doctrine—that table of seventy-five dharmas in five categories comes from it—and the most unsparing critic of that doctrine, refuting the reality of space to its face. Both things come from one hand. This book takes that for no contradiction: it shows rather that Vasubandhu's redaction was carried out with testing in view. He set the school's claims in order so as to see which of them would hold. The dispute over existence in the three times, the subject of Chapter 3, is the second stroke of that same hand, and it falls a good deal harder than this one.

On what ground does this table count as complete? With the positions surveyed, one general question remains. Is seventy-five an exhaustive number, and what guarantees the Sarvāstivāda that nothing has been left out?

The Sarvāstivāda answer is procedural. The criterion is written down—what cannot be dissolved is real; let anyone propose a new candidate and it is simply a matter of applying the measure. The merit of this answer is that it leaves the list open, permitting both addition and review. Legislative passages in the Mahāvibhāṣā commonly take just this form: someone holds that such-and-such is not real; to refute him this treatise is composed; such-and-such is a real dharma. The list grew item by item out of controversy.

The defect lies in the same place. An open list can never declare itself complete; it can only say that so far nothing has been refuted. And what happens in practice is that each addition creates one more place requiring explanation, and the new place requires a further addition. The first chapter spoke of a chain; Chapter 7 will draw it to its end.

The Theravāda guarantee is of another kind. The eighty-two dhammas come from the tradition, from the format of the Visuddhimagga and the ordering of the seven books; no checkable procedure is offered, only the claim that these are the items actually discerned in the practice of insight. This answer closes the list, and is neither easy to add to nor easy to review.

The two guarantees leak in different places: the Sarvāstivāda's is checkable but not closed, the Theravāda's closed but not checkable. What matters is that neither answers the original question—why exactly these, no more and no fewer. Part 13 argued that the early teaching deliberately refrained from exhaustive enumeration in several places: the five aggregates are not an inventory of existents, the twelve bases are not an ontological catalogue; they are groupings for the practice of insight. Making a list at all is a decision of the Abhidharma, and only once that decision is taken does the question of exhaustiveness arise for the first time—and neither tradition has the tools to answer it.

Appendix: the two lists aligned position by position. The table below aligns by work done, not by nomenclature. For the names see Part I, Part 3, Chapter 2 and Chapters 2 and 3 of Part 14.

Over to Chapter 3. With the table read through, one thing is clear: the heaviest category on the Sarvāstivāda list is the one that least resembles observable phenomena. Most of the items on the table whose dissolubility is at issue are uncontroversial; what really holds the system up are the items that can neither be dissolved nor be seen. Chapter 4 takes them one by one.

Before that, Chapter 3 returns to time. Every slot on this table must have its counterpart in each of the three times—that is exactly what the three words "all exists" govern; and however tidily the table is set out, if existence in the three times will not itself hold, the whole table must be redrawn. Vasubandhu's objection and Saṅghabhadra's defence meet head-on there, and the hardest stretch of argument in this part is Chapter 3.

References¶