What the Abhidhamma is
The Pāli canon is divided into three collections. The Vinaya Piṭaka contains the monastic discipline. The Sutta Piṭaka contains the discourses, in which the Buddha addresses particular people in particular places. The Abhidhamma Piṭaka contains seven books in which the same teaching is set out without persons, places or occasions, in a fixed technical vocabulary, and with every term defined in relation to every other.
The prefix abhi- can mean ‘higher’ or simply ‘concerning’. The tradition takes both senses: the Abhidhamma is the teaching about the teaching, and it is regarded as the more precise statement of it. Its subject matter is not different from that of the discourses. Its method is.
The seven books
The Abhidhamma Piṭaka is not a treatise and does not read like one. It consists of:
| 1 | Dhammasaṅgaṇī “Enumeration of States” | Sets out a matrix (mātikā) of classificatory pairs and triads, and applies it to states of consciousness and to matter. |
| 2 | Vibhaṅga “Analysis” | Analyses eighteen topics — aggregates, sense bases, elements, truths, faculties and others — by three successive methods. |
| 3 | Dhātukathā “Discussion of Elements” | Cross-classifies the terms of the system: for each item, which categories include it and which do not. |
| 4 | Puggalapaññatti “Designation of Persons” | Classifies types of person. It is the least characteristic of the seven and the closest in style to the discourses. |
| 5 | Kathāvatthu “Points of Controversy” | A record of doctrinal disputes with other early schools, arranged as debates. Attributed by the tradition to Moggaliputta Tissa at the Third Council. |
| 6 | Yamaka “Pairs” | Tests the consistency of definitions by putting each question in both directions. |
| 7 | Paṭṭhāna “Conditional Relations” | Sets out twenty-four modes of conditionality and applies them exhaustively to the categories of the system. It is by far the longest of the seven. |
The two operations
The system works by two operations, and both are needed.
The first is analysis: resolving what appears to be a single thing — a person, an object, a moment of experience — into the constituents that are actually present. The result is an inventory of items that cannot be resolved further. These are the dhammas.
The second is synthesis: showing how those constituents condition one another. This is the work of the seventh book. Without it the analysis would leave a collection of separate items; with it, no item can be described except by describing what it depends on.
Chapters I to IV set out the analysis, and chapters V and VI the synthesis. Chapters VII and VIII apply both to the two questions the system was built to answer: what happens at death, and how the process is brought to an end. Chapter IX describes how the account reached the form given here, and chapter X asks which of its claims can be tested.
Two levels of description
The Abhidhamma distinguishes two ways of describing the same thing, and holds that both are legitimate. This distinction is the starting point of the system, and most misunderstandings of it come from collapsing the two levels into one.
This description contains one person, one kitchen, one apple, one continuous stretch of time, and one decision.
Every element of it is a designation. None of them is denied by the second description, and nothing in the Abhidhamma suggests that this way of speaking should be abandoned. The canon itself uses it throughout, including in the book that classifies persons.
This description contains no person, no kitchen and no apple, because none of those is among the items it admits. It contains only dhammas and their relations.
It is not a more accurate report of the same objects. It is a description in which those objects do not appear, because they have been resolved into what was present instead.
What ‘ultimate’ means here
The word paramattha is often read as ‘more real’, which is not what the texts claim. A dhamma is called ultimate because it is not analysable into anything further, and because it can be described without reference to a whole. The apple is not an illusion; it is a designation for an arrangement of dhammas, and the designation does real work.
The standard illustration is older than the Abhidhamma. In the discourses the nun Vajirā says that just as the word ‘chariot’ is used when parts are assembled, so the word ‘being’ is used when the aggregates are present. The Milindapañha later expands the same figure at length. The point in both is that the term is neither identical with the parts nor something additional to them.
The programme of the Abhidhamma follows directly from this distinction. If conventional description is composed of designations, and if designations can be resolved, then it should be possible to state exhaustively what remains once the resolution is complete. Chapters II and III are that statement.
The dhamma
A dhamma is an item that survives analysis. The commentarial definition is that a dhamma is what bears its own characteristic: it can be told apart from other dhammas because something is true of it that is not true of them.
Four properties follow from the way the system is constructed, and all four are needed to understand what is meant.
