Chapter 2: The seventy-five dharmas, another list¶

Chapter 1 handed over two distinctions: substance from activity, and the real from the nominal. Their weight becomes apparent only when applied to things. They are applied here to Sarvāstivāda's list of dharmas. Chapter 2 of Essay 3 in Part I already listed all seventy-five dharmas in five categories. This chapter does not repeat the list. It asks how the table was arranged, what that arrangement itself claims, and what gives it the confidence to declare itself complete.

Chapters 2 and 3 of Essay 14 examined the mental and material items among the Southern tradition's eighty-two dhammas, category by category. Put the two lists together, and the easiest comparison is numerical. Eighty-two and seventy-five differ by seven, the least informative number of all. The differences are spread across five categories and run in opposite directions; only after the additions and subtractions cancel does this small number remain. What matters is what enters and leaves each category, and where the two traditions place the same job.

First, the table itself came later. "Seventy-five dharmas in five categories" does not appear in the Mahāvibhāṣā. Across its 200 fascicles, seventy-five never appears as a count of dharmas, nor is the term "five categories" used as a heading for classification. The Vibhāṣā still discusses dharmas through the old frameworks of the sūtras: aggregates, bases, and elements. It assigns collections of names, phrases, and syllables to the dissociated formations within the formations aggregate. They occupy a portion of that aggregate, not a category parallel to matter and mind.¹

The five-category arrangement was settled in the Kośa. Vasubandhu gathered judgments scattered through the Vibhāṣā's 200 fascicles into a table: eleven material dharmas, one mind, forty-six mental factors, fourteen formations dissociated from mind (citta-viprayukta-saṃskāra), and three unconditioned dharmas, making seventy-five. The table became Sarvāstivāda's calling card in Chinese Buddhism. Yet it is an organized version of the school's doctrines, not those doctrines themselves.²

The Southern tradition is in the same position. The count of eighty-two dhammas comes from the Abhidhammatthasaṅgaha, the work of Anuruddha in the eleventh century; the seven treatises themselves do not list them this way.³ Both lists are late consolidations of their traditions, each arranged for earlier thinkers by a skillful organizer. What this essay compares are two acts of organization, not the entirety of either tradition. Unless we make this clear at the outset, every later difference may be assigned the wrong origin.

The tables can still be compared. Organized accounts are worth reading precisely because their compilers have to choose what to merge into one compartment, what to split into two, and what to give no compartment at all. The choices are written plainly in the tables and are easier to see than judgments scattered through the treatises. These choices are what this chapter will read.

The difference between the lists does not fall in one place. First, the numbers.

Seventeen plus six, minus fourteen, minus two, is exactly seven. Four differences run in different directions; only after they cancel do we get the small total. Looking only at the totals suggests that the lists are largely alike. Looking by category, the largest difference is in matter, the second in formations dissociated from mind, and the two run in opposite directions.

More crucially, those seventeen items have not simply vanished. Four characteristics of matter in the Southern tradition, accumulation, continuity, aging, and impermanence, govern matter's arising, ceasing, and change. Sarvāstivāda moves the same job into formations dissociated from mind, establishing the four characteristics of arising, abiding, alteration, and cessation to govern all conditioned dharmas, not just matter. The Southern tradition's material life faculty sustains the material body, while another life faculty among the mental factors sustains mental dhammas. Each side has its own. Sarvāstivāda establishes only one life faculty, places it among formations dissociated from mind, and has it govern both sides.³ Both traditions do the same necessary job, but put its compartment in a different category. A comparison of this kind has content; addition and subtraction do not.

The following sections proceed by category, in the order of the Kośa, from material dharmas to the unconditioned.

With only eleven material dharmas, the criterion has already exposed its basis. Sarvāstivāda's material dharmas comprise the five faculties (eye, ear, nose, tongue, and body), the five objects (visible form, sound, smell, taste, and tangibility), and nonmanifest material form, making eleven. Chapter 3 of Essay 14 examined the Southern tradition's twenty-eight kinds of matter individually. This chapter does not repeat them; it adds only Sarvāstivāda's reasons for establishing its items.³

