Santipada

IN THE BEGINNING…

I’m gripped by a some­what pecu­liar trep­id­a­tion as I tip­toe into the hal­lowed portals of the abhid­hamma, my feet echo­ing too loudly in the cav­ernous aus­ter­ity.¹ There’s an aura of impen­et­rable mys­tery, an impres­sion of unscal­able heights, unfathom­able depths, untrace­able mazes. Nev­er­the­less, in this essay I auda­ciously pro­pose to set forth an entirely new the­ory point­ing to what I believe is a hitherto unap­pre­ci­ated role of the abhid­hamma. I cer­tainly do not pro­pose to prove any­thing in this essay, or hardly even to per­suade; I would simply like to float my idea down the stream of consciousness.

In order to avoid the pre-emptory dis­missal of my thesis I must pre­pare the soil. So for the bulk of this essay I will be merely repeat­ing, in a rough-hewn way, cri­tiques of cer­tain abhid­hamma con­cepts that have been aired often enough before, and by hands far more worthy than mine. I must there­fore beg the reader’s indul­gence, for my argu­ment will be short on spe­cif­ics and rather long on gen­er­al­iz­a­tions. I pro­pose to exam­ine the abhid­hamma take on two of the most fun­da­mental philo­soph­ical con­cepts, being and time.

What bet­ter way to start an inquiry into time than with a jour­ney through time itself? Let’s board the slow boat of his­tory at a point long before the Buddha. In these hoary days of yore, the broad river of time is dark and treach­er­ous, the charts no more reli­able than 16th Cen­tury maps of the world; yet enough light shines through to dis­cern some of the main cur­rents. What do we see as we gaze along the river banks? For a long time, just the plants and anim­als, maybe some prim­it­ive tribes, hunt­ing for food, eking out a bare sur­vival. But at some point we see people doing a strange thing – they are tak­ing per­fectly good food and throw­ing it away! Just toss­ing it on the ground! What pre­his­toric Ein­stein it was who inven­ted agri­cul­ture, we will never know. But what a revolu­tion in under­stand­ing this must have required! To put in so much work, to sac­ri­fice so much time and food, to know the sea­sons so well, to under­stand the gen­er­a­tion of plants from seeds, to con­ceive of one­self able to receive in a far future time the res­ults of work done today – the strides in con­scious­ness that make civil­iz­a­tion possible.

If we look more closely at these unique beings, we see them do some­thing even stranger. In the cen­ter of their towns, all of them, stands one build­ing taller than the rest. There the people go, per­haps once a week, and give offer­ings, sac­ri­fice anim­als, and with dis­turb­ing fre­quency, even other people. Why on earth would they do such a thing, with no appar­ent bene­fit at all? Per­haps we should pull our boat over to the bank and ask. The answer: ‘We sow the fields for our wel­fare in this life; but we offer sac­ri­fices to the gods for our wel­fare in the next.’ See­ing the yearly cycle of the birth and death of the grain, one con­ceives of time, of one­self in time. In a year I will receive the res­ults of work done today. But if I can con­ceive of myself as exist­ing in one year, it’s no great leap to two years, or three. Well, exactly how many?…In the awful silence that must fol­low that ques­tion falls the shadow, the specter of Death. Our Dark Lady of Time – with her left hand she bestows the bounty of grain; but in her right she grips the sickle.

All reli­gions as we know them are attempts to allay the fear of death. So it should come as no sur­prise that the ideas that reli­gions call upon to do this are dir­ectly derived from agri­cul­ture. The ‘self’ is like a ‘seed’ that sur­vives the death of the body. It may fall upon either good or bad soil – hence the import­ance of ‘cul­tiv­at­ing’ good ‘kamma’, which means both ‘eth­ical actions’ as well as ‘work’. Thus the sut­tas explain rebirth, using uni­ver­sal imagery in their own way: ‘Kamma is the field; cog­ni­tion is the seed; crav­ing is the moisture.’

There were, of course, many spec­u­la­tions regard­ing this world bey­ond. Are we reborn as a turtle? As a human? In a heaven? Once or many times? One idea, a syn­thesis of agri­cul­ture and astro­logy, was of a count­less series of lives coil­ing like a vast ser­pent through the ages. Now up to this point, our river of time could have been any­where, with but minor vari­ations. But if our river flows through north­ern India, like the long-vanished Saras­vati, we come to the most remark­able sight of all. Not con­tent with just sac­ri­fi­cing some seed to the soil for next year, or even sac­ri­fi­cing anim­als at the temple for the next life, a small num­ber of people give up all their worldly pos­ses­sions and take to the wilds. Liv­ing on remote moun­tains, or in thick jungle, they pur­sue the most bizarre, irra­tional prac­tices ima­gin­able – tor­tur­ing their bod­ies, sit­ting immob­ile for hours at a time, fast­ing. This time our polite inquiry meets with an even stranger answer: ‘What’s the point in being reborn only to die again? We will not rest until we have achieved noth­ing less than total deliv­er­ance from the cycle of rebirth!’ And so a new word enters the reli­gious vocab­u­lary – lib­er­a­tion. Enter the Buddha.

What I would like to do now is to take a brief run through the treat­ment of time in the early period of the Buddha’s life. I would like to answer two ques­tions. How is time treated? And how import­ant is it? I would then like to posit the simple assump­tion that the con­cep­tion of time thus revealed should be a prime frame for inter­pret­ing the sut­tas as a whole. Innoc­u­ous enough per­haps, but this assump­tion leads to some rad­ical con­clu­sions, as we shall see.

Accord­ing to the sut­tas, when the Bod­hisat­tva was born he roared out ‘This is my last birth! Now there will be no repeated exist­ence!’ When mature, the signs of the old man and the dead man promp­ted the Bod­hisat­tva to go forth, reflect­ing: ‘Why should I, being sub­ject to birth, age­ing, death, and defile­ment, seek what is also sub­ject to birth, aging, death, and defile­ment? Shouldn’t I seek what is not sub­ject to birth, age­ing, death, and defile­ment?’ He rejec­ted his early teach­ers because their sys­tem leads ‘only to rebirth’ in exal­ted planes. On the night of his enlight­en­ment, he first recol­lec­ted his past lives; then saw how kamma leads to rebirth; then finally anni­hil­ated the defile­ments lead­ing to his own rebirth. He knew: ‘Birth is ended…there is no return­ing to this state of exist­ence.’ His very first words were: ‘Through many births in sam­sara I wandered, seek­ing, but not find­ing the House­builder. Pain­ful is birth ever and again!’ In the first ser­mon, his first words defin­ing the spir­itual prob­lem were: ‘Birth is suf­fer­ing, age­ing is suf­fer­ing, death is suf­fer­ing…’ The cause: ‘That crav­ing that gen­er­ates rebirth…’ The solu­tion: ‘The end­ing of that very same craving…’

Up to this point in the Buddha’s life at every major event, time is the cent­ral issue, and the only descrip­tion of time is birth, age­ing, and death. This is incred­ible! Surely this must rank as the defin­it­ive paradigm for under­stand­ing the sutta teach­ings on time. ‘Birth’, of course, always means ‘rebirth’. There is noth­ing to be done about the suf­fer­ing due to one’s own birth, age­ing, and death in this life, and the Buddha did not waste his breath talk­ing about insol­uble problems.

Some may object that there are other teach­ings whose omis­sion here has slanted the argu­ment. Suf­fer­ing, for example, is not just birth, age­ing, and death. True; but if we look more closely at these teach­ings we will find that they in fact sup­port my thesis. Take the fam­ous phrase ‘sor­row, lam­ent­a­tion, pain, grief, and des­pair are suf­fer­ing’. On the face of it this is simply describ­ing our every­day sor­rows. And it is indeed a mar­velous qual­ity of the Dhamma that proper prac­tice leads to unpar­alleled joy and ease of heart here & now. But the fact that this phrase invari­ably occurs after ‘birth, age­ing, and death’ sug­gests that it refers primar­ily to the sor­rows of future lives. The sut­tas say that the suf­fer­ing in this life is like a speck of dust, but the suf­fer­ing in the future is like the mighty Him­alayas. This impres­sion is con­firmed when we notice that the phrase includes ‘pain’, which means spe­cific­ally phys­ical pain. It is well known that even Buddhas are not exempt from the pains of the body, so this must refer exclus­ively to future lives.

Or take the phrase ‘Not to get what one wants is suf­fer­ing.’ If I were a bet­ting man, I would lay strong odds that no-one read­ing that phrase today would asso­ci­ate it with rebirth. But what do the sut­tas say? ‘For beings sub­ject to birth, though they may wish “Aho! May we not be sub­ject to birth! May birth not come to us!” this can­not be attained by wish­ing. This is “Not to get what one wants is suffering”…’

Bear­ing the above in mind, let’s take a fresh look at the second and third ser­mons, not from our per­spect­ive as sec­u­lar­ized mod­erns peer­ing through 2500 years of encrus­ted inter­pret­a­tion, but through the eyes of the ori­ginal audi­ence. Here we must remem­ber one golden rule – don’t psy­cho­lo­gize! The audi­ence, the group of five monks, weren’t; they couldn’t. Psy­cho­logy hadn’t been inven­ted yet. Think: these men had spent years relent­lessly savaging their bod­ies with the most bru­tal self-torture ima­gin­able. Did they do this in hope of a com­fort­able and happy exist­ence in this life? On the con­trary, they would have thought such a goal trivial and fool­ish. Haunted by fear of death, their lives had been obsess­ively ded­ic­ated to utter dis­reg­ard for this life in a sadly mis­guided attempt to find sal­va­tion in the next. And, no doubt, they con­ceived this sal­va­tion in terms of the sur­vival of some sort of ‘self’.

The group of five monks had been with the Bod­hisat­tva for some time pre­vi­ous, so they would be famil­iar with the out­lines of his earlier life as described above. But the only Dhamma teach­ing they’d heard was the first ser­mon. There, the descrip­tion of suf­fer­ing ends with the words: ‘In sum­mary, the five aggreg­ates asso­ci­ated with grasp­ing are suf­fer­ing.’ Note the words ‘in sum­mary’; the five aggreg­ates do not intro­duce any rad­ical new paradigm. The second ser­mon can there­fore be seen as an expan­sion of that curt phrase; the first commentary.

It starts: ‘Phys­ical form is not self.’ What would this have meant to the group of five? The internal evid­ence in the sut­tas sug­gests that the five aggreg­ates were a pre-Buddhist eschat­o­lo­gical scheme, a con­veni­ent frame­work for clas­si­fy­ing the vari­ous spec­u­la­tions about the ‘self’ that sur­vives death. The sutta is dis­miss­ing one class of eschat­o­lo­gical the­or­ies: it is not proper to seek sal­va­tion from death by identi­fy­ing with the sur­vival of some phys­ical prin­ciple. It gives two reas­ons. Firstly, phys­ical form leads to afflic­tion. In the future as now, it gets old and dies. Secondly, we can­not com­mand phys­ical form: ‘Be like that! Don’t be like that!’ In the light of the above, this obvi­ously means that we can­not com­mand our phys­ical exist­ence in the next life to be just how we please. The verb here, hoti, is reg­u­larly used in eschat­o­lo­gical con­texts. The sutta repeats the ana­lysis for the remain­ing aggreg­ates of feel­ing, recog­ni­tion, voli­tional activ­it­ies, and cog­ni­tion. Here and below I’ll just take phys­ical form as the example.

Next the sutta asks: ‘Is phys­ical form per­man­ent or imper­man­ent?’ ‘Imper­man­ent, bhante.’ This is the very first non-specific treat­ment of time in the sut­tas. Since the only mean­ing of time and rise and fall until now has been birth, age­ing, and death, it would be per­verse to insist on another mean­ing here. But we can note a slight shift. ‘Imper­man­ence’ is a more philo­soph­ical term, sug­gest­ing a move to a more gen­eral treat­ment of time, where birth, age­ing, and death become the paradigms for time con­sidered in dif­fer­ent contexts.

