Chapter 6: Mental Factors and Association¶

Mind is one; the mental factors are a crowd. Fascicle forty-two of the Mahāvibhāṣā arranges the crowd into seven categories: the great grounds, the grounds of the universally defiled, the grounds of the limited defilements, the grounds of the universally wholesome, the grounds of the universally unwholesome, the grounds of the universally obscured-neutral, and the grounds of the universally unobscured-neutral. The familiar five categories plus the indeterminate is the figure the Kośa settled on later, the last two categories struck out and the grounds of the universally unwholesome cut from five members to two. This classification is the finest exhibit of the Mahāvibhāṣā's powers of classification, and the most thoroughly systematic block of the doctrine Part 15 had no room for. This chapter looks at the list itself; then at the relation that binds the members of the list together, association; and at the end takes one glance across at the Theravāda's fifty-two mental factors from Part 14.

The list of the seven categories and where it came from. The names of the categories are settled words already in the two hundred fascicles: the great grounds sixty-four times, the ten great grounds eight, the grounds of the universally wholesome thirty, the grounds of the universally defiled fourteen, the grounds of the universally unwholesome four, the grounds of the limited defilements six.¹ The ground in question is mind: feeling, perception, intention, contact, desire, attention, resolve, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment—whenever mind arises these ten arise with it without fail, which is why they are called dharmas of the great grounds, the ten items that pervade every mind. As for where the name came from, fascicle sixteen carries an exchange of the utmost brevity: question, why are they called mental factors? Answer, because they are what mind has.¹ A mental factor is a thing that mind has, and the name points back exactly one step. That step does the classificatory work no harm whatever (one category is marked off from the next perfectly clearly), but on the way of reading laid down in Chapter 1 the machine is already visible here: the cells come first, and the question of what entitles a cell to its name is disposed of by a sentence that turns in a circle.

The four categories come from the Prakaraṇapāda. The Prakaraṇapāda, in its chapter on the seven topics, had already opened four categories of ten members each: the great grounds, being feeling, perception, intention, contact, attention, desire, resolve, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment; the grounds of the universally wholesome, being faith, energy, shame, embarrassment, non-greed, non-hatred, pliancy, equanimity, diligence, and non-harming; the grounds of the universally defiled, being lack of faith, indolence, forgetfulness, distraction, ignorance, lack of right knowing, improper attention, wrong resolve, restlessness, and heedlessness; the grounds of the limited defilements, being anger, enmity, concealment, vexation, envy, avarice, deceit, dissembling, haughtiness, and harming.² Collated item by item against fascicle forty-two of the Mahāvibhāṣā, the membership of the four categories comes out with nothing added and nothing missing, and the divergences are lexical only: three items (concentration, energy, and the lapse of mindfulness) carry a variant rendering in the one text against the other. The order, on the other hand, was moved. The grounds of the universally wholesome keep all ten places unaltered; the great grounds exchange attention and desire; the grounds of the limited defilements are altered in five places, the grounds of the universally defiled in seven. What the alteration in the grounds of the universally defiled was for stands written in the sentence immediately following. The Mahāvibhāṣā promotes lack of faith, indolence, heedlessness, restlessness, and ignorance to the first five places, presses the lapse of mindfulness, lack of right knowing, distraction, improper attention, and wrong resolve into the last five, and then delivers its ruling: these two categories of great grounds are twenty in name and only fifteen in substance, each of the last five being the defiled face of a member of the great grounds, the lapse of mindfulness being mindfulness, lack of right knowing discernment, distraction concentration, improper attention attention, and wrong resolve resolve.¹ The names were taken over intact and the order was rearranged, and the rearrangement clears exactly the places this piece of subtraction needs.

