Abhidharma

• 1. Introduction

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  Abhidharma is a class of Buddhist texts whose earliest examples date from the 3rd century BCE, and the word itself means, quite literally, "about the dharma." Yet to call it merely a collection of texts undersells what it represents. Bhikkhu Bodhi describes Abhidharma as "an abstract and highly technical systemization of the doctrine" that is "simultaneously a philosophy, a psychology and an ethics, all integrated into the framework of a program for liberation." That is a remarkable ambition for any body of literature. The questions this documentary sets out to explore are: where did Abhidharma come from, what problems was it trying to solve, how did it fracture into competing schools with contradictory conclusions, and why does it remain a living field of study across Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana Buddhism today?

• 2. Lists That Became a Canon

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  Long before there was an Abhidharma, there were lists. Western scholars including André Migot, Erich Frauwallner, Rupert Gethin, and Johannes Bronkhorst have traced the tradition back to early doctrinal compilations called matrikas, a Sanskrit word meaning "matrices" or "mothers." Frauwallner put it plainly: the oldest Buddhist tradition had no Abhidharmapitaka, only matrika. Monks used these lists as memory aids, collecting and preserving the key concepts of the teaching in tightly arranged groupings. Analayo describes the matikas as having served a directly practical purpose, since they supported memorization and oral teaching of the doctrine.

  The Sangiti Sutra, which later became the basis for one of the seven canonical Abhidharma texts of the Sarvastivada school, was built around exactly this kind of recitation exercise. The sutra depicts Shariputra reciting doctrinal terms and declaring that the community will remain "united, unanimous, and in unison" in their teaching by doing so. The Jain community had divided after the death of their leader, and the early Buddhists were evidently determined not to repeat that mistake.

  Frauwallner identified certain basic groupings that appear across early texts as a cluster: the twelve ayatanani, the eighteen dhatavah, and the five skandhah. These were not arbitrary selections. They were the primary frameworks through which Buddhist thinkers organized experience, and the impulse to subsume other doctrinal terms under them was the first step toward what would become Abhidharma proper. The Dasuttara Sutta of the Digha Nikaya contains an early instance of a related method: grouping doctrinal terms by whether they belong to categories like rupa (form) or arupa (formless), saṃskritam (constructed) or asaṃskritam.

• 3. The Scholastic Impulse

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  Peter Harvey has described the Abhidharma method as an attempt "to avoid the inexactitudes of colloquial conventional language, as is sometimes found in the Suttas, and state everything in psycho-philosophically exact language." That drive toward precision had a cumulative effect. As Analayo explains, the beginning of Abhidharma proper was inspired by a desire "to be as comprehensive as possible" and to provide "a complete map of everything in some way related to the path." What started as condensed lists expanded into commentaries, which in turn became inseparable from the lists themselves and eventually gained canonical status.

  Frauwallner dated the period of canonical Abhidharma development to between 250 and 50 BCE. During those two centuries, separate monastic communities in different regions expanded the analytical method in diverging directions. Geographic distance contributed to the divergence, but so did the various schisms that fragmented the early Buddhist Sangha. By the time different communities began writing their canons down, the Abhidharma texts of the Sarvastivada and the Theravada had grown into substantially different works, far more distinct from each other than their respective collections of sutras.

  The Belgian Indologist Étienne Lamotte described Abhidharma as "Doctrine pure and simple, without the intervention of literary development or the presentation of individuals." That austerity was deliberate. The Theravadin and Sarvastivadin Abhidharmikas held that the sutras were "conventional" teachings given by Gautama Buddha to specific people at specific times. The Abhidharma, by contrast, they treated as the pure description of ultimate truth, an expression of perfect spiritual wisdom. They justified including Abhidharma texts in their canon on the grounds that the Buddha had originally taught them to his most eminent disciples. By the 7th century, the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang could collect Abhidharma texts from seven different Buddhist traditions, a sign of how broadly the genre had spread.

• 4. The Dhamma Theory

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  At the center of all Abhidharma systems sits the dhamma theory, which scholars have described as "the base upon which the entire Abhidhamma system rests." The question the theory addresses is deceptively simple: what, at the most fundamental level, makes up experience? The Abhidharmikas answered by positing dhammas, the elementary constituents of experience. Collett Cox translates the term as "factors"; Bronkhorst as "psychic characteristics"; Nyanaponika as "phenomena"; and Noa Ronkin as "psycho-physical events." Each translation captures a different facet.

  The Theravada tradition counted 82 possible types of dhammas; the Sarvastivada eventually enumerated 75. Neither school treated these as independent atoms of experience. Dhammas were always understood as dependently conditioned, arising in "momentary constellations" within a constantly flowing stream. Cittas, or awareness events, were never experienced alone but always accompanied by cetasikas, mental factors. Perception and thought were combinations of multiple dhammas moving together.

  Vasubandhu articulated the underlying logic with precision: "Anything the idea of which does not occur upon division or upon mental analysis, such as an object like a pot, that is a 'conceptual fiction'. The ultimately real is otherwise." A pot disappears when you analyze its parts; a dhamma does not. The Theravada's four main dhamma categories were citta (mind or consciousness), cetasika (mental factors, fifty-two types), rupa (physical occurrences, twenty-eight types), and Nibbana, the one unconditioned dhamma that neither arises nor ceases. The Sarvastivada added a fifth category: factors dissociated from thought.