A dhamma is not a substance. The term used for its distinguishing mark is sabhāva, conventionally translated ‘own-nature’. In the commentaries it means that a dhamma has a characteristic of its own by which it is identified. It does not mean that it exists independently, and the seventh canonical book is devoted to showing that it does not. The question of whether the term nevertheless carries more weight than intended is discussed in chapter IX.
A dhamma is momentary. It arises, is present, and dissolves. There is no further phase in which it simply persists. Consciousness lasts one such moment; material dhammas last seventeen consecutive moments of consciousness, a difference of duration on which chapter V depends.
A dhamma never arises alone. Mental dhammas arise in clusters, material dhammas in groups of at least eight. Isolation is not a state in which any dhamma is ever found.
A dhamma is defined by what it does, not by what it is. The commentaries identify each one by answering four questions, none of which asks after its nature.
The four questions, applied to a selection of dhammas. Each answer is from the Visuddhimagga and the Aṭṭhasālinī; where the texts use a simile, it is kept.
Why the definition takes this form
The four questions are: what marks it out (lakkhaṇa), what work it does (rasa), how it presents itself to one who examines it (paccupaṭṭhāna), and what must be present for it to occur (padaṭṭhāna). A dhamma is fully specified when these are answered.
Nothing in the method asks what the dhamma is in itself, and no answer to that question is given anywhere in the literature. This is consistent with the position stated above: a dhamma is a describable occurrence, not a thing that occurs. The fourth question is the one that connects it to the rest of the system, since it names the condition without which the dhamma does not arise.
One dhamma has no answer to the fourth question. Nibbāna is not produced, so nothing stands behind it; and since it is not produced it also does not cease, which is what distinguishes it from the other eighty-one.
The four categories
All dhammas fall into four categories: consciousness (citta), mental factors (cetasika), materiality (rūpa), and the unconditioned (nibbāna). The first three are conditioned and momentary; the fourth is neither. The next chapter lists every member of all four.
The eighty-two dhammas
What follows is the complete inventory. It is short, and its shortness is the claim: the tradition holds that nothing occurs in any experience, of any being, in any realm, that is not one of these items or a designation built from them.
Colour marks kinship. Blue is ethically variable — the same factor serves a good state and a bad one. Red is unwholesome, green wholesome; a factor of one colour never arises together with a factor of the other. Slate is material, and gold is the single unconditioned item. Select any tile for its definition.
How the count is made
Consciousness is counted as one dhamma although the system distinguishes eighty-nine kinds of it. This is deliberate. All consciousness does the same thing — it knows an object — and what makes one state of mind differ from another is the company it keeps. The fifty-two factors are that company, and they are where the differences actually lie.
Six of the beautiful factors appear twice, once for the body of mental factors and once for the consciousness itself: tranquillity, lightness, malleability, wieldiness, proficiency and rectitude are each counted as a pair. This yields nineteen from thirteen names.
Materiality
Material dhammas never occur singly. The smallest possible group contains eight that cannot be separated: the four primaries together with colour, smell, taste and nutritive essence. Any material thing whatever, down to the least part of it, contains at least these eight.
Matter arises from four causes and from no others: past kamma, consciousness, temperature and nutriment. The sensitivities of the sense organs and the sexual determinants are produced by kamma alone; bodily and vocal intimation by consciousness alone; sound by temperature or by consciousness; and most of the rest by more than one.
The last four material items are of a different order from the rest. Production, continuity, decay and impermanence are not constituents of a material group but phases of its career, and the commentaries debate whether they should be counted as dhammas at all.
How a state of mind is put together
Consciousness and its factors are not two things that meet. They arise as one event and are distinguished only in analysis. The commentaries specify the relation by four identities.
Consciousness and the factors accompanying it arise together, cease together, take the same object, and depend on the same physical base. Any factor of which one of these is untrue does not belong to that state.
Seven factors are present in every consciousness without exception: contact, feeling, perception, volition, one-pointedness, life faculty and attention. A consciousness with only these seven is possible, and occurs — the moment of seeing described in chapter V is one. Every other state of mind is that minimum plus additions.
The additions are constrained. The fourteen unwholesome factors arise only with unwholesome consciousness, the twenty-five beautiful factors only with beautiful consciousness, and the two sets never occur together. Within each set there are further restrictions: greed and hatred cannot arise in the same consciousness, since one is directed toward its object and the other away from it. Delusion, by contrast, is present in every unwholesome state whatever.