‘Is what is imper­man­ent suf­fer­ing or pleas­ure?’ ‘Suf­fer­ing, bhante.’ Now nor­mally we think of vari­ety and change as stim­u­lat­ing and enjoy­able, so this answer might seem a bit odd. But if ‘change’ means birth, age­ing & death, it’s no won­der it’s suffering.

‘In that case is it fit to regard phys­ical form thus: “This is mine, I am this, this is my self”?’ ‘No, bhante.’ So phys­ical form, being imper­man­ent, i.e. sub­ject to age­ing & death, is not fit to regard as an immor­tal soul.

Next, one regards all phys­ical form ‘with right under­stand­ing in accord­ance with real­ity’ as not-self: ‘past, future, and present’ (i.e. past lives, future lives, and the present life) ‘internal’ (i.e. an internal phys­ical phe­nomenon regarded as a soul, such as the breath) ‘external’ (the external soul was a com­mon idea in antiquity – a bird, a tree, or just about any­thing could be con­ceived of as one’s soul) ‘inferior or super­ior’ (i.e. in bet­ter or worse planes of rebirth) ‘near or far’ (per­haps mean­ing ‘on earth or in heaven’).

See­ing thus, the ‘learned noble dis­ciple’ aban­dons defile­ments. So far, the only descrip­tion of defile­ments we have met is ‘that crav­ing that gen­er­ates repeated exist­ence.’ The phrase ‘learned noble dis­ciple’ as well as ‘right wis­dom in accord­ance with real­ity’ spe­cific­ally refer to stream entry or higher; this is thus said to be depend­ent on insight into rebirth. After all this, it should come as no sur­prise when the sutta expresses the exper­i­ence of enlight­en­ment again as: ‘Birth is ended…’

Let us now look at the third ser­mon. We shall see a sig­ni­fic­ant devel­op­ment in the treat­ment of time. This time the Buddha is teach­ing a dif­fer­ent group of yogis, with, how­ever, sim­ilar pre­con­cep­tions. This teach­ing is phrased in terms of the six senses. The Buddha is now invent­ing psy­cho­logy, set­ting forth his basic ana­lysis of cog­nit­ive pro­cesses. Here we see, for the first time, a spe­cific­ally psy­cho­lo­gical treat­ment of time. Feel­ing is said to ‘arise depend­ent on con­tact’, whereas pre­vi­ously, arising and ceas­ing was exclus­ively the arising and ceas­ing of rebirth. The most strik­ing fea­ture of the dis­course, how­ever, is that the emphasis is not on tech­nical defin­i­tion and abstract ana­lysis, but on a stir­ring, con­stantly repeated warn­ing : ‘All is burning!…With what is it burn­ing? With the fires of greed, anger, and delu­sion…’ This fam­ous triad is obvi­ously just a more detailed ana­lysis of ‘that crav­ing that gen­er­ates rebirth’, intro­duced here to cor­rel­ate with the triad of feel­ing. ‘…With the fires of birth, aging & death…’ So the reason the eye, etc., are burn­ing is because attach­ment to our sens­ory exper­i­ence gives rise to defile­ments which gen­er­ate rebirth.

Thus the Fire Ser­mon, draw­ing on a sug­ges­tion lat­ent in the ‘imper­man­ence’ of the second ser­mon, shows the con­nec­tion between the exper­i­ence of time in the psy­cho­lo­gical present moment and the eschat­o­lo­gical frame­work which was the ori­ginal motiv­a­tion for spir­itual prac­tice. This rela­tion­ship is explored in many ways in the sut­tas, and all the sut­tas’ psy­cho­lo­gical teach­ings should be seen in this light. The Buddha’s innov­a­tion was not to shift the focus of reli­gious con­cern from eschat­o­logy to psy­cho­logy, but to ‘demeta­phys­ic­al­ize’ eschat­o­logy, explain­ing rebirth in rational, empir­ical terms as being no dif­fer­ent in prin­ciple from the psy­cho­lo­gical pro­cesses observ­able in the present moment. So see­ing the sut­tas by stand­ing ‘behind’ them look­ing for­ward we see a very dif­fer­ent scen­ario than if we stand in the 21st Cen­tury look­ing back.

If the main per­spect­ive on time in the sut­tas is eschat­o­lo­gical, the main frame­work for explain­ing this must be depend­ent ori­gin­a­tion. This is the Buddha’s explan­a­tion for how rebirth hap­pens without a soul, tak­ing the psy­cho­lo­gical ana­lysis from the third ser­mon and show­ing how that fits into the cycle of rebirth. Des­pite receiv­ing var­ied treat­ment in the sut­tas, this is always the main idea; so the fam­ous twelve links occur count­less times with rig­or­ous consistency.

We can trace the treat­ment of time in the abhid­hamma as an evol­u­tion from these ele­ments. In the earli­est strata of abhid­hamma lit­er­at­ure, the Sutta Expos­i­tion of the Vibhaṅga, we find the same series of twelve links. But the next strata, the Abhid­hamma Expos­i­tion, intro­duces many vari­ations by rede­fin­ing the twelve links in ways never taught by the Buddha. The Sar­vāstivāda Abhid­harma developed sim­ilar ideas, and there too they were forced to redefine the factors to make them work. The main pur­pose seems to fur­ther psy­cho­lo­gize the teach­ings by intro­du­cing what has in mod­ern times become fam­ous as the ‘one life­time depend­ent ori­gin­a­tion’. This is touted as a return to the ori­ginal psy­cho­lo­gical teach­ings of the Buddha, free of the eschat­o­lo­gical per­spect­ive intro­duced by later sup­posed Brahmanical influ­ences. But as we have seen, the real­ity is just the oppos­ite. It is the sut­tas which so strongly emphas­ize eschat­o­logy – I can­not ima­gine what the Buddha could have done to emphas­ize it more. The Abhid­hamma Pitaka, divor­cing the psy­cho­lo­gical teach­ings from their ori­ginal eschat­o­lo­gical con­text, starts to develop a psy­cho­logy for its own sake. Thus the mod­ern ‘one-lifers’ are really just tak­ing the abhid­hamma pro­gram a step fur­ther, abol­ish­ing the role of rebirth altogether.

It is per­haps worth not­ing that the athe­istic Saṅkhyā school was emer­ging over the same period as the abhid­hamma. This school was described by emin­ent scholar Hein­rich Zim­mer in his Philo­sophies of India thus. ‘Their ana­lysis of the micromac­ro­cosm, as well as the whole range of human prob­lems, are presen­ted in terms of a sort of proto-scientific psy­cho­lo­gical functionalism…a metic­u­lous and sober pos­it­iv­ism.’ Given the near iden­tity of the philo­soph­ical ten­ets of these two schools – ration­al­ism, dual­ism, and real­ism – and the evid­ent influ­ence of such Sankhya con­cep­tions as the ‘sab­hāva’ on the abhid­hamma, we may be for­given for won­der­ing if it is not the Sut­tas’ three life depend­ent ori­gin­a­tion, but the Abhidhamma’s one life the­ory which reflects some non-Buddhist influence.

By the time of the Dhammasaṅgaṇī, which is prob­ably later than the sec­tions con­sidered above, time is just treated as ‘on that occa­sion’. The vague­ness of this – in a text whose ostens­ible pur­pose is pre­ci­sion of defin­i­tion! – allows for just about any inter­pret­a­tion of time, which was prob­ably the point. Gone is the urgency, gone the inspir­a­tion, gone the human­ity, gone the rel­ev­ance. That’s all in the past now.

The Dhammasaṅgaṇī is com­mit­ted to thus impov­er­ish­ing time due to its uni­ver­sal­ist agenda. It must provide defin­i­tions applic­able to any pos­sible mode of exper­i­ence. But it also pur­ports to be a legit­im­ate expos­i­tion of the sut­tas, which have quite a dif­fer­ent agenda. To recon­cile the two per­spect­ives the Dhammasaṅgaṇī resorts to a con­cep­tual blun­der of aston­ish­ing naiv­eté, col­lapsing the dis­tinc­tion between an event in the present moment, know­able through dir­ect obser­va­tion, and a pro­cess evolving over time, know­able through infer­en­tial under­stand­ing of causal prin­ciples. For the sut­tas, the term ‘aggreg­ate’ denotes an umbrella cat­egory for a given class of phe­nom­ena. The aggreg­ate of cog­ni­tion, for example, is defined as ‘whatever cog­ni­tion, past, present, or future…’ But the Dhammasaṅgaṇī asks ‘What is the aggreg­ate of cog­ni­tion on that occa­sion?’ This is as non­sensical as ask­ing ‘Which dog is the can­ine spe­cies?’ The Dhammasaṅgaṇī is so crude a semantic steam­roller that it is unable to dis­tin­guish between a class and a mem­ber of the class. A class is too obvi­ously a concept, and it just wouldn’t do to soil the abhid­hamma with mere concepts.

In the later abhid­hamma, the treat­ment of time is dom­in­ated by a rad­ical new the­ory, totally unlike any­thing in the sut­tas or even the canon­ical abhid­hamma, the the­ory of moments (khaṇavāda). This pos­tu­lates that time is con­sti­tuted of a series of dis­crete, indi­vis­ible units, rather like a series of bil­liard balls lined up on a table. Each unit, or ‘moment’, is infin­ites­im­ally small, such that bil­lions pass by in a lightning-flash. So while the sut­tas emphas­ize the length of time, the abhid­hamma emphas­izes the short­ness. This the­ory shapes the abhid­hamma con­cep­tion of a whole range of cent­ral doc­trines. Thus imper­man­ence becomes, not simply being sub­ject to birth and death, rise and fall, but the moment­ary dis­sol­u­tion of phe­nom­ena – one dhamma rises and ceases in an instant, leav­ing no trace of residue in the next. Samadhi becomes, not an exal­ted, stable coales­cence of mind, but a ‘moment­ary samadhi’ run­ning after the fluc­tu­ations of phe­nom­ena. The path becomes, not a gradual pro­gram of spir­itual devel­op­ment, but a ‘path-moment’, gone in a flash. And the mind itself becomes just a series of ‘mind-moments’.

Now it is quite pos­sible to take this the­ory, com­pare it with the sut­tas, and refute it point by point. But here I would simply like to point out what an implaus­ible and use­less idea it is. Quite obvi­ously, time may be ana­lyzed as finely as we wish, its divis­ib­il­ity determ­ined only by the sharp­ness of our ana­lyt­ical razor. Any unit of time has a begin­ning, a middle, and an end. That begin­ning, too, has a begin­ning, a middle, and an end, and so on ad infin­itum. There is simply no good reason to pos­tu­late an ulti­mate sub­stratum of time to which other strata can be reduced. This idea seems to derive some of its impress­ive­ness from its air of acrid, pess­im­istic, reduc­tion­ist sever­ity, which is often mis­taken as a sign of really uncom­prom­ising wisdom.

The guid­ing object­ive for the for­mu­la­tion of the mind-moment the­ory would seem to be for exactitude of defin­i­tion. So while the Buddha spoke of the mind ‘chan­ging while it stands’, the abhid­hamma just speaks of ‘stand­ing’. It is much easier to define a static entity than a pro­cess evolving over time. This is why a but­ter­fly col­lector wants to have his but­ter­flies dead, with a pin stuck through their heart and a little label under­neath, not madly mean­der­ing about in the woods. The dead mind. But the Buddha was not a but­ter­fly col­lector, he was an observer of nature. He wanted us to watch the flight and flit­ter of the but­ter­fly, to under­stand how it behaves in its nat­ural envir­on­ment, and to fol­low it gently, del­ic­ately, quietly until it settles down to rest and be still accord­ing to its nature – which he called ‘samadhi’.

