Chapter 1. From a place of practice to an academy: the Abhidharma movement¶

Essay 2 concerned the junctures of power: whose memory counted, whose roster was authoritative. This essay turns to a much quieter and more enduring change. In the two or three hundred years after the Buddha's death, the monastic community's central activity gradually moved from practice to scholarship. No edict announced the move and no council voted on it. It happened in the daily schedule: time spent reciting outweighed time spent sitting in meditation, precision of definition outweighed the immediacy of contemplation, and a new type of monk, the scholar, became the monastery's public face. Abhidharma was the chief expression of this relocation. Volume 1 has already explained its doctrines: how matrices expanded into an Abhidharma basket, and how the intrinsic being of dharmas, seeds, and the pudgala each became the basis of a distinct position.¹ This chapter asks only this volume's four questions: What changed? What force was pushing? Who benefited? Who bore the cost?

What changed was the genre, and beneath the genre, the form of activity. A sūtra teaches in response to particular capacities, with an audience, an occasion, and a story. A treatise is a system detached from particular capacities, consisting only of definitions, classifications, and cross-checks. In the passage from sūtra to treatise, the Buddha's teaching first acquired the shape of an "academic discipline." The matrices were its syllabus, the treatises its textbooks, and debate its examination hall.

(This analogy needs an adjustment in light of the data in Part II of Volume 1. Chapter 3 of Essay 16 classifies each of the 289 occurrences of "the assessment is" (评曰) across two hundred fascicles: 195 close with argument, 68 with bare adjudication, 17 follow the format, and 9 invoke sacred teaching. The direction of the decisions favors accounts that make the format more orderly. Order takes precedence over economy. Chapter 4's dispute among the four great masters is a still more direct scene: three positions are rejected and one established, without a single appeal to scripture or transmission. Every appeal is to the consistency of the format. The conclusion is that commentary becomes a system through adjudication because argument cannot accomplish it. The academy's actual standard of success is an orderly format plus adjudicative authority; winning debates is only its public face. This does not weaken the drift of criteria discussed below. It gives the drift a harsher form: the destination is administration, not debate.)

An academic discipline needs things that a place of seated meditation cannot supply: permanent buildings, organized bodies of reciters and collections of books, full-time teachers, and courses measured in years. Settlement happened to be completed in the same period. Temporary rainy-season settlements became permanent monasteries, and monastic property grew from a bowl and three robes to estates and storehouses. Volume 1 recorded doctrines; here the record concerns the material conditions on which they depended.

There are at least three ordinary forces pushing the change, all legitimate. First, the need to adjudicate disputes. With schools established alongside one another and controversies under way, all parties needed more precise tools. The levels of "existence," and how non-self and continuity could both be maintained, could not be argued out clearly without a system. Second, the need to preserve fidelity. Orally transmitted teaching survived through organized memory. Classification and lists were already mnemonic techniques. The compressed form of the matrices preceded any philosophical motive; Volume 1 has established their early appearance. Third, the need to teach. Once the community expanded, the old method of individual transmission from master to disciple could no longer carry the load. A standardized course was the prerequisite of scale. These three forces together suffice to explain why Abhidharma arose.

What they cannot explain is its intensity.

Why did systematization become the monastic community's central undertaking, refined enough to decompose a single moment of mind into forty or fifty components? The number needs room for qualification. The southern tradition has fifty-two mental factors, while the Sarvāstivāda standard list has forty-six. Yet the Abhidharmakośa fixed that forty-six. On the Vibhāṣā side, the names of all five groups are present, but the total has not been fixed; see Volume 1, Part II, Essay 16, Chapter 6. Why did it become so vast that compiling a Mahāvibhāṣā required the legendary five hundred masters?

(The phenomenon requiring explanation must first be reduced. Chapter 1 of Essay 16 in Part II of Volume 1 made an equal-length comparison, taking just over 349,000 characters each from two vernacular renditions by the same translator. With twelve-character windows, the repetition rate was 15.9% in the Vibhāṣā and 1.8% in the Abhidharmakośa; with twenty-character windows, 7.4% against 0.4%. "Likewise" (亦尔) occurred 1,626 times, "four alternatives should be formulated" (应作四句) 312 times, and "furthermore" (复次) 3,625 times. The conclusion is that the book is long because it performs every multiplication its format calls for. It is not complex, because there are only a few multipliers. Bulk is not the quantity of thought. The greater part of the intensity that belongs to the automatic expansion of the format therefore need not be explained by external causes.)

External causes must enter here. Along the line of the monastic economy, settlement and estates made "full-time scholarship" possible for the first time and also made it dependent on recognition by patrons. In seeking support, scholarship has something meditation cannot provide: visibility. Donors can see eloquence on the teaching platform, manuscripts, and lecture halls. They cannot see how far the mind in a meditation room has progressed. Achievements that can be displayed have a natural advantage in attracting support. Over time, the people monasteries are willing to sustain and the people the community takes pride in shift from those who sit to those who lecture. Along the line of population composition, those able to enter this discipline are literate young people with leisure, usually of relatively high birth. The rise of scholarly monks simultaneously changes the community's composition and ethos. The collapse in the density of sages recorded in the Interlude acquires an institutional version here. Sages are hard to reproduce; scholars can be produced. A community no longer confident that it can produce arhats makes what it can produce its new central undertaking.