The eighty-nine consciousnesses
Consciousnesses are classified first by the plane of existence they belong to, and then by ethical quality. There are four ethical qualities: unwholesome (producing painful results), wholesome (producing pleasant results), resultant (itself the result of past action, and producing nothing), and functional (neither result nor cause, performing a task and leaving nothing behind).
| Plane | Composition | Count |
|---|---|---|
| Sense sphere kāmāvacara |
Unwholesome 12 — eight rooted in greed, two in hatred, two in delusion. Rootless 18 — seven unwholesome results, eight wholesome results, three functional. Beautiful 24 — eight wholesome, eight resultant, eight functional. | 54 |
| Fine-material sphere rūpāvacara |
The five absorptions, in wholesome, resultant and functional forms. | 15 |
| Immaterial sphere arūpāvacara |
The four formless attainments, in the same three forms. | 12 |
| Supramundane lokuttara |
Four path consciousnesses and four fruition consciousnesses. Counted as forty when each is distinguished by the absorption factor accompanying it. | 8 |
| Total | 89 |
The rootless consciousnesses are worth noting, because chapter V is largely made of them. They contain none of the six roots — no greed, hatred or delusion, and no non-greed, non-hatred or wisdom. They are the moments in which sensing takes place and nothing is being done. The seven unwholesome results and eight wholesome results include the five sense consciousnesses on each side: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching, each of which occurs in a pleasant and an unpleasant version according to the object met.
Where kamma is made
Of the eighty-nine, only the unwholesome and wholesome ones produce results. Resultant consciousnesses are effects and produce nothing further; functional consciousnesses are neither. In an arahant, the consciousnesses that would be wholesome in anyone else arise as functional instead, and no further result is produced. This is the sole structural difference the system records between an arahant and anyone else.
One act of seeing, worked through
Chapters I to IV set out the elements. This chapter takes a single ordinary event and shows how they combine, because the system is easier to follow in one worked example than in the abstract.
The example is a glance at a coloured surface. The Abhidhamma holds that such a glance is not one event but a sequence of seventeen momentary consciousnesses in a fixed order, each ceasing before the next arises. The order is not chosen by anyone; it follows from the properties set out in chapter II — that consciousness is momentary, that matter lasts longer than consciousness, and that each dhamma requires its conditions.
Two things to have in mind before starting
The mind at rest. When nothing is being sensed or thought, consciousness does not stop. A resultant consciousness called bhavaṅga, the life-continuum, repeats, taking as its object something from the final moments of the previous existence. It is the same kind of consciousness that linked this life to the last, and it accounts for most of the moments of any existence. It is never itself experienced; it is what the mind returns to between processes. In the diagram it is drawn below a line, and a process is drawn above it — but there is only ever one consciousness at a time, and the line marks a change of function, not a second stream.
The lag. A material dhamma requires one moment to reach the strength at which it can serve as an object. This is why the first of the seventeen moments is one in which the form has arisen but nothing has yet been sensed.
A very desirable visible form has entered the range of a working eye. Use Run, or the arrows, or select any moment directly. The height of each moment is the number of mental factors present in it.
What the diagram adds that the doctrine does not contain
Two things, and both should be discounted when reading it.
The past is drawn. Switching off Leave traces removes the dashed outlines, and only the present moment remains; the process then cannot be seen at all. That is the accurate picture. A process is never observed as a whole, since no moment of it is contemporaneous with any other. Every diagram of this material, including this one, presents as simultaneous what the doctrine says is not.
The speed is a convenience. At the fastest setting here a moment lasts about six milliseconds. The commentarial figure is that many thousands of millions of consciousnesses arise and cease in the time of a flash of lightning, which is a figure of speech rather than a measurement, and no setting on the slider approaches it.
When the object is weaker
The seventeen-moment process is the maximal case. It occurs only when the object is strong. Weaken it and the process is cut short, always at one of a small number of fixed points. Below a certain strength no impulsion occurs, and therefore no action is performed.
The fourth case is called mogha-vāra, the futile course. Something impinged; the life-continuum was disturbed; and the process did not begin. Nothing was cognised.
This is the system’s account of most of what impinges on a being. The visual field is large, the process is costly, and the majority of impacts are dropped before the eighth moment. Of those that reach it, many are determined and released without any impulsion. What is ordinarily called inattention is described here as a process that lawfully stopped early.