By now I ima­gine our poor mind-moment must be feel­ing quite friend­less. I should have more good Buddhist com­pas­sion and try to see things from the mind-moment’s point of view – which is, accord­ing to the abhid­ham­mi­kas, the only point of view from which we see any­thing. What would a moment of stasis be like? A strange world! One could cer­tainly not see imper­man­ence, any more than one can remem­ber the moment one falls asleep. By defin­i­tion, end­ing is the end­ing of aware­ness. Everything one could know, for the whole of one’s life, would be per­man­ent. From the point of view of a mind-moment, exist­ence would be identical with etern­ity. And that is a very remark­able con­clu­sion for a the­ory whose pur­pose was to explain impermanence.

But the abhid­ham­mi­kas them­selves were unable to for­mu­late a coher­ent account of this the­ory. They were left with the task of explain­ing how the mind works, which was, after all, the main idea. Now, ‘mind’ (citta) in abhid­hamma is nor­mally treated as equi­val­ent to ‘cog­ni­tion’ (viññāṇa). The func­tion of cog­ni­tion accord­ing to the sut­tas is, sens­ibly enough, to cog­nize. But the abhid­hamma alloc­ates a bewil­der­ing array of other func­tions to its mind-moments. They are said to ‘vibrate’, to ‘advert’, to ‘register’, even to ‘activ­ate’ (javana, lit­er­ally ‘run­ning’). It is cer­tainly very clever of our mind-moment to be able to ‘stand’ and ‘run’ at the same time! One should think that, at the end of a hard moment’s ‘run­ning’ or ‘advert­ing’, our poor over­worked mind-moment would find it hard to squeeze in a bit of cognizing!

Sev­eral, per­haps all, of these sup­posed func­tions of the mind-moment, moreover, over­lap with func­tions ascribed by the sut­tas to ‘name’ or by the abhid­hamma to ‘men­tal factors’, that is, the func­tions assist­ing cog­ni­tion rather than cog­ni­tion itself. Thus advert­ing = atten­tion, activ­at­ing = voli­tion, etc. So on the one hand they are sup­posed to be uni­ver­sal func­tions assist­ing cog­ni­tion, while on the other hand they are sup­posed to be func­tions exer­cised by cer­tain par­tic­u­lar kinds of cog­ni­tion. The abhid­hamma in gen­eral seem to not be able to dis­tin­guish between cog­ni­tion and the men­tal factors. So when it claims to be talk­ing about cog­ni­tion it’s usu­ally talk­ing about these asso­ci­ated factors.

Fur­ther­more, we can see that each of these func­tions, or indeed any effi­cient func­tion at all, must be a pro­cess involving change over time, con­trary to the ini­tial static defin­i­tion. It is there­fore divis­ible. There is noth­ing more ‘ulti­mate’ about any one level of ana­lysis or another. Our decision to class one spec­trum of phe­nom­ena together under a par­tic­u­lar label is purely con­ven­tional. The mind-moment is noth­ing but a concept – and not a very good one.

Just what is going on here? Why pos­tu­late such an odd the­ory, rais­ing so many pseudo-problems, and so con­trary to the sut­tas, to com­mon sense, and to exper­i­ence? What is occur­ring, I sug­gest, is that the domain of dis­course has been shif­ted from the empir­ical to the meta­phys­ical. The sut­tas treat time in a straight­for­ward, prag­matic, empir­ical terms – birth, age­ing, and death, the chan­ging states of the mind, the pro­gress­ive devel­op­ment of spir­itual qual­it­ies. The pur­pose, the sole pur­pose, is to empower the prac­ti­tioner to get a handle on this stuff of life, dir­ect­ing atten­tion to the seat of the prob­lem – how our attach­ments cause suf­fer­ing, and how to find peace by let­ting go. But the abhid­hamma aims to describe, not just the spir­itual prob­lem and its solu­tion, but the total­ity of exist­ence. Inev­it­ably, the sub­ject­ive stance of the sut­tas becomes objec­ti­fied, and as the focus moves from med­it­a­tion to study, the con­cepts in the books become imposed on real­ity; in fact, they become real­ity itself. The quest for truth becomes a quest for defin­i­tion, and real­ity becomes as neatly depart­ment­al­ized as a math­em­at­ical table. ‘Ulti­mate real­ity’ becomes, not what you are exper­i­en­cing now, but what you read about in abhid­hamma books.

Find this hard to swal­low? You might be inter­ested to know that in con­tem­por­ary abhid­hamma circles it is, appar­ently, the ortho­dox pos­i­tion that the series of ‘mind-moments’ can only be dir­ectly seen by Buddhas, and per­haps chief dis­ciples. This is, admit­tedly, chal­lenged by some, who claim it can be seen in med­it­a­tion. In just the same way, a Chris­tian med­it­ator will claim to see God, or a Hindu to see the uni­ver­sal Self. Seek and ye shall find. The very fact that such a con­tro­versy could pos­sibly arise is a sign how far we have drif­ted from the Buddha’s prag­matic empir­i­cism. This is bad enough; but even worse when we real­ize that the the­ory in ques­tion made its appear­ance a mil­len­nium after the Buddha’s time. This, for me, is as good as an admis­sion that the whole thing is mere meta­phys­ical spec­u­la­tion. No won­der the abhid­ham­mi­kas have been so keen to father the canon­ical abhid­hamma (and some­times even the com­ment­ar­ies!) on the Buddha him­self, des­pite massive evid­ence to the contrary.

No aspect of the abhid­hamma speaks so elo­quently of the dis­missal of exper­i­ence as the treat­ment of feel­ing. The abhid­hamma says that ‘whole­some con­scious­ness’ is invari­ably asso­ci­ated with either pleas­ure or equan­im­ity. This blatantly con­tra­dicts the Mahadham­masamādāna Sutta (M46.16): ‘Here, someone in pain and grief abstains from killing liv­ing beings….’ The the­or­et­ical mis­take seems to arise from the abhid­hamma habit of speak­ing primar­ily of the eth­ical qual­ity of cog­ni­tion (‘whole­some con­scious­ness’), and deriv­ing the eth­ical qual­ity of an inten­tional act from its ‘asso­ci­ation’ with a cer­tain kind of cognition.

Tak­ing the cog­ni­tion to be whole­some, the abhid­ham­mi­kas seem to have found it uncom­fort­able to admit that a ‘whole­some con­scious­ness’ could be pain­ful, or visa versa. But for the sut­tas it is the inten­tion, not the con­scious­ness, that is whole­some, and so the res­ult­ing hap­pi­ness can be exper­i­enced at a later time: ‘One holds right view, and exper­i­ences pain and grief that have right view as con­di­tion. On the dis­sol­u­tion of the body, after death, one is reborn in a happy des­tin­a­tion, even in a heav­enly realm. This is called the way of under­tak­ing prin­ciples that is pain­ful now and ripens in the future as pleasure.’

We need hardly be sur­prised that the abhid­ham­mi­kas ignore the sut­tas; what is more wor­ry­ing is how they ignore their own exper­i­ence. We all, includ­ing the abhid­ham­mi­kas too, have exper­i­enced suf­fer­ing some time or other (too often!) while doing good. Yet rather than cor­rect their the­ory in line with exper­i­ence, the abhid­ham­mi­kas chose to side­line exper­i­ence in defer­ence to their the­ory. It is all too easy to argue that the ‘mind-moments’ are flash­ing by so quickly, we simply can’t tell which ‘cit­tas’ are whole­some and happy, and which are unwhole­some and sad.

A sim­ilar point can be made with ref­er­ence to the abhidhamma’s strange ana­lysis of the kinds of feel­ing asso­ci­ated with the six kinds of sense cog­ni­tion. Feel­ings asso­ci­ated with the eye, ear, nose, and tongue are said to be neut­ral only. This seems to entail that flowers are beau­ti­ful and food tasty only because they make you happy. Has no abhid­ham­mika eaten a mango while depressed and still found it tasty? Or smelt sewage while happy and still found it unpleas­ant? Again, the fact that this doc­trine con­tra­dicts the sut­tas (which speak of ‘the feel­ing born of eye-stimulus, whether pleas­ant, pain­ful, or neut­ral…’) is not as wor­ry­ing as the fact that it flies in the face of the liv­ing exper­i­ence of the abhid­ham­mi­kas, every moment of every day. Neither veri­fi­able nor falsifi­able, the the­ory of moments inhab­its an epi­stem­o­lo­gical no-man’s-land, drift­ing like a lost albatross over the track­less seas of para­dox, seek­ing but never find­ing a place to land.

…THERE WAS…

Let’s leave time – for the moment – and have a look at that other great philo­soph­ical bogey­man, being. In the sut­tas, true to the per­spect­ive sketched in above, the main mean­ing of ‘exist­ence’ (bhava) is ‘states of rebirth’. But lest I be con­sidered obsess­ive, and lest the good reader mis­takenly think that the sut­tas are lack­ing in psy­cho­lo­gical depth, I would like to approach being from a psy­cho­lo­gical per­spect­ive, tra­cing the evol­u­tion of the import­ant term nāmarūpa, which lit­er­ally means ‘name & form’. Although my treat­ment below will be primar­ily psy­cho­lo­gical, we should not for­get that eschat­o­lo­gical con­texts are not lack­ing. Thus the ‘fix­a­tion’ of cog­ni­tion in name & form gives rise to ‘future birth, age­ing & death, and the ori­gin of suf­fer­ing’. Name & form itself is said to be reborn.

In the pre-Buddhist tra­di­tions, name & form stood for the phe­nom­enal world, that mirage of mul­ti­pli­city. ‘Form’ is the external realm of appear­ances, of seem­ings, while ‘name’ is the inner reflec­tion of what appears through the senses – ‘inform­a­tion’. ‘Name’ rep­res­ents the vic­tory of intel­li­gence over the primal chaos. The swirl­ing waters of undif­fer­en­ti­ated, unformed brute nature are van­quished with the magic power of name, which organ­izes and renders intel­li­gible the cos­mos, and hence bestows mean­ing, an under­stand­ing of one’s place in nature, and the power to manip­u­late nature – the same power that has ulti­mately res­ul­ted in mod­ern sci­ence. Name & form cor­res­pond so closely that the ideas, the names, seem to inhere in the forms per­ceived, grant­ing those who know names a mys­ter­i­ous power over the external world. This stage of under­stand­ing is rep­res­en­ted in the Indian tra­di­tion by the Vedas, the old­est extant Indian literature.

The pre-Buddhist tra­di­tions were agreed that lib­er­a­tion is not to be gained through such means, but through the dis­sol­u­tion of name & form in that cos­mic ocean of con­scious­ness (vijñāna), freed from the lim­it­a­tions of con­cepts. But the Buddha’s insight dis­closed that con­scious­ness itself was bound up with name & form in a rela­tion­ship of needy depend­ency. For the Buddha, infin­ite con­scious­ness meant infin­ite suffering.

The fol­low­ing verses, one from the Upan­ishads and one from the Sutta Nipāta, illus­trate how par­al­lel terms can vividly express quite dif­fer­ent ideas when trans­formed by the magic of meta­phor. (In the Sutta Nipāta verse, the term ‘name-group’ is not a syn­onym for name & form, but just means ‘name’. This verse was spoken to a brah­man ascetic who wished to know the fate of one who gained release based on the sphere of noth­ing­ness, a form­less attainment.)

The End­ing of Name & Form

Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad 3.2.8	Sutta Nipāta 1080
Yathā nadyas syan­damānās samudre	Accī yathā vātave­gena khittā
Just as rivers flow­ing into the ocean	Just as a flame tossed by a strong wind
Astam gac­chanti nāmarūpe vihāya	Atthaṁ paleti na upeti saṅkhaṁ
Go to their end, hav­ing dropped name & form	Goes out to the end, and does not enter reckoning
Tathā vid­vān nāmarūpād vimuktaḥ	Evam munī nāmakāyā vimutto
Thus the real­ized [sage], freed from name & form	Thus the sage, freed from the name-group
Parāt­param puruṣam upaiti divyam	Atthaṁ paleti na upeti saṅkhaṁ
Bey­ond the bey­ond is that Man he enters, divine.	Goes out to the end, and does not enter reckoning

Let us con­tinue the story of name & form in the spe­cific­ally Buddhist con­text of depend­ent ori­gin­a­tion. There, name & form is shown to be depend­ent on cog­ni­tion. This sug­gests that ‘name’ is a term for cer­tain men­tal func­tions exclus­ive of cog­ni­tion, while ‘form’ des­ig­nates phys­ical phe­nom­ena. There is a very inter­est­ing pas­sage in the Mahā Nidāna Sutta which high­lights the root mean­ing of ‘name’. I would there­fore con­sider this to be an early con­cep­tion of ‘name’. The pas­sage is obscure even in Pali and nearly incom­pre­hens­ible in a lit­eral Eng­lish trans­la­tion, so I paraphrase.