The “sitter” is the meditator, and “attainment” refers to stages of spiritual attainment. The Chinese image has six arrowheads pointing toward the lecturer; the English image has four and moves the statement about displayable achievement below the two panels. The arrows illustrate the attraction of visible accomplishments to patrons; their number does not measure gifts or the distribution of support.

This is the chapter’s account of an institutional shift in the main activity and the standard of success. It does not reduce the emergence of Abhidharma to fundraising. Chapter 1 first gives three legitimate needs—settling disputes, preserving the teaching, and teaching a larger community—and sets aside the length produced by the texts’ own repetitive format before considering external pressures. Nor does a shift toward scholarship mean that meditation disappeared.

The beneficiaries are easy to list. Monasteries benefit. Scholarship can be accumulated, inherited, and displayed; meditation has none of the three qualities. Scholarly monks benefit. A route of advancement opens that does not depend on attainment. It tests memorization and analysis, which can be examined. By contrast, as the Interlude shows, stages of fruition cannot be examined. The schools benefit. Treatises mark a school's identity; an Abhidharma of one's own marks a school's coming of age.

The rules now require an explicit marker: the following is this volume's conjecture. One force pushing scholasticization comes from outside Buddhism, competition for status. Buddhism began with an anti-Brahmanical approach oriented toward ordinary people. Volume 1 recorded its choice to reject elevated speech and remain close to the vernacular. Yet in a society where Brahmanical scholarly traditions define "what counts as learning," a community without grammar, logic, or systematic scriptures cannot hold its head up among the elite. Abhidharma's form reveals traces of Brahmanical learning taken as a point of reference. Its taxonomic ambition, its fastidiousness about terminology, and its procedures of debate resemble the paths taken by Brahmanical disciplines. Buddhism's later general turn toward Sanskrit, recorded in Volume 1 as a relatively late development, runs in the same direction as this competition.² Nor was the opponent a static tradition waiting for Buddhism to catch up. Pāṇini's grammar came first; Patañjali was contemporary with Abhidharma's maturation; works on dharma and the epics also took shape during the same centuries. The development of disciplines was a competition pursued by both sides at once, and neither side dared stop first.

Here is a conjecture: half the impetus of the Abhidharma movement came from the wish to prove to that learned world which looked down on renunciants that we too have learning, and ours is more rigorous.

(This conjecture must be restricted by stratum. Chapter 5 of Essay 16 comprehensively examined the roster of opponents across two hundred fascicles: Dārṣṭāntikas (譬喻者), 90; "Analysts" (分别论者), 125; "the Venerable" (大德), 161; Vātsīputrīyas, 17; Mahāsāṃghikas, 11. Not a single non-Buddhist school appears on the roster. The family of expressions "in order to refute other schools and display our own meaning" (为止他宗显己义故) occurs 119 times, and those "other schools" all belong to the roster. An outward-facing stance appears only sporadically in explanations of why a doctrine is established. Fascicle 16, for example, declares that the six causes are established "to refute theories of no cause and wrong causes." Systematic confrontation with outsiders only comes in the fourth or fifth century, when Vasubandhu's "Refutation of the Self" directly addresses Vaiśeṣika and Sāṃkhya. Most of the victories in debate cited as corroboration thus come several hundred years later and cannot be read directly back into the Vibhāṣā stratum.)

The corroborating evidence is that many of the achievements Buddhist philosophy subsequently took greatest pride in were precisely victories in external debate. If the earliest treatises show their concerns to have been purely internal, adjudication and teaching, with no outward-facing stance at all, this conjecture does not stand.

The costs fell in two places. The first is the criterion. An academic discipline brings its own standards of excellence: are its definitions precise, its system rigorous, its debates victorious? These standards have no conversion rate into "has suffering ceased?" Yet they can be examined, compared, and accumulated, so they naturally prevail within institutions. Volume 2 diagnosed a trajectory in which the Mahāyāna traditions' criteria drift from cessation toward debate. The historical starting point of that trajectory is not Mahāyāna but here. The moment the community moves its central activity to scholarship, the basis of its system of evaluation has already changed. The second cost concerns the map. The Interlude said that the map expands as the territory shrinks. Abhidharma draws the path and its fruits in unprecedented detail, and precision of mapping happens to take the place of reports from the journey. The charge of decline cannot be attached to a particular person here. An institution has taken what it can do well to the utmost, and what it can do well happens no longer to be what it was originally founded to do.

The academy has been established. It is expensive, and someone must pay for it. The next chapter brings royal power onto the scene.

References¶