The sixth door
Return to the fifth moment of the full process, the seeing itself. It has seven factors and lasts one moment, and it takes colour as its object. It does not take shape, distance, thing, use or name, none of which is visible.
Those are supplied through the sixth sense door. In this system the mind is a sense faculty like the other five, with its own processes and its own objects; and what follows a sense-door process is a rapid series of mind-door processes, each taking as object what the previous one produced. The commentaries describe the object being assembled in four stages.
Two consequences follow, and both are stated explicitly in the commentaries.
The first is that the apple is a paññatti, a designation, and designations are not among the eighty-two items of chapter III. This is the distinction of chapter I applied to a particular case: the apple belongs to the conventional description and not to the ultimate one.
The second concerns order. By the time the fourth stage is complete, thousands of processes have run, each containing seven impulsions. The wanting has been occurring throughout. In the sequence as the Abhidhamma sets it out, liking and wanting precede identification, because identification requires the later mind-door processes and liking does not.
This is why the tradition assigns the whole of practice to the eighth moment. Determining is the one functional, ethically neutral consciousness standing between the resultant moments, which are the effects of past action, and the impulsions, which are new action. It is the only point in the sequence at which what follows is not already settled. What the discourses call wise attention, yoniso manasikāra, the commentaries locate there.
The twenty-four conditions
The analysis of chapters II to IV produces an inventory of items. The Paṭṭhāna supplies the second operation: it specifies the ways in which one dhamma can condition another, and applies them exhaustively to the categories of the system.
Every join in the process of chapter V is one of these relations. Seven of the twenty-four were named there, and are marked below with a dot.
What the list is for
Several of the twenty-four describe the same join from different sides. A state conditions the next by being present and by not having vanished; it also conditions the next by being absent and by having vanished. Both pairs are required. If a dhamma could condition its successor only while present, nothing could follow anything; if only by absence, nothing could support anything.
One of the relations runs against the direction of time. In pacchājāta, postnascence, a mental state that has just arisen conditions material dhammas that arose earlier and have not yet ceased — as rain falling now sustains vegetation that grew before it. A system of self-contained momentary items could not state this relation. A system of relations can.
The effect of the whole book is that no dhamma can be specified without specifying what it depends on. This is the answer the tradition gives to the objection that the analysis has merely replaced one substantial thing with eighty-two small ones. Whether the answer is sufficient is discussed in chapter IX.
Death and the next existence
The account of chapters I to VI leaves nothing that could pass from one life to another. There is no consciousness that endures, no substance underlying the stream, and nothing that survives the moment in which it arose. The tradition nevertheless holds that existence continues after death, and the Abhidhamma has to state how, using only the elements it admits.
The answer is that nothing passes over. What occurs at death is a join of exactly the kind described in chapter VI: one consciousness ceases, and by ceasing conditions the arising of the next. The only unusual feature is that the two belong to different existences.
One consciousness, three functions
In any single existence, one kind of consciousness performs three functions. It links that existence to the one before it, it repeats as the life-continuum whenever nothing is being sensed or thought, and it performs the passing away at the end. All three are of the same type, all three are produced by the same past action, and all three take the same object. They differ in position only.
Paṭisandhi, rebirth-linking, is the first consciousness of an existence. Bhavaṅga, the life-continuum, is that same consciousness repeating. Cuti, death, is its last occurrence.
The object of all three is settled at the beginning and holds to the end. It is whatever appeared to the mind in the final moments of the preceding existence, and the life-continuum takes that object for the whole of the existence that follows.
What appears at the end
As death approaches, one last cognitive process occurs. Its object is a nimitta, a sign, of one of three kinds. Whichever kind appears becomes the object of the first consciousness of the next existence, and then of its life-continuum for as long as that existence lasts.
Nimitta
A nimitta is a sign: the object taken by the last cognitive process of an existence. The three kinds differ in their relation to time, and the system classifies every object in one of four ways — as present, past, future, or time-freed. The last of these covers nibbāna and concepts, which neither arise nor cease.
A volition performed earlier in the life, taken as a past object.
An object or instrument bound up with that action. It may be past or present, and it is often a concept: a shape, a place, a thing.
A present object appearing at the mind door — a visible form, a sound, a temperature — belonging to the sphere about to be entered.