Sarvāstivāda's reasoning is plain. The five faculties and five objects are the ten material bases among the twelve bases, names already given in the sūtras and needing no separate justification. These ten can be analyzed down to atoms and survive analysis, so they count as real under Chapter 1's criterion. Besides nine items corresponding to these, the Southern tradition establishes nineteen further kinds of matter. Sarvāstivāda accepts none as a separate item. The four great elements enter the tangible-object base. Hardness, wetness, warmth, and motion are themselves what is touched and receive no four separate compartments. The two kinds of sex matter enter the body faculty; nutritive matter enters smell, taste, and tangibility. Sarvāstivāda has no use for the heart base, because its mind faculty is the mind that has just ceased, belonging to mind rather than matter. Delimiting matter is the space between material groups. Sarvāstivāda calls it the space element and classifies it as visible, resistant matter within the visible-form base, without establishing a separate dharma. The three kinds of mutable matter, lightness, malleability, and wieldiness, are states of material dharmas, not constituents that can be separately isolated by analysis. The four characteristics of matter mark its arising and ceasing; Sarvāstivāda makes other arrangements for them. As for the two kinds of intimation matter, bodily and verbal, Sarvāstivāda recognizes bodily and verbal expression but attaches this business to karma; what it establishes is nonmanifest material form.¹

The Southern tradition therefore has nine plus nineteen, giving twenty-eight. Sarvāstivāda has ten plus one, giving eleven, a difference of seventeen. The additional one on Sarvāstivāda's side is nonmanifest material form.

Nonmanifest material form (avijñapti-rūpa) is unique to Sarvāstivāda, with no Southern counterpart. It is a kind of matter that remains with a person after taking precepts or performing karma, without becoming outwardly manifest. It explains why the substance of the precepts persists after they are taken and why karma remains attached after the deed. What establishes this item is not survival under analysis, but the fact that without it the matter cannot be explained. Chapter 1 said that the first question would be what criterion establishes an item as real. Here is the first exception, in the very category that looks most like phenomena.⁴

The criterion's use in two directions deserves a separate word. The same criterion bars nineteen items from material dharmas and admits fourteen among formations dissociated from mind. Those barred are said not to be constituents that can be separately isolated by analysis; those admitted are said to be necessary if something is to make sense. These are two reasons, not one. Applied consistently, the first would abolish the entire category of formations dissociated from mind; applied consistently, the second would give no reason to exclude mutable matter or the characteristics of matter. The table has seventeen fewer items of matter than the Southern tradition and fourteen more formations dissociated from mind precisely because different criteria are used in the two places.

There is only one mind. Sarvāstivāda's mind category lists only one dharma: mind. The Southern tradition likewise has only one ultimate dhamma of mind, expanded into eighty-nine or 121 according to its objects, realms and planes, and associated mental factors.³ The two traditions are closest here, and their closeness shows that where particular differences are placed is itself a claim.

Sarvāstivāda assigns all the differences to mental factors. Mind itself has no types. The distinction between wholesome and unwholesome mind lies not in mind but in its associated mental factors. Mind simply cognizes; the nature of that cognition is determined by the mental factors accompanying it. The Southern tradition's divisions look different but follow the same principle. Its eighty-nine minds are still classified by associated mental factors and by realms and planes. The difference is that the Southern tradition writes each combination into the table under a fixed name, while Sarvāstivāda does not.

The Vibhāṣā preserves an interesting discussion here. The sūtras use three names: mind, mentation, and consciousness. Is there a difference among them? One view says no: mind is mentation, and mentation is consciousness. Their sounds differ, but their substance does not. It is like fire, also called flame or blaze: one fire with ten names, different names but no difference in substance. Another view says there are differences in name, time, designation, and meaning. In the past it is called mentation, in the future mind, and in the present consciousness. Within the elements it is designated mind, within the bases mentation, and within the aggregates consciousness. Mind means lineage, mentation means a door of arising, and consciousness means accumulation.¹

Notice the route taken by the second view. It gives four differences, none of which falls on the substance of mind itself. A difference in name concerns what it is called; a difference in time concerns its temporal position; a difference in designation concerns which framework contains it; a difference in meaning concerns the aspect by which it is identified. Even those who affirm a difference do not say there are several kinds of mind, only that the same thing can be identified from several directions. The position that mind is one is thus secured. Whichever view is chosen, there is only one mind, and all the work of individuation is passed elsewhere.

The cost of passing it elsewhere appears in the next section. If mind has no types of its own, whether it is wholesome or unwholesome, contaminated or uncontaminated, depends entirely on its associated mental factors. Mental factors are then more than accessories to mind. They bear the differences among its types. How the forty-six are grouped is therefore no mere detail in arranging a list. It is a claim about how mind is constituted.