Three categories are the Mahāvibhāṣā's own addition, and so are the names of the categories. The last three categories are nowhere to be found in the eighteen fascicles of the Prakaraṇapāda: the grounds of the universally unwholesome, the grounds of the universally obscured-neutral, and the grounds of the universally unobscured-neutral, all three names appearing only in fascicle forty-two of the Mahāvibhāṣā. Lack of shame and lack of embarrassment do not make a category on the Prakaraṇapāda's side; they stand there in a list of five dharmas alongside applied thought, sustained thought, and consciousness.² The Mahāvibhāṣā set up the grounds of the universally unwholesome and then stretched them to five members, torpor and restlessness entering because their force in obstructing calm and insight is strong, ignorance entering because it is associated with every unwholesome mind.¹ The line of descent can therefore be stated: four categories taken over, two of them rearranged, three added. A layer further back, in the twenty fascicles of the Jñānaprasthāna, the root treatise the Mahāvibhāṣā comments on, the word "grounds" does not occur once. Fascicle one, treating the six causes, merely lists the ten items one after another under the associated cause, feeling, perception, intention, contact, attention, desire, resolve, mindfulness, concentration, discernment, and gives them no collective name.³ The phrase "the ten dharmas of the great grounds" was supplied by the Mahāvibhāṣā at fascicle sixteen, in the course of commenting on that very sentence.¹ Each of the three layers performed one operation: the Jñānaprasthāna furnished the items, the Prakaraṇapāda furnished the names of the categories, and the Mahāvibhāṣā added categories and consolidated substances.

The senses of association. The relation binding mind to the mental factors is called association. Fascicle sixteen asks why mind and mental factors are reciprocally the associated cause, and the answer runs six reciprocals in a row: because they are cause to one another, because they arise by one another's force, because they draw one another on, because they nourish one another, because they increase one another, because they depend on one another. There follow at once the famous similes (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), closed with the sentence that conditioned dharmas are feeble in nature and accomplish their work only by depending on one another in turn.¹ The same passage carries a further question: feeling, could you receive an object apart from perception? The answer given is that it could not; and the remaining mind and mental factors are questioned in the same way.¹ Every factor in turn is hauled up and asked whether it can get its work done without the others, the answer is uniformly that it cannot, and then a single "likewise" is laid over the whole column. The substance of association is said out in these few lines: dharmas are too weak, no single one of them brings anything off, and they must arise together in a group and take one object together. What deserves notice is that what the Sarvāstivāda posits for this relation is the associated cause, a kind of cause, and not a dharma named association on the list: the relation has been filed away in the drawer marked cause. Chapter 5 of Part 15 treated that maneuver head-on—the burden of relating is shifted off the entries and onto time; this chapter supplies only the shape the original text takes on the Mahāvibhāṣā's side.

Aggregation in fascicle one hundred ninety-seven: a functional definition of relation. Chapter 6 of Part 15 recorded that fascicle one hundred ninety-seven splits aggregation into two senses: to arise together and not be separable is aggregation; not to conflict and to accomplish one task together is aggregation.¹ The second sense is precisely what the three similes of association are saying: not conflicting, accomplishing one task together. This shows that the Mahāvibhāṣā did have in hand a purely functional conception of relation—several things fall in together and get one job done, and no further entity need be posited. It uses that conception fluently while treating contact and while treating aggregation. But here, at mind and mental factors, accomplishing one task together is set up as the associated cause; and at possession, belonging is set up as a real dharma. The functional formulation was manufactured and then left unused at the point where it counted. This is one more specimen of the mechanism Chapter 2, section fourteen calls instruments built and never used.

The comparison with the Theravāda. The Theravāda has fifty-two mental factors; the Sarvāstivāda's settled figure is forty-six, sealed in the Kośa, while on the Mahāvibhāṣā's side the names of the seven categories are all present and no total has been sealed.⁴ The two lists are grouped on different principles. The Theravāda groups by whether a factor is universal to every consciousness and by whether it is beautiful; the Sarvāstivāda groups by ground, and the ground is wholesome, or defiled, or unwholesome. Yet each side has one group that answers exactly to the other's: the Theravāda's seven universal factors and the Sarvāstivāda's ten great grounds are asking the same question, namely which factors accompany every mind without exception. Seven names against ten; what overlaps is the backbone of feeling, perception, intention, contact, and attention, while the surplus on the one side and the shortfall on the other each have a history of their own. Collating them item by item is the work of a table, and this chapter takes only the skeleton. The real difference was fixed in Part 14: Theravāda classification serves the registering done in insight meditation, Sarvāstivāda classification serves the completeness of the enumeration of dharmas. One and the same instrument, taken up by the two schools for different work.

It is handed on to Chapter 7. The factors having been laid out, the most consequential family among them comes next. In this system the defilements are called the latent defilements, and whether the latent defilements are associated with mind or dissociated from it is the great divide between the Mahāvibhāṣā and the Vibhajyavādins.

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