‘Name’ and ‘form’ are each shown to cor­rel­ate with a par­tic­u­lar kind of ‘con­tact’. Name cor­rel­ates to ‘labeling con­tact’, while form cor­rel­ates to ‘impact con­tact’. So let us have a look at this ‘con­tact’. In the nor­mal ana­lysis of con­tact, it is said to be the co-operation of three factors: the external sense object (e.g. ‘image’), the internal sense organ (e.g. ‘eye’), and the cor­res­pond­ing class of cog­ni­tion (e.g. ‘visual cog­ni­tion’). In the case of the five phys­ical senses, then, the ‘impact con­tact’ would be the ‘impact’ of the external sense object on the internal sense organ – light ‘hit­ting’ the eye, or sound ‘hit­ting’ the ear. In the case of men­tal cog­ni­tion, we have the men­tal objects (dham­mas), mano (usu­ally rendered ‘mind’), and mano –cognition.

What then is this mano? It’s not defined in this con­text in the sut­tas, so any explan­a­tion remains spec­u­lat­ive. In sim­pler, non-specialized con­texts, such as the three doors of action (body, speech, and mind), mano is more or less a syn­onym for ‘mind’ (citta) or ‘cog­ni­tion’ (viññāṇa). But here, since mano is clearly dis­tin­guished from mano–cog­ni­tion, it seems to carry a more spe­cial­ized nuance.

The abhid­ham­mi­kas invoke their beloved ‘mind-moment’ here, opin­ing that mano refers to cer­tain kinds of mind-moments in the pro­cess of cog­ni­tion, while mano–cog­ni­tion refers to cer­tain oth­ers. Spe­cific­ally, the man­od­hātu is defined as the ‘five-door advert­ing con­scious­ness’ and the ‘receiv­ing con­scious­ness’ that accepts the five-sense impinge­ment; which is rather odd since the man­od­hātu is the sup­port for mano–cog­ni­tion, not five-sense cog­ni­tion. Else­where mano is incon­sist­ently iden­ti­fied with bhavaṅga, the sup­posed sub­lim­inal ‘life con­tinuum con­scious­ness’, which is inter­rup­ted by ‘advert­ing con­scious­ness’ to give rise to a pro­cess of act­ive cog­ni­tion; this des­pite the fact that the rel­ev­ant sutta pas­sage clearly states that mano must be intact, not cut off, in order for mano–cog­ni­tion to mani­fest. Fur­ther­more, the sut­tas make it plain that the ‘co-operation’ (saṅgati, ‘com­ing together’) of mano, men­tal objects, and mano–cog­ni­tion con­sti­tutes con­tact. How can sep­ar­ate mind-moments occur simultaneously?

Since in the abhid­hamma the sim­ul­tan­eous occur­rence of the three factors becomes stretched out into suc­cess­ive occur­rence, it would seem only nat­ural to fur­ther sep­ar­ate out con­tact, dig­ni­fy­ing it with a real exist­ence of its own, rather than being a mere func­tion. So the abhid­ham­mi­kas alter the sutta state­ment that the three are con­tact (tiṇṇaṁ saṅgati phasso) to the three give rise to con­tact (tiṇṇaṁ saṅgatiyā phasso). To sum up. The sut­tas say: ‘Depend­ent on mano and men­tal objects arises mano–cog­ni­tion. The co-operation of the three is con­tact.’ The abhid­hamma explains: ‘Depend­ent on cer­tain kinds of cog­ni­tion and men­tal objects arises sense cog­ni­tion or other kinds of men­tal cog­ni­tion. Due to the co-operation of the three is con­tact.’ In all mod­esty, I think we can do a little bet­ter than that.

Mano and men­tal objects here give rise to cog­ni­tion, in the same way that name & form gives rise to cog­ni­tion. And just as the phys­ical sense organs are phys­ical con­structs that enable or facil­it­ate the act of phys­ical cog­ni­tion, so too mano would seem to be a men­tal ‘con­struct’ that enables or facil­it­ates the act of men­tal cog­ni­tion. I would there­fore sug­gest that it seems to be sim­ilar if not identical with ‘name’ itself. We might there­fore render it in this con­text as ‘men­tal­ity’. The ‘men­tal objects’ would most com­monly con­sist of ‘thoughts’, etc., which are related to ‘name’, and also ‘men­tal images’, which are part of ‘form’.

But we digress. To return to the Mahā Nidāna Sutta, we now have form giv­ing rise to ‘impact con­tact’ con­sist­ing in the impact of external sense objects on the sense organs, and name, appro­pri­ately enough, giv­ing rise to ‘labeling con­tact’ con­sist­ing in con­cep­tual pro­cessing of sense data. I am des­per­ately flail­ing about here in a prob­ably doomed attempt to avoid mak­ing this dis­cus­sion too tech­nical. There are import­ant qual­i­fic­a­tions to be made to my dis­cus­sion both above and below, but I hope that by sim­pli­fy­ing some­what I can cla­rify the out­lines without dis­tor­tion. We can see that ‘impact con­tact’ deals primar­ily with receiv­ing data from out­side, while ‘labeling con­tact’ deals primar­ily with pro­cessing inner, con­cep­tual inform­a­tion. Thus the earlier, mys­tical under­stand­ing of name & form receives a strictly rational, psy­cho­lo­gical treat­ment. Name & form are shown to be inter­de­pend­ent. If there were no name, there could be no labeling, i.e. no con­cep­tual pro­cessing of sens­ory exper­i­ence. If there were no form, there would be no aware­ness of the world out­side. Finally the pas­sage pro­ceeds by way of syn­thesis to show that both of these pro­cesses are essen­tial aspects of ‘contact’.

So far I have treated this ana­lysis as gen­eral psy­cho­logy. But the con­text, and else­where too, sug­gests that it may be applied rather more spe­cific­ally to the field of infant devel­op­ment. Thus we can see that without sens­ory stim­u­lus the infant’s mind would not develop past an undif­fer­en­ti­ated, ‘oceanic’ sub­con­scious, like a fetus in the womb. And without devel­op­ing con­cep­tual abil­it­ies one could not learn to assim­il­ate and pro­cess sens­ory input in a mean­ing­ful and use­ful form.

But I have omit­ted the most import­ant aspect of this pas­sage for under­stand­ing early Buddhist onto­logy. Nor­mally in depend­ent ori­gin­a­tion, exist­ence is simply described in terms of the exist­ence of the factor itself, as in the fam­ous for­mula: ‘This being, that is…this not being, that is not’. But our present pas­sage speaks, not of the exist­ence of, say, ‘name’, but of the exist­ence of ‘the fea­tures, prop­er­ties, signs, and sum­mar­ies by which there is a concept of name’. If these ‘prop­er­ties’ are absent, no ‘labeling con­tact’ regard­ing ‘form’ can be ‘found’. Con­versely, if the ‘prop­er­ties’ by which there is a ‘concept’ of ‘form’ are absent, no ‘impact con­tact’ regard­ing ‘name’ can be ‘found’.

This demon­strates in a most emphatic and expli­cit way that the ‘prop­er­ties’ by which phe­nom­ena are known are, for all Dhamma pur­poses, equi­val­ent to the phe­nom­ena them­selves, since they per­form the identical func­tion in depend­ent ori­gin­a­tion. We can­not dis­tin­guish between a thing’s prop­er­ties and the thing itself, since the label we give a ‘thing’ is just a concept denot­ing the exer­cise of cer­tain func­tions. To say a thing ‘exists’ is to say it is ‘found’. And the very work­ings of exper­i­ence, the fun­da­mental struc­ture of inform­a­tion pro­cessing, is neces­sar­ily depend­ent on this con­cep­tual appar­atus. Without ‘labeling’, without the prop­er­ties by which a thing is ‘con­cep­tu­al­ized’, stim­u­lus, and hence the entire per­cep­tual pro­cess can­not work. Thus this pas­sage thor­oughly demol­ishes any attempt to wedge a divi­sion between ‘ulti­mate real­ity’ and ‘con­ven­tional real­ity’. Wis­dom does not con­sist in going past con­ven­tion to the ulti­mate sub­stratum, but in under­stand­ing how con­cep­tu­al­iz­ing is inher­ent in the cog­nit­ive pro­cess itself. Hence the Buddha said that the extent of con­cepts, lan­guage, and labeling is pre­cisely the domain of wis­dom; that is, birth, age­ing, and death, cog­ni­tion together with name & form.

Bhikkhu Bodhi, how­ever, reads this pas­sage in just the oppos­ite way. For him, the men­tion of the ‘prop­er­ties’ implies that they are con­cep­tu­ally dis­tinct from the thing in & of itself. But he is surely just read­ing a later agenda into an earlier teach­ing. He but­tresses his pos­i­tion with ref­er­ence to the three ‘ways’ of speech, des­ig­na­tion, and lan­guage, men­tioned a little below in our sutta. Claim­ing sup­port from the com­ment­ar­ies (although they are not con­sist­ent here, always a sus­pi­cious sign), he says that ‘speech’ refers to con­cep­tual descrip­tion, while the ‘way’ of speech refers to the object­ive ref­er­ent of speech, i.e. the five aggregates.

Unfor­tu­nately, when the identical phrase occurs in the Khandha Saṁyutta, it refers to, not five, but three ‘ways’ of speech – that is, past tense, future tense, and present tense (remem­ber­ing that in Pali these tenses often mean past lives, future lives, and the present life). Any state­ment must be phrased in terms of these modes, and must there­fore buy into time, into the course of rebirths. This is espe­cially so in a heav­ily inflec­ted lan­guage like Pali, where the tenses are built into the verb forms; the state­ment would per­haps lose some of its punch when applied to, say, Chinese or other unin­flec­ted lan­guages where tenses may be omitted.

Under­stand­ing the dif­fer­ence between ‘ulti­mate’ and ‘con­ven­tional’ truth was upheld by later Buddhists as a sign of pro­found wis­dom, a key to pen­et­rat­ing the inner mys­ter­ies of the Dhamma. But any spe­cial­ized field of endeavor – from mech­an­ics to math­em­at­ics, from fish­ing to phys­ics – will develop a tech­nical vocab­u­lary of terms used in nar­rowly defined and some­times eccent­ric ways – a jar­gon. Dhamma is no dif­fer­ent. We just take our jar­gon a tad too seriously.

Tra­cing the arbit­rary and incon­sist­ent usage of this onto­lo­gical apartheid in its checkered career through Buddhist his­tory, I can dis­cern only one con­stant factor – to exalt one’s own teach­ings as ‘ulti­mate’ and den­ig­rate oth­ers’ as ‘con­ven­tional’. Thus the abhid­hamma is ‘ulti­mate’ while the sut­tas are ‘con­ven­tional’; or the Mahay­ana sut­tas are ‘ulti­mate’ while the abhid­hamma is ‘con­ven­tional’. It is a stand­ard piece of abhid­hamma rhet­oric to claim that the entire abhid­hamma is phrased in terms of ‘ulti­mate truth’. But this is trans­par­ent bluster. There are two whole books, and much mater­ial else­where in the Abhid­hamma Pitaka, that straight­for­wardly talk of what even the abhid­ham­mi­kas would con­sider to be ‘con­ven­tional’ truth. Thus the Kathāvat­thu enlight­ens us with learned dis­cus­sions on such cru­cial issues as, say, the smell of the Buddha’s excre­ment. How­ever I allege that every word in the Abhid­hamma Piṭaka, from ‘kus­ala’ to ‘pac­cayo’, is noth­ing but convention.