  The practical aim behind all this categorization was soteriological. Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga argues that not-self does not become apparent because it is concealed by "compactness" when one fails to attend to the elements making up the person. The Abhidharma gave meditators a schema for dismantling that compactness, identifying which dhammas were wholesome and to be cultivated, and which were unwholesome and to be abandoned.

• 5. Disputes on Time and Self

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  One of the sharpest fault lines in Abhidharma thought ran through the philosophy of time. The Sarvastivada school took its name from its central doctrine: "sarvastiva" means "all exists," a claim that dharmas exist in all three times, past, present, and future simultaneously. The Sautrantika, Vibhajyavada, and Theravada schools rejected this, arguing instead for presentism, the view that only the present moment exists. The argument was so central to Buddhist philosophical identity in north India that schools were often named according to their position on it.

  Vasubandhu, who initially wrote in favor of the Sarvastivada and later critiqued it, reported the opposing positions in direct terms. The Sarvastivada-Vaibhashika also held an atomistic theory of time, dividing temporal experience into discrete, indivisible moments called ksana, each lasting only an instant, yet paradoxically existing in all three times. Theravadins accepted momentariness too, but in a less ontological form: they divided each dhamma into three instants of origination, endurance, and cessation, and they limited momentariness to mental events, holding that material events could endure longer.

  A second major dispute concerned personal identity and rebirth. If there is no permanent self, only a stream of aggregates, what exactly undergoes rebirth? The Patthana, the last book of the Pali Abhidhamma, contains the earliest Pali canonical reference to bhavanga, or "life-continuum," defined as that substratum which maintains the continuity of the individual throughout a single life. The Sarvastivadins had a parallel concept called nikayasabhagata. Both anticipate the later Yogacara doctrine of the alayavijnana, or storehouse consciousness.

  A group of schools called the Pudgalavadins, or Personalists, took a more radical step. The Vatsiputriya, Dharmottariya, Bhadrayaniya, Sammitiya, and Shannagarika schools all posited the existence of a real "person" (pudgala) not reducible to streams of dhammas. They borrowed vocabulary from Hindu and Jain traditions, using terms like Atman and Jiva, and placed this self in a fifth category of existence they described as inexpressible. Theravadins, Sarvastivadins, and later Mahayanists thoroughly attacked this position.

• 6. The Texts That Survived

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  In the modern era, only two complete canonical Abhidharma collections have survived: those of the Sarvastivadins and the Theravadins, each consisting of seven books with accompanying commentarial literature. The survival record for other traditions is fragmentary. Sanskrit fragments from the Shariputra Abhidharma Shastra of the Dharmaguptaka school have been found in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, and are now part of the Schøyen Collection. Several Pudgalavada texts survive in Chinese. Many texts brought from India by Xuanzang were never translated into Chinese at all, and many texts discovered among the Gandharan Buddhist manuscripts have no parallel in any surviving language.

  Two post-canonical works from the 5th century stand above all others in influence. Buddhaghosa, a South Indian exegete who moved to Sri Lanka, produced the Visuddhimagga, which remains the central reference work of the Theravada school. Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakoshabhashya, known in English as the Treasury of Higher Knowledge, remains the primary source for Abhidharma studies across Indo-Tibetan and East Asian Buddhism. Both works surpassed the canonical texts they engaged with in their reach and readership.

  The Tattvasiddhi Shastra, attributed to Harivarman, a third-century monk from central India, carved out its own distinctive place in Chinese Buddhism. Translated by Kumarajiva, it eventually generated a separate school, the Chengshi school, founded in 412 CE. That school was transmitted to Japan in 625 CE, where it became known as Jojitsu-shu and is counted among the six great schools of Japanese Buddhism in the Nara period (710-794 CE). Meanwhile, in Myanmar, Abhidhamma study became the primary subject of monastic education from around the 17th century, a tradition associated especially with Ledi Sayadaw (1846-1923), whose commentary on the Abhidhammatthasangaha, called the Paramatthadipanitika, shaped modern Burmese Buddhist scholarship.

• 7. Mahāyāna Transformations

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  The Yogacara tradition, which evolved primarily out of the Sarvastivada Abhidharma, produced its own complete Abhidharma system. Figures including Asanga, Vasubandhu, Sthiramati, Dharmapala, Silabhadra, and Xuanzang engaged with Abhidharma categories while pushing them in new directions. The most significant addition was the theory of eight consciousnesses, including the alayavijnana, which did what bhavanga had done for the Theravadins but within a fully Mahayana metaphysical framework.

  John Keenan, who has translated the Samdhinirmocana Sutra into English, describes the Yogacara project as inheriting a mystical approach from the Prajnaparamita texts while refusing to abandon theoretical Abhidharma. The Yogacarins instead attempted to "construct a critical understanding of the consciousness that underlies all meaning, both mystical and theoretical," focusing on doctrine as it flowed from meditative practice rather than purely from conceptual analysis. Their Abhidharma texts became the foundation for the East Asian Consciousness Only school, known as the Weishi-zong.

  The Prajnaparamita sutras stand in a more ambivalent relationship to Abhidharma. Edward Conze argued that they were partly conceived as a criticism of those Abhidharmikas who treated dharmas as ultimately real. At the same time, the later Prajnaparamita sutras incorporated Abhidharma doctrinal lists directly into their text. Johannes Bronkhorst put the dependence even more bluntly, noting that the Ashtasahasrika Prajnaparamita "only makes sense against the historical background of the Abhidharma." Erich Frauwallner's judgment, offered from a different vantage point, still stands as an apt summary: these Buddhist systems are "among the major achievements of the classical period of Indian philosophy."