Mental factors fall into six groups, and the grouping itself is a claim. Sarvāstivāda's forty-six mental factors form six groups: ten factors of the great ground, ten of the great wholesome ground, six of the great afflicted ground, two of the great unwholesome ground, ten of the ground of minor afflictions, and eight indeterminate factors. The Southern tradition's fifty-two are not divided this way. They are ordered as universal, occasional, unwholesome, and wholesome: seven factors common to every mind, six occasional factors, fourteen unwholesome factors, and twenty-five wholesome factors.³ Comparing individual entries yields little. What can be compared is the basis of the grouping.

First consider "ground" (地). Fascicle 16 of the Vibhāṣā gives three readings. In one, "great" means mind, and these ten dharmas are where mind arises: they are the ground of the great, hence "great ground." In another, mind is called great because it is outstanding in substance and activity. The great is itself the ground, the support of the mental factors. In a third, the ten dharmas, feeling and the rest, are called great because they extend through all types of mind, and mind is their ground; hence "great ground."¹ The disagreement concerns whether "great" denotes mind or the ten dharmas. But all three readings take ground to mean a field, the surface on which activity occurs. If this word groups the factors, the grouping specifies the range in which each group operates.

Next, how is that range determined? The Vibhāṣā asks why only ten factors of the great ground are listed. Its first answer uses one of the Vibhāṣā's stock phrases, "the author of the treatise intended it so," to be treated separately in Essay 16.¹ Here, however, the discussion continues after that answer and gives a substantive criterion. A dharma belongs to this group if it is found in all realms, all planes, all destinies, all modes of birth, all kinds, and all minds. Six "alls" side by side make a procedure that can be checked, not a matter settled by saying "because that was the intention."

The six group names now have content. Factors of the great ground are universal without qualification; factors of the great wholesome ground occur in all wholesome minds; those of the great afflicted ground in all defiled minds; those of the great unwholesome ground in all unwholesome minds. Factors of the ground of minor afflictions arise separately, while the indeterminate factors fit none of the preceding compartments. The basis of grouping is the range of universality, ordered from widest to narrowest, with a final compartment to take in what remains. The table is arranged by coverage.

The Southern tradition uses a different basis. Its seven universal and six occasional mental factors are divided according to whether they are universal; this portion follows the same principle as Sarvāstivāda. But its fourteen unwholesome and twenty-five wholesome factors are divided by ethical nature, independently of coverage. The two traditions share a principle in the first half and part ways in the second. Sarvāstivāda separates the factors universal to wholesome, defiled, and unwholesome minds into groups, still counting coverage. The Southern tradition orders directly by nature and leaves coverage to the tables of mental-factor combinations for each mind.

Another statement in the same fascicle should be recorded. The Vibhāṣā explains why mental factors must arise in association with mind: conditioned dharmas are weak by nature and must depend on one another to accomplish anything. Three analogies follow: two bundles of reeds standing against one another, several ropes together able to pull a large log, and many people joining hands to cross a great river.¹ The move stops the inquiry. Why can mental factors not arise alone? Because conditioned dharmas are weak by nature, too weak to do without companions. Why their nature is weak is not asked further. Chapter 1 encountered the same ending with substance and activity, an analogy followed by no need to ask again. Here it occurs a second time, the same shape in another place. We will meet it several more times, and Chapter 7 will compare the instances together.

Formations dissociated from mind are the focus of this category and of the chapter. Sarvāstivāda establishes fourteen such dharmas: acquisition, nonacquisition, group homogeneity, the fruit of nonperception, the attainment of nonperception, the attainment of cessation, the life faculty, arising, abiding, alteration, cessation, and collections of names, phrases, and syllables. The Southern tradition has no such category. Among its eighty-two dhammas, a dhamma is mind, a mental factor, matter, or nibbāna; there is no fifth possibility. Sarvāstivāda's fourteen additional items make the largest structural difference between the lists.³

Grouped by their jobs, the fourteen dharmas fall into three bundles.

The first bundle concerns attachment: acquisition (prāpti) and nonacquisition. They answer the question of what allows us to say that a dharma belongs to a person. Afflictions are cut off and arise again; the noble path is acquired and lost. For these statements to hold, something must attach a dharma to a continuum, and something must account for the state in which it is not yet attached.

The second bundle concerns kinds and the limits of life: group homogeneity, the life faculty, the fruit of nonperception, the attainment of nonperception, and the attainment of cessation. Group homogeneity explains how sentient beings can be divided into kinds; the life faculty explains what sustains a life for a determinate span; the fruit of nonperception and the two attainments explain why we can still say that a continuum is unbroken during the interval in which mind does not arise.