Prob­ably the com­posers of the Abhid­hamma Piṭaka would agree with me. The Pug­gala Paññatti (‘The Concept of the Per­son’) lists six con­cepts, the con­cepts of aggreg­ates, sense media, ele­ments, truths, fac­ulties, and per­sons. The Pug­gala Paññatti itself obvi­ously deals with the sixth kind of concept, and the rest of the Abhid­hamma Pitaka deals with the remain­ing con­cepts. Thus, in har­mony with the sut­tas and the rest of the Abhid­hamma Pitaka, there is no attempt to sanc­tify the aggreg­ates, etc., with a priv­ileged onto­lo­gical status above the ‘person’.

The later abhid­ham­mi­kas, draw­ing on the subtle epi­stem­o­logy of the Sautrāntikas, pro­posed that con­ven­tional truth is known through infer­ence (anvaya, anumāna), while ulti­mate truth is known through dir­ect per­cep­tion (pac­cakkha). Ulti­mate truth is then said to con­sti­tute the objects of vipas­sanā, while the objects of samatha are mere con­ven­tional truth. I have argued else­where at length that samatha and vipas­sanā are not dis­tin­guished in the sut­tas by their objects, but by their char­ac­ter­istic emphasis on either peace or under­stand­ing. But I do not need to resort to the sub­tleties of dia­lectic to refute this the­ory. For we need only glance at the way ‘dir­ect know­ledge’ (dhamme ñāṇaṁ) and ‘infer­en­tial know­ledge’ (anvaye ñāṇaṁ) are treated in the Nidāna Saṁyutta to see that they are both aspects of vipas­sanā. Dir­ect know­ledge under­stands the present; infer­en­tial know­ledge under­stands the past and future.

In the Mahā Nidāna Sutta pas­sage, name and form are also called the ‘name group’ and the ‘form group’, imply­ing that each con­sists of a num­ber of factors. Else­where in the sut­tas they are indeed defined, not syn­thet­ic­ally as above, but ana­lyt­ic­ally. Name is feel­ing, per­cep­tion, atten­tion, con­tact, and voli­tion. Form is the four great phys­ical prop­er­ties and derived form. The con­nec­tion between name and its ori­ginal mean­ing is grow­ing weaker. It is now an umbrella term for a class of men­tal func­tions, only some of which are dir­ectly asso­ci­ated with con­cep­tu­al­iz­ing. One factor which is, how­ever, asso­ci­ated with con­cep­tu­al­iz­ing is ‘per­cep­tion’. This is the asso­ci­at­ive aspect of con­scious­ness. ‘Per­cep­tion’ (saññā) relates to ‘cog­ni­tion’ (viññāṇa) as ‘con­nota­tion’ relates to ‘denota­tion’. The sut­tas treat it as a key aspect of concept form­a­tion. In every­day usage it can mean ‘con­tract’, ‘agree­ment’. In this sense, per­cep­tion (saññā) approaches the mean­ing of con­ven­tion (sam­muti). The two are ety­mo­lo­gic­ally par­al­lel. Note­worthy by its absence from name is ‘thought’ (vitakka), which is not an essen­tial factor for con­scious­ness. Else­where the factors con­sti­tut­ing name are said to pre­cede thought. So it seems that des­pite the terms ‘name’ and ‘labeling’, name deals with very fun­da­mental, pre-linguistic proto-conceptual processes.

By the time of the abhid­hamma, name has drif­ted even fur­ther from its basic mean­ing. Now name becomes an umbrella for all men­tal phe­nom­ena, includ­ing cog­ni­tion, which as we saw above was spe­cific­ally excluded in the sut­tas. This is jus­ti­fied by rely­ing on a spuri­ous con­nec­tion with the verb ‘to bend’, and assert­ing that cog­ni­tion ‘bends’ towards its objects – a highly ath­letic accom­plish­ment for our agile mind-moment! Thus ‘name & form’ becomes trans­lated as ‘mind and body’, the ‘ulti­mate real­ity’, and wis­dom is the abil­ity to mince these into very small bits. Which rather misses the point. A skilled sur­geon is not one who can hack their patient into shreds, but one who can del­ic­ately remove just the dis­eased tissue.

Let’s com­pare ana­lytic treat­ment in the sut­tas and abhid­hamma. Con­sider the fam­ous chariot simile. Just as when the parts come together the word ‘chariot’ is used, so too when the five aggreg­ates are present the word ‘self’ is used. There’s no implic­a­tion that the parts are in any way more ‘ulti­mate’ than the chariot as a whole. The parts are them­selves just con­structs that may be fur­ther ana­lyzed. Nor is there any implic­a­tion that there would be any bene­fit in redu­cing the chariot to ‘ulti­mate’ parts and defin­ing every ele­ment, even if this was pos­sible. The pur­pose of the ana­lysis is simply to show that the word ‘chariot’ is a con­ven­tion, not to prove that there is some­thing else which is not a con­ven­tion. By pos­tu­lat­ing an onto­lo­gic­ally priv­ileged ulti­mate strata of being, one is com­mit­ting the very error the ori­ginal simile was designed to dis­pel. There are sutta pas­sages where the Buddha, not­ably when dis­cuss­ing self-theories, emphas­izes that he is just speak­ing con­ven­tion­ally. Mod­ern trans­lat­ors often sup­ply a help­ful note inform­ing us that this is a ref­er­ence to the ‘two levels of truth’, ulti­mate and con­ven­tional; but the pas­sages say noth­ing of ‘ulti­mate truth’!

Another aspect of the chariot simile is that it is not reduc­tion­ist – none of the parts of a chariot per­forms the func­tions of the whole. We can’t divide one big chariot into two small chari­ots. Rather, the func­tion of a chariot, its ‘drive­ab­il­ity’, is a prop­erty that emerges from the har­mo­ni­ous co-operation of the vari­ous parts. But the abhid­hamma pos­its an ultra-crude reduc­tion­ism, bey­ond any­thing dreamt of by sci­ence. Each kalapa – the ulti­mate unit of mat­ter, com­pared by mod­ern abhid­ham­mi­kas with such con­cepts as the ‘atom’ or the ‘elec­tron’, has its own color, taste, smell, and nutri­ment. Instead of ‘taste’ being a com­plex phe­nomenon involving chem­ical, physiolo­gical, and psy­cho­lo­gical factors, it’s just a big pile of little tastes. Per­haps the phys­i­cists may have some opin­ion as to the fla­vor of sub-atomic particles. This kind of ana­lysis just car­ries ideas over from the ‘big’ world into the ‘small’ world and pats itself on the back for being so clever. So too the self (attā) is just a big pile of ‘self-existents’ (sab­hāva).

This kind of ana­lysis is remin­is­cent of Jain anim­ism, which sees all exist­ence as com­posed of atoms (paramāṇu), which they call ‘per­sons’ (pudgala). These are ele­mental souls (jīva, lives), pos­sessed of color, odor, and taste. The souls of earth, etc., are tiny, undeveloped, and can only be per­ceived when vast amounts of them accu­mu­late in one place. The souls of humans are merely an advanced ver­sion. The simple anim­istic the­or­ies of the early Jaina Sut­ras, whose con­cepts prob­ably pre-date the Buddha, became developed by their com­ment­ar­ies in abstruse and baff­ling detail. In fact, the ele­ments of earth, water, etc., were com­monly wor­shipped as gods in ancient times. This throws doubt on the claim that the Buddha demon­strated not-self simply by show­ing that what we call a ‘per­son’ is no more than a con­glom­er­ate of ele­ments, since those listen­ing would have regarded the ele­ments them­selves as selves or souls. Again, we can­not argue that what we nor­mally think of as a self is merely the five aggreg­ates; for it is pre­cisely the five aggreg­ates that are iden­ti­fied with the self: ‘Phys­ical form is self, feel­ing is self…’. Divid­ing things up fur­ther just mul­ti­plies selves. Hor­ror of horrors!

With this redefin­i­tion of name & form that came to pre­vail in the abhid­hamma, we seem to be mov­ing towards a reific­a­tion of the treat­ment of phe­nom­ena, that is, treat­ing them as entit­ies rather than events. This impres­sion is rein­forced when we see how the abhid­hamma handles the cru­cial task of defin­i­tion, sup­posedly its forte. We have seen that the sut­tas typ­ic­ally define a noun with a verb; for example, ‘cog­ni­tion’ = ‘cog­nizes’. This kind of defin­i­tion is exactly par­al­lel with the ambi­gu­ity between waves and particles in quantum phys­ics. It implies that a ‘thing’ and an ‘event’ are in some sense equi­val­ent; or, more gen­er­ally , that ‘being’ and ‘time’ are dif­fer­ent modes of describ­ing the same real­ity. Another way of put­ting this is that ‘being’ and ‘time’, since they are con­cepts, are incap­able of fully appre­hend­ing the rich­ness of exper­i­ence. We may pro­vi­sion­ally denote an aspect of exper­i­ence in terms of ‘being’ with a noun, or of ‘time’ with a verb; but the real­ity of exper­i­ence is always some­thing else, some­thing more. Flex­ibly employ­ing the two approaches will prove more authen­tic than com­mit­ment to a hard and fast divi­sion between the two.

But the abhid­hamma is, of course, thus com­mit­ted, pos­tu­lat­ing a rigid, mech­an­istic, abso­lute ‘time’ made up of a row of bricks of ‘being’. So the abhid­hamma, ignor­ing the sub­tleties of the sut­tas, defines cog­ni­tion by merely list­ing a series of syn­onyms.²

The reify­ing tend­ency takes full flight in later abhid­hamma lit­er­at­ure. Here the key term is ‘dhamma’. We have seen that for the sut­tas, dhamma refers exclus­ively to the empir­ical phe­nom­ena of exper­i­ence – the Buddha expressly declared that all he teaches is suf­fer­ing and the end of suf­fer­ing. But the abhid­hamma makes an appar­ently innoc­u­ous shift – dham­mas become defined by their ‘sab­hāva’, their ‘intrinsic essence’, or ‘own-nature’, or ‘self-existent’. The com­ment­ar­ies do some­times make use of the man­ner of defin­ing a noun in terms of a verb. But they care­fully say that this is a mere con­tin­gent usage; the ulti­mate mode of defin­i­tion is to define a phe­nomenon (dhamma) by its intrinsic essence (sab­hāva). The sab­hāva is really the same as the dhamma, we’re told, but the dis­tinc­tion must be made for the pur­pose of defin­i­tion. Say what? Why on earth is it any easier to define a sab­hāva than to define a dhamma?

At this point the trust­ing and slightly over­awed novice stu­dent – like your present author in his starry-eyed youth – nods sagely in assumed com­pre­hen­sion and then pro­ceeds to for­get this strangely inex­plic­able com­ment as they are snowed under by a sea of detail. The doc­trine of sab­hāvas has been sub­jec­ted to with­er­ing cri­ti­cism since its incep­tion, yet it saunters along quite mer­rily, blithely ignor­ing its own sil­li­ness. The true pur­pose of the sab­hāva doc­trine, I allege, is to shift the domain of dis­course behind another meta­phys­ical cur­tain. The real action, the ‘ulti­mate real­ity’, is going on backstage.