An object is therefore cognisable whether or not it exists at the moment of cognising. Consciousness takes past objects as readily as present ones, and does so constantly: recalling something from yesterday is the same relation at work. Object-condition, the second of the twenty-four in chapter VI, holds between a consciousness and its object without requiring the two to be contemporaneous.
This is the sense in which the rebirth-linking consciousness takes the same object as the dying process. The same item is cognised by both. There is a last consciousness with an object, a first consciousness with the same object, and nothing between them.
Action works the same way. A volition that has ceased conditions a result now, by the relation the commentaries treat separately as asynchronous kamma-condition — kamma-paccaya operating between different moments.
Mind and matter at the same instant
At the moment the rebirth-linking consciousness arises, the same action produces matter. For a human conception this is three groups at once: the body-decad, the sex-decad, and the decad of the heart-base, the last being the material support on which all consciousness other than the five sense consciousnesses depends.
Mind and matter begin together and support one another from that first instant. The discourses give the image, and the commentaries take it up: two sheaves of reeds propped against one another, each standing because the other does, and both falling if either is drawn away.
The join itself
Between the death consciousness and the rebirth-linking consciousness there is no interval. They stand in the same relation as any two consecutive moments within a life: contiguity, immediacy, absence and disappearance. Two further relations are added — the action that produced the new existence conditions it as kamma-paccaya, and the object that appeared at the end conditions it as ārammaṇa and as decisive support.
The question “what is reborn” therefore has no answer in this system, because it asks after something the analysis does not contain. What can be said is that the conditions for a further consciousness were present, and that a further consciousness arose. The relation between the two existences is the same relation that holds between any two moments of one existence, which is also the reason the tradition treats the difference between them as less significant than it appears.
Which action takes effect
A being has performed an indefinite number of actions capable of producing results. One of them determines the next existence. The commentaries set out an order of precedence.
Where it leads
The type of the rebirth-linking consciousness determines the plane of the new existence. There are nineteen possibilities.
| Rebirth-linking consciousness | Count | Existence produced |
|---|---|---|
| Unwholesome-resultant investigating consciousness, with neutral feeling | 1 | The four woeful planes. |
| Wholesome-resultant investigating consciousness, with neutral feeling | 1 | Human birth with congenital impairment; the lower earth-bound deities. The result of weak wholesome action. |
| The eight great resultant consciousnesses | 8 | Human birth, and the six sensual heavens. |
| The five fine-material resultants | 5 | The brahmā planes, by attainment of the corresponding absorption. |
| The four immaterial resultants | 4 | The immaterial planes. |
| Total | 19 |
Two features of this table are worth noticing. The first is that whether a being is born with a functioning set of senses is itself a result, and is settled by the type of consciousness that links the existences. The second is that the higher planes are reached only through attainments developed during a lifetime, which is the point at which this chapter connects to the next.
How the process is brought to an end
Everything described so far is a description of what continues. The purpose of the analysis is not to admire the machinery but to identify the point at which it can be stopped, and the Abhidhamma states the goal in terms of its own elements rather than in images.
What is to be ended is the arising of unwholesome consciousness, and with it the production of results that occasion further existences. This is achieved not by suppressing states as they arise but by eradicating the factors that produce them, so that certain classes of consciousness become permanently incapable of arising.
The eight supramundane consciousnesses
Eight consciousnesses of chapter IV do this work: four path consciousnesses and four fruition consciousnesses. They differ from all others in their object, which is nibbāna — the single unconditioned dhamma of chapter III.
A path consciousness arises once and never again. It occupies one mind-moment, it eradicates a determinate set of factors, and it is immediately followed by fruition consciousnesses which experience the result. There is no gradual version of it: the transition from one stage to the next is a single moment in a single cognitive process.
The cognitive process in which a path consciousness arises, in a person of keen faculties. Watch the object lane: at the seventh moment the object changes from conditioned phenomena to nibbāna, and does not change back until the process is over.
What each path eradicates
The four paths are distinguished by what they destroy. The traditional list is of ten fetters, and the destruction is held to be irreversible: a factor eradicated by a path cannot arise again in that continuity under any conditions.
the fourteen unwholesome factors — struck through when eradicated
Why eradication is permanent
An ordinary wholesome consciousness suppresses unwholesome states while it lasts, and it lasts one moment. Nothing prevents the unwholesome state from arising in the next process, because its conditions are untouched. The path consciousness acts on the conditions themselves: it takes as object the unconditioned, and in doing so removes the factors that would otherwise be available to arise.