The third bundle concerns temporal characteristics and linguistic expression: arising, abiding, alteration, cessation, and collections of names, phrases, and syllables. The four characteristics account for conditioned dharmas' passage through time; the three collections account for the units of linguistic expression.

The jobs differ, but their character is the same. Not one of these fourteen items is an observed phenomenon. Acquisition is not something that can be perceived; group homogeneity is not an object one can point to; the four characteristics are beyond the reach of eye and ear; collections of names, phrases, and syllables are not sounds themselves. They are all positions established to make other things intelligible. Of the three sources of Abhidharma entries described in Chapter 1, this entire category belongs to the third: additions that allow the system of notation itself to stand.⁵

The Vibhāṣā itself states the point. Fascicle 14 asks why a discussion of collections of names, phrases, and syllables should be established. As usual, the first answer is "because that was the author's intention." The second gives the real reason: "to refute other schools and display our own meaning." Some, such as the Dārṣṭāntikas, hold that collections of names, phrases, and syllables are not really existing dharmas. Others, such as the theorists of sound, hold that they have sound as their own substance. The discussion is established to refute both and display the school's own position: collections of names and the rest are real dharmas, included among the dissociated formations within the formations aggregate.¹ The motive for establishing the dharma is in plain view. The starting point for declaring this item real was the need to defeat two opponents.

Apply Chapter 1's three questions to this category, and the results are almost glaringly uniform. First, what criterion establishes the items as real? None rests on surviving analysis; all rest on the fact that without them something cannot be explained. Second, what would be lost without them? Without the first bundle, attachment between karma and fruit; without the second, the coherence of a continuum; without the third, the temporal structure of conditioned dharmas and the reality of language. Third, what does establishing them cost? Each new item requires another question about how the item itself is to be handled. Must acquisition itself have acquisition? Must the four characteristics themselves have characteristics? Both questions are raised in the Vibhāṣā, and Chapter 4 will treat them in turn.

The cost of the Southern tradition's absence of this category is equally plain. The attachment of karma and fruit, the coherence of a continuum, and the units of language are explained either through arrangements of cognitive processes and mental factors or left as relations of conditioning, without being made into entities. Chapter 7 of Essay 14 called this compartment empty. Empty means it establishes no dhammas, not that it has no problems. Sarvāstivāda turns all these problems into entities, at the cost of an entire category of unobservable things on its list. The Southern tradition does not, at the cost of leaving several accounts at the descriptive level without supplying a warrant. Each takes its own route. Chapter 7's judgment will fall here.

Two more unconditioned dharmas. Sarvāstivāda establishes space, cessation through discernment, and cessation without discernment as three unconditioned dharmas. The Southern tradition has only nibbāna.³ The two additions each have an origin and a difficulty.

Cessation without discernment is a cessation attained without discerning wisdom. Fascicle 32 of the Vibhāṣā defines it through this very negation. Because this cessation is not attained through discerning wisdom, it is called cessation without discernment, the fruit of nondiscernment. How, then, is it attained? The answer is through the absence of conditions. When one faces one direction, the visible forms, sounds, smells, tastes, and tangible objects in the other directions pass away. The minds and mental factors that could have taken them as objects never arise, because their conditions are incomplete. Through this nonarising, cessation without discernment is attained.¹ The definition concerns what will never arise, not what has already ceased. The adjudication in the same fascicle states more strictly that this cessation applies only to future dharmas that will never arise.

The reason for establishing it is of the same kind as for formations dissociated from mind. Without it, there would be no place for the situation in which something will never happen. The "never will" must itself have a status. Yet it brings more trouble than it resolves. The same fascicle compares the number of cessations through discernment with those without discernment and concludes that the latter are more numerous: cessations without discernment number as many as conditioned dharmas, while cessations through discernment number only as many as contaminated dharmas.¹ That an unconditioned dharma must be counted according to the number of conditioned dharmas lets slip its true situation. More troubling still, cessation without discernment (apratisaṃkhyā-nirodha) is attached to a continuum through acquisition, an item among formations dissociated from mind. An unconditioned dharma needs a conditioned dharma to enter into a relation with a person.²

Space is the most easily refuted of the three unconditioned dharmas. Fascicle 75 of the Vibhāṣā clearly distinguishes space from the space element: space is not matter, the space element is; space is invisible, the space element visible; space is nonresistant, the space element resistant; space is uncontaminated, the space element contaminated; space is unconditioned, the space element conditioned. Five contrasts place unconditioned space on one side and conditioned gaps on the other.¹