Some soph­ist­ic­ated mod­ern abhid­ham­mi­kas, how­ever, deny that the abhid­hamma falls into sub­stan­tial­ist con­cep­tions. Mind moments, they say, are ‘acts’ or ‘events’ of con­scious­ness. They are ‘know­ing’, not that which knows’. Great; we agree as to the fun­da­mental con­cep­tion of con­scious­ness. The ques­tion is whether we feel this con­cep­tion dom­in­ates the abhid­hamma or not. Here I feel that these schol­ars, impli­citly accept­ing the cri­ti­cism, are sub­con­sciously adjust­ing the abhid­hamma to escape its force. Since the abhid­hamma is (of course!) phrased entirely in terms of ulti­mate truth, we should expect that the treat­ment of con­scious­ness as a func­tion will be entirely plain and expli­cit through­out. But no – the abhid­hamma con­stantly speaks of mind-moments as entit­ies per­form­ing func­tions, as accom­pa­ny­ing men­tal factors, or as pos­sess­ing eth­ical qual­it­ies, not simply as the cog­niz­ance of these things. One could argue that this is just for lin­guistic con­veni­ence. But idio­mat­ic­ness is not a rel­ev­ant cri­terion in abhid­hamma lan­guage. If mind is spoken of as an entity, it must be an entity. If else­where this is denied, this simply adds inco­her­ence to error. Please note that these are not trivial or pedantic cri­ti­cisms, but go to the heart of what abhid­hamma means. The very idea of ulti­mate truth is mis­guided and must inev­it­ably lead to the grasp­ing of the word, the expres­sion, as Truth itself. Here’s a clas­sic example of hard­core onto­lo­gical real­ism from a mod­ern abhidhammika.

[Rūpa para­mat­thas] ‘are also sub­ject to change, yet the dis­tinct­ive char­ac­ter­ist­ics [sab­hāva] of these rūpas are identic­ally the same whether they are found in a ves­sel or a vase. They pre­serve their iden­tity in whatever com­bin­a­tion they are found – hence the com­ment­arial inter­pret­a­tion of parama as “immut­able” or “real”. “Attha” exactly cor­res­ponds to the Eng­lish multi-significant term “thing”.’³

Let’s take an over­view of the two main books of the Abhid­hamma Pitaka, the Dhammasaṅgaṇī and the Paṭṭhāna. The first is chiefly con­cerned with the ana­lysis and cat­egor­iz­a­tion of dham­mas, while the second con­cerns itself with syn­thesis, relent­lessly cata­loguing all the pos­sible rela­tions of phe­nom­ena. This is some­times called the analytic/synthetic method, a label appar­ently designed to defend the abhid­hamma against the charge that it is obsessed with dual­istic analysis.

I would like to take the liberty of com­par­ing this pro­ced­ure with that of God in Gen­esis. First we make a mould of clay (= rūpa, defined as ‘without mind’). Then we take the breath of God (= nāma, defined as ‘without mat­ter’). Then we inject one into the other. Thus mind-body dual­ism – that hydra-headed specter which has haunted the cor­ridors of thought for thou­sands of years – takes root in Buddhism. We are left with the Franken­stein­ian prob­lem of explain­ing how two utterly dif­fer­ent kinds of entity end up co-inhabiting the same mon­strous con­glom­er­ate – the ghost in the machine.

This task is the bur­den of the Paṭṭhāna, a book whose labyrinth­ine mazes are ideally suited to mask­ing the fact that it is a spuri­ous solu­tion to a pseudo-problem. The Paṭṭhāna, the most revered – and there­fore least read – of all abhid­hamma books, is said to present 24 modes of con­di­tional rela­tion­ships. It does noth­ing of the sort. Most of the much-vaunted ‘modes of con­di­tional rela­tions’ are merely lists of dham­mas that act as con­di­tion for other dham­mas. The text says little about caus­al­ity as such; in fact this work excels all other products of the human mind in its com­bin­a­tion of verb­os­ity of form with vacu­ity of con­tent. Remark­ably, it is less intel­lec­tu­ally stim­u­lat­ing and less read­able than a tele­phone book. The Paṭṭhāna attempts to glue the mind and the body back together again with its ‘dis­so­ci­ation con­di­tion’, a term which per­fectly encap­su­lates the strange world of mind-body dual­ism: things are con­nec­ted by being dis­con­nec­ted. I can cer­tainly con­firm that if I think about this stuff too much, I end up in a very dis­so­ci­ated condition!

I feel that this impli­cit dual­ism of late Buddhism has had a subtle but import­ant impact in the some­time fail­ure of mod­ern Buddhists to under­stand or to explain the Buddhist response to sci­entific cri­tiques of reli­gious con­cepts, most import­antly life after death. The eschat­o­lo­gical the­or­ies of most reli­gions are expli­citly dual­istic. The soul and the body are two dif­fer­ent things. At death the body is aban­doned and the soul lives forever. This idea has been stub­bornly lodged in the heart of West­ern thought since God did mouth-to-mouth on Adam.

Only in the 19th Cen­tury did some rad­ical Ger­man sci­ent­ists, fed up with the wooly-mindednss and unveri­fi­ab­il­ity of meta­phys­ical thought, do away with the soul alto­gether and decide to deal only with observ­able phys­ical ele­ments and forces. They wrote a mani­festo to this effect and signed it, like pir­ates, in their own blood. It is cru­cial to see that this is a reac­tion to soul/body dual­ism, reject­ing the soul and affirm­ing the body. One of those young sci­ent­ists went on to com­pose the the­ory of ther­mo­dy­nam­ics, whose key idea – ‘for every action there is an equal and oppos­ite reac­tion’ – was spe­cific­ally for­mu­lated to exclude the pos­sib­il­ity of meta­phys­ical inter­ven­tion. The world is a closed sys­tem. There are no gaps through which the divine hand can reach in and inter­vene. Effect­ively this affirms that the soul and the body are the same.

This is, of course, one of the meta­phys­ical pos­i­tions which the Buddha fam­ously declined to take a stand on: ‘The soul is one thing, the body another’, and ‘The soul and the body are the same’. The Buddha escaped this prob­lem by refus­ing to enter the arena. He rejec­ted as use­less the very assump­tions under­ly­ing the for­mu­la­tion of the ques­tion. It is like answer­ing the ques­tion ‘Do you beat your wife often?’ So a Buddhist can point out that when the sci­ent­ists define the phys­ical world as a closed sys­tem, the mind is already there, mak­ing the­or­ies, devis­ing assump­tions, tak­ing meas­ure­ments, impli­cit in all sci­entific activ­ity. We are there­fore quite happy to agree with the sci­ent­ists that no meta­phys­ical entity can inter­vene or sur­vive phys­ical death. What takes rebirth is just this very same mind. So Buddhism, early Buddhism that is, eas­ily escapes the gen­eral the­or­et­ical cri­tiques by sci­ence of meta­phys­ical the­or­ies. Spe­cific Buddhist ideas, how­ever, are still obvi­ously sub­ject to empir­ical test­ing by sci­entific means.

But the abhid­ham­mi­kas, com­mit­ted to their dual­istic meta­phys­ics, are unable to straight­for­wardly escape sci­entific cri­tiques of meta­phys­ical eschat­o­logy. Instead, they seem to feel that by mak­ing their psy­cho­logy reduc­tion­ist and mech­an­ical enough they can avoid the prob­lem, not real­iz­ing they are just mak­ing a reduc­tion­ist and mech­an­ical meta­phys­ics. They say that when the series of con­scious moments is cut off at death a new con­scious­ness arises imme­di­ately, with no inter­me­di­ary state, as the ‘re-linking con­scious­ness’ at the con­cep­tion of a new indi­vidual. This view, derived from the Kathāvat­thu, is obvi­ously try­ing to dis­tin­guish the Buddhist notion of rebirth from the Brahmanical, which does posit a ‘self’ passing through an inter­me­di­ate exist­ence between births. Unfor­tu­nately for the abhid­ham­mi­kas, there are a num­ber of sutta pas­sages that clearly accept an inter­me­di­ate exist­ence of some kind.

This again points up the abhid­ham­mic mis­con­cep­tion of ‘not-self’. When a per­son dies, whether they go straight to another body, or pass through an inter­me­di­ate state, (or hang around to scare the rel­at­ives and nibble the dain­ties at the funeral!) has noth­ing to do with whether they are a meta­phys­ical entity or a con­di­tioned pro­cess. The point is that this inter­me­di­ate exist­ence is imper­man­ent and fed by crav­ing. If I were a self the­or­ist I would have no prob­lem, tak­ing advant­age of the rich ima­gin­at­ive license afforded by meta­phys­ical spec­u­la­tion, in pos­tu­lat­ing a ‘self’ in the last moment of con­scious­ness that dis­ap­pears and reappears with no inter­val as the ‘self’ under­ly­ing the new indi­vidual. In fact, I would have no prob­lem in accept­ing the entire abhid­ham­mic psy­cho­logy and simply say­ing that there’s a self under­ly­ing each of the mind moments. You might think such a the­ory absurd. I agree; but I think all meta­phys­ical the­or­ies absurd. But they were the norm in ancient times, and I fear the abhid­ham­mi­kas were just fol­low­ing the flock with their ‘self-existent’ under­ly­ing each of the dhammas.

The sut­tas refuse to coun­ten­ance dual­istic assump­tions and so the prob­lem does not arise. First they point to the flow of phe­nom­ena as they actu­ally occur in exper­i­ence, then draw atten­tion to the cru­cial aspects by way of ana­lysis and/or syn­thesis. The sut­tas, des­pite being mis­rep­res­en­ted by abhidhamma-influenced trans­lat­ors, speak not of the ‘mind and body’, but of the ‘body together with its con­scious­ness’. Each of the vari­ous phys­ical and men­tal aspects or qual­it­ies con­trib­ute their own spe­cial func­tion to that great whorl of rela­tion­ship we call ‘experience’.

The doc­trine of sab­hāvas has been accused of des­troy­ing depend­ent ori­gin­a­tion. If a thing is ‘self-existent’, what need for con­di­tions? If it is con­di­tioned, what need for a ‘self-existent’? The sut­tas typ­ic­ally speak of real­ity not as ‘exist­ent’ (bhāva), but as ‘become’ (bhūta), what has been con­di­tion­ally pro­duced. These are cer­tainly not equi­val­ent. Nib­bana is the ‘not-become’ (abhūta), but, accord­ing to the abhid­hamma, it is ‘self-existent’ (sab­hāva). The the­ory of sab­hāvas thus pos­its an essen­tial onto­lo­gical sim­il­ar­ity between Nib­bana and saṁsāra. Hence the sab­hāvic con­cep­tion of Nib­bana must fall prey to the most import­ant of all argu­ments against God, a ‘Ground of Being’, or any other attempt to con­ceive the sum­mum bonum in terms of an exist­ing meta­phys­ical abso­lute: the argu­ment from evil.

Is ‘sab­hāvatā’, ‘self-existingness’, part of the first noble truth, that is, suf­fer­ing? If it is, then Nib­bana, since it par­takes of sab­hāvatā, must also par­take of suf­fer­ing. But if sab­hāvatā is not suf­fer­ing, what is it doing in the Dhamma? Surely it is but a meta­phys­ical abstrac­tion of no use in solv­ing our spir­itual prob­lems. An obvi­ous response to this argu­ment is to con­tend that, while sab­hāvatā in and of itself does not par­take of suf­fer­ing, still cer­tain sab­hāvadham­mas are part of suf­fer­ing, i.e. the five aggreg­ates, while cer­tain sab­hāvadham­mas are not part of suf­fer­ing, i.e. Nib­bana. But in this case too we must see that the doc­trine of sab­hāvas is unable to draw any rel­ev­ant con­cep­tual dis­tinc­tion between such rad­ic­ally dif­fer­ent prin­ciples as true hap­pi­ness and real suf­fer­ing; how then can this doc­trine help us to move from pain to peace?

So this meta­phys­ical con­cep­tion of ‘being’ in terms of sabhava is the cul­prit for the near-universal mis­con­cep­tion of Nib­bana as a kind of meta­phys­ical Abso­lute, Ground of Being, Cos­mic Con­scious­ness, or ‘Infin­ite Clear Light Non-dual Dia­mond Void­ness’. In early Buddhist terms these ideas would trans­late as ‘Abso­lute Suf­fer­ing’, ‘Ground of Suf­fer­ing’, ‘Cos­mic Suf­fer­ing’, and ‘Infin­ite Clear Light Non-dual Dia­mond Suffering’.