The most consequential of these is diṭṭhi, the view that there is a self. On the account of chapters I and II this view is not merely false but misdescribes what is present, and its removal at the first path is what makes the remaining three possible.
How the path is reached
The system does not treat the path consciousness as something that can be produced at will. It arises when its conditions are complete, and the conditions are the subject of the practice literature rather than of the Abhidhamma proper. In outline they are three, in a fixed order of dependence: sīla, conduct; samādhi, concentration; paññā, understanding.
Buddhaghosa sets this out as seven successive purifications, of which the last five are stages of insight. Two of them correspond directly to earlier chapters here: the purification of view is the discernment of mind and matter, which is the analysis of chapters II to IV; the purification by overcoming doubt is the discernment of conditions, which is chapter VI. Only after those does the sequence proceed to the knowledges of arising and passing away, of dissolution, of danger and disenchantment, and finally to equanimity toward formations — after which, if the conditions are complete, conformity, change of lineage and the path arise in the process shown above.
The Abhidhamma’s contribution to this is precision about what is happening rather than instruction about how to do it. The instruction is in the discourses and in the practice manuals.
The last consciousness
An arahant continues to live, sense, act and feel. The processes of chapter V run in the ordinary way, with the difference noted there: the impulsions are functional, and no result is produced. What has stopped is production, not experience.
At the death of an arahant the process of chapter VII runs as far as the death consciousness and no further. There is no rebirth-linking consciousness, because the conditions for one are no longer present.
The death process for one in whom the fetters have been eradicated: thirteen moments, identical to the first thirteen of chapter VII except that the impulsions are functional rather than wholesome or unwholesome. The sequence runs to the death consciousness and stops, and the space where chapter VII shows a rebirth-linking consciousness followed by the life-continuum of a new existence stays empty.
Nibbāna as an object, and the end of the stream
Two different things are described in this chapter, and the vocabulary makes them easy to run together.
The first is a consciousness that takes nibbāna as its object. The path and fruition consciousnesses do this. They are conditioned dhammas of the ordinary kind: they arise, they last one moment, they have thirty-six mental factors, and they cease. What is unusual about them is only their object. Taking the unconditioned as an object is a relation between a momentary consciousness and a dhamma that does not arise, and the relation leaves both sides as they are — the consciousness remains conditioned and passes, and nibbāna is neither produced by it nor exhausted when it goes.
This is why the attainment can be repeated. One who has reached a fruition can enter it again at will, for a determined length of time, in an attainment called phala-samāpatti. Throughout it there is consciousness, arising and ceasing moment by moment, with nibbāna as its object.
The second is the state of an arahant, and here the tradition uses two terms.
The condition of a living arahant. Greed, hatred and delusion are extinguished; the aggregates continue, and so do seeing, feeling and the processes of chapter V.
What follows the death consciousness of an arahant. No rebirth-linking consciousness arises, and the sequence of chapter VII has no continuation.
The difference between the two is the presence or absence of a stream of consciousness. In the first, consciousness continues and may take nibbāna as its object. In the second there is no consciousness, and therefore nothing that takes anything as an object. The diagram above shows the second: the columns after the death consciousness are empty because nothing arises there, and not because something colourless does.
On what may be said of an arahant after death the discourses decline to answer, treating the question as one of those that are set aside. The Abhidhamma adds nothing to that. Its account is structural and stops where the process does: the conditions for a further consciousness are absent, so there is no further consciousness.
How the system reached this form
The account given on this page is the Abhidhamma as the Theravāda tradition developed it over roughly fifteen centuries. Its parts are not all of one age, and the differences matter for judging what kind of claim each part is making.
The first stage: the discourses
The material the Abhidhamma formalises is already in the suttas. The clearest instance is the Madhupiṇḍika Sutta, MN 18, in which Mahākaccāna expands a brief remark of the Buddha’s into an account of perception in six steps.
The structure of chapter V is this sequence with a schedule laid over it. What the Abhidhamma adds is the division into discrete moments, the assignment of a function to each, and the specification of which consciousness performs it.