The distinction needs to be so clear because the word does not behave as required in the sūtras. The same passage poses a problem. A sūtra says that the Blessed One stroked space with his hand while addressing the monks. Could the Buddha have stroked an unconditioned dharma? The answer is that it refers to the space element, merely using the word "space." The same fascicle also has an analogy of a painter painting space in colors and a verse saying that beasts return to woods and thickets, birds to space.¹ In all these examples, "space" denotes gaps that can be seen and touched. Sarvāstivāda's procedure is to assign every such use in the sūtras to the space element, leaving only its own defined space (ākāśa) as unconditioned. The procedure follows the same route as the treatment of "all" in Chapter 1. The sūtras' word is first taken over, then its uses are reassigned.

Space has further difficulties. In distinguishing the three ethical natures, fascicle 77 of the Vibhāṣā states that wholesome dharmas are the wholesome five aggregates and cessation through discernment; unwholesome dharmas are the unwholesome five aggregates; and indeterminate dharmas are the indeterminate five aggregates, space, and cessation without discernment.¹ The three unconditioned dharmas part company here: cessation through discernment is wholesome, while space and cessation without discernment are indeterminate. An unconditioned dharma established as real is ethically indeterminate, does nothing by way of activity, and has no content to its existence beyond not obstructing the arising of matter. Vasubandhu already challenges this in Chapter 1 of the Kośa. Nonobstruction is a negative expression. If the entire content of a thing is that it does not obstruct other things, what makes it really exist?²

Here readers first encounter the Kośa's double identity. It is the fullest organized account of Sarvāstivāda doctrine, giving us the table of seventy-five dharmas in five categories. It is also the doctrine's most unsparing critic, directly refuting the real existence of space. Both are the work of the same pen. This book sees no contradiction. Vasubandhu organized the doctrines while testing them, putting Sarvāstivāda's claims in order to see which could stand. The dispute over real existence in the three times in Chapter 3 is this pen's second attack, and it strikes much harder.

What entitles the table to count as complete? After all the categories, one general question remains. Is seventy-five an exhaustive count? What guarantee does Sarvāstivāda offer that nothing has been omitted?

Sarvāstivāda's answer is procedural. The criterion is explicit: what survives analysis is real. Whenever someone proposes a new candidate, test it by the criterion. The strength of this answer is its openness to additions and to checking. Passages establishing dharmas in the Vibhāṣā often follow this form: someone holds that a certain thing is not real; this discussion is established to refute that view; the thing is a real dharma. The list grows one item at a time through debate.

The weakness lies in the same place. An open list can never declare itself complete; it can say only that it has not been refuted so far. What actually happens is that each addition creates another point needing explanation, and that point requires a further addition. Chapter 1 described this chain; Chapter 7 will finish drawing it.

The Southern tradition offers a different guarantee. The names of its eighty-two dhammas come from tradition, from the format of the Visuddhimagga and the organization of the seven treatises. It gives no procedure that can be checked, saying only that these are the items actually accessible to direct contemplative observation in insight practice. The answer is closed, difficult to supplement and difficult to check.

The guarantees leak in different places. Sarvāstivāda's can be checked but is not closed; the Southern tradition's is closed but cannot be checked. Neither answers the crucial original question. Why precisely these, no more and no fewer? Essay 13 noted that the early teaching deliberately declined to be exhaustive in certain places. The five aggregates are not a list of existing things, nor are the twelve bases an ontological catalogue. They are groupings for insight practice. Turning them into lists was a decision of Abhidharma. Only after that decision did the problem of exhaustiveness first arise, and neither tradition had the tools to answer it.

Supplementary table: the two lists compared by category. The following table aligns jobs, not names. For the names, see Chapter 2 of Essay 3 in Part I and Chapters 2 and 3 of Essay 14.

To Chapter 3. The table makes clear that the category bearing the greatest weight on Sarvāstivāda's list is the least like phenomena. Most items that do or do not dissolve are uncontroversial. What truly supports the system is what neither dissolves under analysis nor can be seen. Chapter 4 will treat these items one by one.

Before that, Chapter 3 returns to time. Every compartment in the table must have an instance in each of the three times. This is precisely what the three Chinese characters of "all exists" (一切有) govern. However neatly arranged the table, if real existence in the three times cannot stand, the whole table must be rearranged. Vasubandhu's challenges and Saṅghabhadra's defense meet head on there. Chapter 3 contains the essay's toughest argument.

References¶