It is very true that the sut­tas emphat­ic­ally affirm the real­ity of Nib­bana; but real­ity in the sut­tas is in no sense and no way con­ceived in meta­phys­ical terms. Such ideas are not merely incom­pat­ible with the sut­tas, but totally incom­men­sur­able; the Buddha had noth­ing to say when ques­tioned on meta­phys­ical issues. So when the sut­tas say, for example, ‘There is anger in me’, they speak of a simple empir­ical real­ity, with no under­ly­ing meta­phys­ical implic­a­tions. Sim­il­arly, when they say ‘There is the unborn, the unbe­come, the unmade, the uncon­di­tioned…’ they speak of what is ‘to be real­ized’, with no under­ly­ing meta­phys­ical implic­a­tions. They affirm the real­ity of ces­sa­tion. Nib­bana exists in the same sense that uni­corns, hob­bits, God, the soul, mind-moments, or sab­hāvas do not exist. It is not a fantasy, not an illu­sion, not a spec­u­la­tion, but is the end­ing of fantasy, of illu­sion, and of speculation.

The concept of sab­hāva, then, clearly pos­its a sphere of ‘being’ divorced from con­di­tions – and this is just what I mean by ‘meta­phys­ics’. It is a shadow world, a twi­light zone where abstract defin­i­tions parade as ‘ulti­mate real­ity’, and phe­nom­ena come neatly labeled with their own name-tag – in Pali, of course.

Per­haps, gentle reader, you think I’m going over the top. I wish, I really do. But let us per­use the hal­lowed pages of the Visuddhi­magga, the Bible of the abhid­ham­mi­kas. That revered icon, in one of its more flam­boy­ant flour­ishes of absurdity, actu­ally insists that Pali is the ‘root lan­guage of all lan­guages’, the ‘self-existent lan­guage’, hard-wired into the cir­cuitry of real­ity.⁴ It is a ster­ling test­a­ment to the Visuddhimagga’s faith in its own con­cep­tual appar­atus that it is will­ing to fol­low the implic­a­tions of the sab­hāva the­ory through to their logical con­clu­sion, no mat­ter how ludicrous.

In this they may have been influ­enced by con­tem­por­ary Brahmanical the­or­ies. For example, the Mīmaṁsās regarded the lan­guage of the Vedas as an eman­a­tion of Being into sound, and so when recit­ing Vedic man­tras one was com­mun­ing with pat­terns woven into the fab­ric of the cos­mos, thus explain­ing the undoubted effic­acy of the man­tras. Sim­ilar ideas per­meate Buddhist cul­ture today. It reminds me of a state­ment by Ter­tul­lian, one of the fath­ers of the Cath­olic church – ‘It is believ­able because it’s absurd… It is cer­tain because it’s impossible’. Do we per­haps begin to see how a med­it­a­tion sys­tem con­sist­ing in a labeling tech­nique has man­aged to con­vince the world that it is a short-cut to ‘ulti­mate reality’?

The fal­lacy of the the­ory of sab­hāvas, just as with the the­ory of moments, lies in read­ing the con­nota­tions of our terms for real­ity into real­ity itself; that is, in assum­ing that real­ity reflects its con­cep­tual descrip­tion. Let me illus­trate this by going back to Gen­esis. From our per­spect­ive, it’s almost impossible to read that story without meta­ph­or­iz­ing it, as I did above – did you notice? We auto­mat­ic­ally assume that the breath of God is a meta­phor for an imma­ter­ial soul. But look again; noth­ing sug­gests such a metaphor.

The prim­it­ive tribespeople who wrote the story were yet to develop such soph­ist­ic­ated, abstract notions as an imma­ter­ial soul. They simply noticed that when a per­son is breath­ing they’re alive and when they stop breath­ing they die. The con­cep­tion of an imma­ter­ial soul developed gradu­ally, in a series of suc­cess­ively more refined stages. But even the most refined con­cep­tions of a self still embody char­ac­ter­ist­ics of the simple notion from which they derive. As the breath is light, so the soul is light; as the breath is sens­it­ive, so the soul is sens­it­ive; as the breath is bound up with life and departs at death, so too the soul. Notice, too, that the basic mis­take is not dis­placed by the refine­ment of the the­ory, but rep­lic­ates itself, like a virus that becomes even dead­lier as it evolves to out­smart the ever stronger anti­bi­ot­ics that are thrown at it. There simply are no dis­tinct entit­ies of ‘breath’ and ‘body’ which have to be some­how glued together. So too there is no dis­tinct entity of ‘soul’ apart from the empir­ical real­ity of consciousness.

In just the same way, as the word ‘con­tact’ is inde­pend­ent from the word ‘feel­ing’, we assume that the sab­hāva of con­tact is inde­pend­ent from the sab­hāva of feel­ing. Just as the word ‘mind’ stays con­stant in time, we find the abhid­ham­mi­kas assert­ing that the sab­hāvas do not change over the three peri­ods of time.⁵ Just as the word ‘dhamma’ appears to exist object­ively on the page, so they assume that the sab­hāvas exist object­ively in real­ity. And just as the the­ists, assum­ing that the word ‘I’ refers to an object­ively exist­ing entity, form a doc­trine of self, so too the abhid­ham­mi­kas, assum­ing that the word ‘dhamma’ refers to an object­ively exist­ing entity, form a the­ory of sab­hāvas (self-existents).

This is why the ancients unequi­voc­ally declared that the doc­trine of sab­hāvas amounts to noth­ing but a hid­den doc­trine of self. This pos­i­tion is quite expli­cit in the Hindu tra­di­tion; the Bhagavad-Gita says: ‘The essen­tial nature (sab­hāva) is called the Self’.⁶ This is just the same psy­cho­lo­gical pro­cess described in the Mahā Nidāna Sutta. We can­not dis­tin­guish between real­ity and our con­cepts of real­ity, because our con­cep­tual appar­atus shapes the real­ity of exper­i­ence – and this is the only real­ity we know. The only ‘ulti­mate real­ity’ bey­ond con­cepts is Nib­bana – the end­ing of con­scious­ness, the end­ing of time, the end­ing of being.

…THE WORD.

With the found­a­tions of being and time unce­re­mo­ni­ously dis­mantled, the gleam­ing stainless-steel archi­tec­ton­ics of the abhid­hamma col­lapse inwards with a groan like the World Trade Cen­ter, or like the Titanic rent asun­der on the cruel ice of dia­lectic. Per­haps it would be best to depart from the dis­aster area for a time, lest we be accused of being philo­soph­ical ter­ror­ists linger­ing to gloat at the scene of the crime. We could do with some light relief. Let me tell you a story.

Pic­ture this, if you will. A time long ago, a place far away. A simple vil­lage, where the chick­ens squawk and the palm trees sway. There’s a young lady who’s recently been blessed with her first child. Tire­lessly she dotes on him, cleans him, and feeds him. She loves noth­ing bet­ter than to sit rock­ing her darling as the even­ing settles cool and slow over the bustle of the day’s activities.

But of a sud­den the young baby is stricken with some name­less afflic­tion. Daily he weak­ens; until one day, as his mother cradles him to her breast, he breaths his last sad, quiet breath. His mother is dis­traught, driven wild with grief and con­fu­sion. But her hus­band can offer no solace. Her mother and father, her broth­ers and sis­ters, her friends and rel­at­ives – they’re all at a loss.

Finally someone sug­gests she go to the temple. She’s never been before, never been inter­ested. But now the grand pagoda looms above her as she mounts the steps. She dares the threshold, then pauses as her eyes adjust to the dim, smoky, candlelit interior. She creeps nervously in, bows at the altar, then approaches the priest. He sits, eyes half-closed as he mumbles some ancient man­tra. The place is filled with mys­ter­i­ous ancient texts and exotic objects. She takes her place beneath his seat and asks her question.

‘Ven­er­able sir.’

‘Yes, my child?’

‘Ven­er­able sir, what hap­pens when we die?’

He looks kindly down at her and smiles. ‘Death, my child, is no mys­tery. Let me explain. When you see some­thing, it is not you who sees. There is a little man, the size of a thumb, who lives in your chest. He is the one who sees. When you hear some­thing, it is the little man who hears. When the little man lifts up his arm, you lift up your arm. It is the little man who thinks, who speaks, who feels. When you die, the little man who is your self does not die. He flies out of your mouth to live up in the sky forever with all the other little men. So there’s no need to be afraid of death.’

As she listens with grow­ing com­pre­hen­sion her eyes fill with tears of joy. Grate­fully she thanks the priest for clear­ing up her con­fu­sion, makes him an offer­ing, bows, and leaves, her wor­ries all gone.

Yes, the details of the story are a tongue-in-cheek inven­tion. But the the­ory is not. The little man the size of a thumb appears in ancient Brahmanic the­or­ies of the self. Sim­ilar ideas, dif­fer­ing wildly in details but the same in essence, have been quite lit­er­ally believed in by the vast major­ity of people all through his­tory, as they still are today.

There are two strik­ing fea­tures of such ideas. The first is that they’re so ludicrous – badly, sadly, madly wrong. They are, in fact, utterly mean­ing­less, mere empty words float­ing with no ref­er­ent. The second fea­ture is that they are philo­soph­ic­ally use­less – they explain noth­ing. Say­ing that a little man inside my chest is the one who sees tells me pre­cisely noth­ing about the act of see­ing. What it does, as I do not tire of repeat­ing, is shift the domain of dis­cus­sion from the empir­ical world into meta­phys­ics. It cre­ates a world of shadow-puppets divorced from nature, fol­low­ing dif­fer­ent prin­ciples all its own.

Now a little empir­ical invest­ig­a­tion is all that’s needed to dis­close the non-existence of the little man. When this hap­pens our priest must either develop a more abstract the­ory or lose a fol­lower. So the the­ory dodges up a flight of abstrac­tion, hid­ing behind ever more soph­ist­ic­ated cur­tains of mys­ti­fic­a­tion. It’s not really a little man, but a subtle body that’s like a little man. And then it becomes, not really a subtle body, but a life-force; but then, not a phys­ical life-force, but an imma­ter­ial essence of life. Until even­tu­ally the soul becomes a node in the cos­mic flux of being, or some other such nonsense. As long as the priest keeps the the­ory abstract enough that the fol­low­ers do not really under­stand it – which is usu­ally not so hard – the sys­tem works very well.

And that is the most start­ling thing of all. It really does work. Our griev­ing devotee gets what she wants – she’s happy. This must surely rank as one of the most out­stand­ing, incred­ible, if some­what embar­rass­ing, fea­tures of human his­tory – that so many have believed in some­thing so silly for so long. The whole super­struc­ture of our human cul­ture is foun­ded on mil­len­nia of error. And often, of course, it is the massive­ness of the super­struc­ture that con­veys the impres­sion that the found­a­tions must be rock solid.

But if we refer back to our story, we can see that the suc­cess of the priest’s advice has noth­ing to do with the cor­rect­ness of his the­ory, and everything to do with the cre­ation of the faith in author­ity. This is really the key. Vir­tu­ally all of the extern­als of reli­gion can be attrib­uted to this imper­at­ive – the cos­tumes, the build­ings, the ini­ti­ations, the rituals. They are spe­cific­ally designed to defy reason, to defy sense, to cre­ate the over­whelm­ing belief in another real­ity – not see­able, touch­able, or reas­on­able, but far more real than the empir­ical world of hum­drum birth, age­ing, and death. Surely, thinks the devotee, here must be one who knows! Surely this Holy Being, so learned, so sagely, so remote, must see more deeply than we! But alas, on reflec­tion we must admit that this impres­sion of author­ity is sheer illu­sion – external form has no rela­tion to depth of wisdom.