One feature of the passage is grammatical. The first steps have no subject: dependent on eye and forms, eye-consciousness arises; the meeting of the three is contact; with contact as condition, feeling. From the fourth step a subject appears — what one feels, one perceives; what one perceives, one thinks about. At the last step the products of the process act upon the person they were produced by. Bhikkhu Ñāṇananda took this shift as the point of the discourse.
What the canonical books contain, and what they do not
The seven books supply the matrix of categories, the enumeration of states, the analysis of the standard topics, the record of the school’s disputes with its neighbours, and the twenty-four conditions.
They do not contain the process of seventeen moments; the doctrine that consciousness lasts one moment and matter seventeen; bhavaṅga as a developed account of the resting mind, which the Paṭṭhāna mentions once without elaboration; or momentariness in the strict sense. These are commentarial. They were consolidated by Buddhaghosa in the fifth century, working from older Sinhalese commentaries that have not survived, and were given their textbook form by Anuruddha some six centuries later.
This is stated here rather than marked throughout, because a running apparatus of attributions would make the system harder to follow than it needs to be. The relevant point is that the seventeen moments are a systematisation: rigorous, internally consistent, and going well beyond what the canonical texts assert.
The argument about sabhāva
The commentators define a dhamma as what bears its own characteristic. The Sanskrit equivalent of the term they use, svabhāva, is the target of Nāgārjuna’s critique: what has own-being cannot arise dependently, and what arises dependently has no own-being. If the Theravāda dhammas have own-being in that sense, the objection applies to them.
The reply, argued at length by Karunadasa and in different terms by Noa Ronkin, is that the Pāli usage marks distinguishability rather than independence, and that the tradition consistently refused the positions that would have made dhammas independent. It never held that dhammas exist in past, present and future alike. It did not treat dhammas as bearers of properties. And it produced the Paṭṭhāna, which is unintelligible on a reading in which dhammas stand on their own.
The question remains open. What is clear is that the Theravāda and the Sarvāstivāda developed the same inherited material in different directions, and that presenting either as ‘the Abhidharma’ obscures a real disagreement.
| Tradition | Ultimates | Composition | Distinguishing position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Theravāda | 82 | 1 consciousness · 52 factors · 28 material · 1 unconditioned | Only present dhammas exist. Dhammas are distinguishable but not independent. |
| Sarvāstivāda | 75 | 1 mind · 46 factors · 11 material · 14 dissociated · 3 unconditioned | Dharmas exist in all three times — the thesis the school is named for, and one the Theravāda rejected. |
| Yogācāra | 100 | 8 consciousnesses · 51 factors · 11 material · 24 dissociated · 6 unconditioned | A storehouse consciousness performs the functions assigned here to bhavaṅga; external objects are reinterpreted as appearance. |
What can be tested
The Abhidhamma was not built as an empirical science, and most of its claims are not framed in a way that admits testing. Some are. This chapter sets out where the system makes a claim that overlaps with something modern research has examined, what the research shows, and where the two do not meet.
The verdicts below are about structural resemblance, not about vindication. A modern finding that resembles a fifth-century doctrine is not evidence that the doctrine was derived in the same way or means the same thing.
What is not testable
The specific schedule — seventeen moments rather than sixteen or eighteen, the seven impulsions, the exact counts of mental factors — is not an empirical claim in any usable form. It is derived from the internal requirements of the system: given that consciousness is momentary, that matter is slower, that impulsions repeat, and that registration requires a strong object, the number falls out. No measurement would confirm or refute it.
The same applies to bhavaṅga considered as the consciousness that links one existence to the next, to the classification of consciousnesses by plane of existence, and to the account of kamma ripening across lives. These are not claims that current methods are failing to reach; they are claims of a different kind.
Finally, the commentarial figure for the speed of mental events — thousands of millions of consciousnesses in a flash of lightning — is incompatible with any known timescale of neural activity by many orders of magnitude. It is best read as the rhetorical device it appears to be.
A note on the genre
There is a substantial literature claiming that Buddhist psychology anticipated modern cognitive science. Much of it works by selecting congenial findings and ignoring the parts of the doctrine that do not fit. The honest summary is narrower: the Abhidhamma proposes that experience is a lawful, impersonal process; that it is discrete rather than continuous; that its objects are constructed rather than received; that evaluation precedes recognition; and that most sensory input never becomes experience at all. The first of these is a philosophical claim rather than an empirical one. The other four are live positions in contemporary research, argued on independent grounds.