The most potent tool in per­petu­at­ing this illu­sion is archaic author­iz­a­tion. This is why reli­gions are so con­ser­vat­ive. Take Cath­oli­cism, for example. Des­pite cen­tur­ies of rail­ing against pagan­ism, of witch burn­ings, of inquis­i­tions and ana­themas, vir­tu­ally every aspect of Cath­olic ritual and dogma can be traced dir­ectly to pagan reli­gions dat­ing cen­tur­ies before Christ. One of the key forms of archaic author­iz­a­tion is the reli­ance on ancient texts – the older and obscurer the better.

So we find that, just as the Cath­ol­ics claim that the Bible is the very Word of God, though the Bible itself makes no such claim, so too the abhid­ham­mi­kas claim that the Abhid­hamma Pitaka is the very Word of the Buddha, though the texts them­selves make no such claim. In order to main­tain the unques­tion­able author­ity of the texts, it is highly desir­able to mono­pol­ize the study in the hands of the priests. The Cath­ol­ics used to burn any Bibles that had been trans­lated into the ver­nacu­lar, and burn at the stake any­one out­side the priest­hood who stud­ied or taught the Bible. Accord­ing to ancient Hindu texts, if one of the menial caste were to listen delib­er­ately to a Vedic man­tra, his ears are to be filled with lead; if he recites it, his tongue is to be cut out: and if he should mem­or­ize it, his body must be cut in half. No mess­ing about. A gentler solu­tion might be simply to make the texts so unbear­ably tedi­ous that few are will­ing to com­mit the lifetime’s work neces­sary to mas­ter them.

I’ve now done with my work of ground-preparation. Little in my essay up to this point has been ori­ginal. I’ve merely bor­rowed bits of ideas from here and there to lend my thesis some semb­lance of plaus­ib­il­ity. My method has been to insinu­ate rather than to prove. If you’ve stuck with my argu­ment up to now and have some ink­ling of what I’m going to say, per­haps you might think ‘He couldn’t! He wouldn’t!’ But, dear reader, you’re wrong. I can, and I will.

I sug­gest that the abhid­hamma is most prof­it­ably con­sidered, not as a psy­cho­logy or as a philo­sophy, but as a mys­tical cult. Its com­plex­ity arises, not from the inher­ent dif­fi­culty of the sub­ject mat­ter, but from the need to cre­ate an impres­sion of unim­peach­able author­ity. Its spe­cial­ists, the abhid­ham­mi­kas, are the High Priests of Buddhism. They play, aloof in their lofty Castle of Thought, the ulti­mate Glass Bead Game. Their role is not to real­ize the Dhamma, but to medi­ate between the devotees and the Plane of Ulti­mate Real­ity. The sab­hāva of the abhid­hamma is its soul, the moment its etern­ity. Its texts are magical incantations. Abhidhamma pas­sages are, in fact, used vir­tu­ally solely for this pur­pose in con­tem­por­ary Thai­l­and, recited at funeral rituals by monks who don’t know their mean­ing for laypeople who don’t care.

The texts, those seven ‘val­leys of dry bones’, are designed for neither study nor prac­tice, but to stand, mute and inscrut­able monu­ments, awe­some as pyr­am­ids in the desert. The chief soteri­olo­gical value of the abhid­hamma lies not in lead­ing to the abandon­ing of crav­ing, nor even in the­or­et­ical clar­ity, but in the naïve faith of the mul­ti­tude that someone, at least, has the Abso­lute well in hand. Its the­or­ies res­ult, not from dir­ect insight into the Dhamma, but from the same cat-and-mouse chase of abstraction-critique-higher abstrac­tion that has given rise to God and the soul. Its unreal, arti­fi­cial air of divorce from real­ity is no unfor­tu­nate con­sequence of our own poor insight, but is its essence, the very impres­sion it was designed to create.

One mis­con­cep­tion I wish to guard against here. This was not, and is not, a delib­er­ate fraud per­pet­rated by an unscru­pu­lous clergy on a duped pub­lic. The abhid­ham­mi­kas, by and large, are per­fectly sin­cere – they really believe in what they do. And, as I have men­tioned, the psy­cho­lo­gical bene­fits are indis­put­able. I would sug­gest, absurd though it may seem, that the whole great adven­ture of the abhid­hamma, that ‘magic lan­tern of chi­meras’, is a fant­astic pro­jec­tion from what some call the ‘col­lect­ive uncon­scious’, a pub­lic mani­fest­a­tion of the need for belief in a Higher Reality.

To sub­stan­ti­ate the essen­tially reli­gious pur­pose of the abhid­hamma, we need look no fur­ther than the myth of the ori­gin of abhid­hamma, which is expounded over many pages at the begin­ning of the abhid­hamma com­ment­ary, and is still taught as sober his­tory by many a pious preacher. Dur­ing his sev­enth rains retreat – a sig­ni­fic­ant num­ber – the Buddha ascen­ded to Tāvatiṁsa heaven to preach the abhid­hamma to the deit­ies. He wished, for some suit­ably obscure reason, to teach the entire Abhid­hamma Pitaka in one unin­ter­rup­ted ses­sion, and humans can­not sit still for three months. The heav­enly set­ting is a con­veni­ent way to both exalt the abhid­hamma as well as to explain away the embar­rass­ing fact that the early sut­tas and vinaya know noth­ing of the abhid­hamma as such, although the word does occur a few times mean­ing just ‘advanced teach­ings’. (A very sim­ilar device was adop­ted by the Mahay­ana – per­haps this is where the Theravada got the idea.) At meal time, the Buddha cre­ated a mind-made body to con­tinue the expos­i­tion while he went for alms. He would meet Ven­er­able Sari­putta and give him the sum­mar­ized method. He thus com­pleted the seven books of the Abhid­hamma Pitaka in three months.

This is cer­tainly a remark­able test­a­ment to his abil­ity to speak very fast. There are, accord­ing to the com­ment­ar­ies, 404 948 533 248 ques­tions in the Paṭṭhāna alone. That makes about 52 000 ques­tions per second for three months. Someone should tell the Guin­ness Book of World Records!⁷ Think what this means: the implic­ate struc­ture of the Paṭṭhāna, sup­posed to rep­res­ent the quint­essence of the Dhamma, has never and will never be rendered expli­cit in any form, neither by chant­ing, by print­ing, by read­ing, and cer­tainly not by understanding.

The tra­di­tion tells us that when the Buddha des­cen­ded from Tāvatiṁsa he cre­ated a crys­tal prom­en­ade in the sky where he paraded back and forth emit­ting streams of fire and water from his body. This tacky exhib­i­tion­ism is entirely out of keep­ing with the Buddha’s dis­dain for gra­tu­it­ous magic dis­plays, which he said were like ‘a har­lot flash­ing her private parts’. The whole fant­astic legend is an elo­quent test­a­ment to the degree of gull­ib­il­ity needed to swal­low the abhidhamma.

But the most inter­est­ing thing about this myth, for me, is that the Buddha goes to Tāvatiṁsa spe­cific­ally to teach his mother, who, you will remem­ber, died seven days after the Buddha was born. Why so? Briefly, seven has the gen­eral mean­ing in myth­o­logy, derived from the lunar cycles, of the ‘entire cycle of being’. This mean­ing is prom­in­ent, say, in the seven days of Bib­lical cre­ation. It also fea­tures often in the legends sur­round­ing the Buddha’s birth and enlight­en­ment, where it should always be read with the same mean­ing. The same mean­ing also applies, no doubt, in the seven books of the Abhid­hamma Piṭaka. Myth­o­lo­gic­ally, the num­ber seven emphas­izes the all-embracing nature of the abhid­hamma, gath­er­ing the whole of being to its breast, and invok­ing the secur­ity of long asso­ci­ation with famil­iar archetypes.

The Buddha’s mother was called Māyā, which means ‘magic’. Māyā is one of the ancient names of the Indian incarn­a­tion of the uni­ver­sal Mother God­dess. It is inter­est­ing that although the schol­astics, being of a rather dryly lit­eral inclin­a­tion, make little if any­thing of the God­dess con­nec­tion, Her signs per­meate Buddhist icon­o­graphy from the start. The Buddha was reg­u­larly rep­res­en­ted by a pair of foot­prints, a lotus seat, a tree, or a stupa, all clas­sic sym­bols of the ancient Indian Goddess. Māyā is most famil­iar in Indian thought as the emer­ging of the play of the world from the dream­ing of the under­ly­ing source of being, sym­bol­ized as Brah­man or Vishnu. This school of thought, iron­ic­ally called ‘non-dualism’, can­not escape pos­it­ing a fun­da­mental dis­tinc­tion between the under­ly­ing essence and the sur­face mani­fest­a­tion, try as they may to insist they are one and the same.

But in Buddhism, Māyā, the embod­i­ment of the illu­sion of being, dies to pre­pare the way for the vis­ion of truth. Thus Māyā was the Buddha’s first and greatest teacher. She, the maker, sac­ri­ficed her life for her son. Her death was no mere coin­cid­ence, but is a law of nature, a sym­bolic neces­sity, the great paradigm for sep­ar­a­tion from the beloved, for the ulti­mate futil­ity of birth. Is it pos­sible to see Māyā’s death as sym­bol­iz­ing the death of the endeavor to dis­tin­guish between sub­stance and appear­ance? The death of the com­puls­ive need to use spir­itual dis­course to cre­ate an unfalsifi­able illu­sion of under­stand­ing by talk­ing only of what lies behind the meta­phys­ical cur­tain? Would it then be going too far to see the resur­rec­tion of Māyā in the legend of the teach­ing of the abhid­hamma as a sym­bolic resur­rec­tion of that very same illu­sion, the erec­tion of a mys­tical bar­rier between exper­i­ence and ulti­mate real­ity, and the removal of the search for spir­itual truth from the every­day exper­i­ence of every­body to the priv­ileged domain of the elite?

Oh, I know there are a thou­sand and one per­fectly good reas­ons why my the­ory fails. And yet… I would never even pre­tend that such an impres­sion­istic sketch can even approach adequacy in explain­ing such a com­plex, ancient, and diverse school of thought. But still… Per­haps you may feel that my the­ory – and my flip­pancy of expres­sion! – dis­hon­ors the regal dig­nity of the Higher Teach­ings. But that, I’m afraid, is just the point. I wish to punc­ture the pre­ten­sions of the abhid­hamma, to steal its aura of invi­ol­ab­il­ity. The true Dhamma shines on, bril­liant as a dia­mond and just as tough. Whatever is good and true in the abhid­hamma will stand the test. When abhid­hamma is removed from the class on ‘What the Buddha Taught’ and placed in the class on ‘The Evol­u­tion of Buddhism Through the Ages’ we will at last be able to assess it on its true merits.

Notes

1. This essay is inten­ded in a play­fully pro­voc­at­ive spirit. I hope it will be read the same way. It is philo­soph­ical rather than schol­arly, by which I mean I have not bothered to check any ref­er­ences. Unless oth­er­wise spe­cified, I use the term ‘abhid­hamma’ to refer to the Theravada schol­astic tra­di­tion in gen­eral rather than the Abhid­hamma Piṭaka in par­tic­u­lar. ↩
2. This includes the minor poetic terms paṇḍara, mānasa, and hadaya, but omits the import­ant tech­nical term ceto. Again, des­pite men­tion­ing pedantic vari­ations on mano, some of which don’t appear in the sut­tas, it omits the import­ant man­od­hātu. ↩
3. <cite>Narada</cite>, A Manual of Abhid­hamma ↩
4. Visuddhi­magga 14.25 ↩
5. Na hi kālab­hedena dham­mānaṁ sab­hāv­ab­hedo atthi. (‘Not by the divi­sion of time is there a divi­sion of the intrinsic essence of the dham­mas’. Abhidhammatthasaṅgahavibhāvinīṭīkā, pg. 122. Quoted in <cite>Sumanapala</cite> An Intro­duc­tion to Theravada Abhid­hamma, pg. 94. ↩
6. Bhagavad-Gita 8.3 ↩
7. I am indebted to Bhikkhu Varado for this deli­cious tit­bit. ↩