Abhidharma

P. De Silva, Buddhist and Freudian Psychology, Colombo, Lake House, 1972, 52-3. De Silva does not explicitly equate bhavaṅga and the unconscious as implied by Collins op. cit., 304, n. 22, he merely discusses the term in this connection and in fact acknowledges that the term is problematic since what scholars have said about it seems contradictory and to involve a certain interpretive element. 3 See Collins, op. cit., 238-47; P.J. Griffiths, On Being Mindless: Buddhist Meditation and the Mind-Body Problem, La Salle, Open Court Publishing Co. , 1986, 38-9; Griffiths, quite mistakenly, even goes so far as to state that "bhavaṅga is a type of consciousness that operates with no object" (36). 4 S. Collins, op. cit., 2, 45.

General opinion holds that the Abhidhamma treats the Buddha's teachings in terms of ultimate realities, i.e. dhammas, and that conventional constructs such as persons (puggala) fall outside the primary concern of the Abhidhamma. The present paper reexamines this ultimate-conventional dichotomy drawn between dhammas and persons and argues that this dichotomy does not hold true for the canonical Abhidhamma in Pali. This study explores how various types of persons are interpreted and approached by the Abhidhamma material, including Abhidhamma texts such as the Puggalapaññatti and a number of suttas in the Aṅguttara Nikāya that are identified in this paper as proto-Abhidhamma. Keywords Abhidhamma · Person · Puggala · Pudgala · Paññatti · An ˙guttara

Published online at https://tinyurl.com/jgdkxyz In this presentation, I shall demonstrate how Patañjali, a brāhmaṇa Yoga philosopher, formulated a theory of transformation of matter by drawing upon four Sarvāstivāda Buddhist theories of temporality. In developing his theory, Patañjali reused the wording in which these theories were originally formulated as well as the original exemplifications for the respective theories. By changing the wording of the original formulation slightly, he created a completely new theory that has not much in common with its Buddhist exemplar.

Conventionally, the label 'classical yoga' has been aligned with—and sometimes conflated with—the text of Patañjali's Yogasūtra. Yet if we broaden the scope of inspection to a wider textual corpus, we can identify a richer and more complex discourse of classical yoga in soteriological contexts. This discourse is also employed in Buddhist Sarvāstivāda traditions and is semantically and metaphorically entangled across religious boundaries. By comparing passages from the Pātañjalayogaśāstra and the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya, this article highlights the botanical image of the seed and its seedbed (the substratum) as a key metaphorical structure in the soteriology of the two texts.

This book covers the eighteen treatises of the original scripture. A total of 273 tables, 30 diagrams, and lucidly-defined outlines of points and summaries are used extensively throughout this book to present the contents of the original text as lively as possible to readers. The treatises are divided into three distinct groups. The first group containing the Five Aggregates, Twelve Sense-Bases, Eighteen Elements, Four Noble Truths, Twenty-Two Controlling Faculties, and Dependent Origination, are the fundamental  requisites for developing our right views and wisdom. The second group contains the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, Four Right Striving, Four Means to Accomplishment, Seven Factors of Enlightenment, Noble Eightfold Path, and Jhāna, provide the basis for practicing wisdom using the different approaches, all of which are interdependent modular functions connecting one to another. The third group contains the Illimitables, Precepts, Analytical Insight, kinds of Knowledge, numerical list of defilement, and kernel of the Buddha’s teaching — provide supplementary information illuminated in extensive details not apropos to being dealt with in the preceding twelve Chapters.

Most Buddhists would admit that every Buddhist practice and theoretical construct can be traced to or at least subsumed under one or more among the four nobles' truths. It is hardly surprising, then, that listening to these truths and pondering upon them were considered the cornerstones of the Buddhist soteric endeavour. Learning them from a competent teacher and subjecting them to rational analysis are generally regarded as taking place at the very beginning of the religious career or, to put it otherwise, still as an ordinary person along the preparatory path. At this stage, the discursive nature of the four nobles' truths fits well the didactic and intellectual requirements of early religious practice. But how about the subsequent, more distinctively intuitive/non-conceptual stages of a mystic's career? How to interpret, for instance, our sources' strong emphasis on the four nobles' truths as forming the content of the first pivotal event on the path, the so-called path of vision? And how to understand a philosopher's claim that the yogic path exhausts itself in one's learning, rationally analyzing and mentally cultivating the four nobles' truths? In order to understand this, one has to turn to Abhidharmic interpretations of the four truths as embodying the ultimately true aspects of reality itself. Here, the truths are not regarded as a didactic device encapsulating the entire Buddhist law, but as the basic sixteenfold structure of the real. It is, of course, these ultimately true aspects that the path of cultivation is supposed to make directly perceptible to the yogin, thus enabling him to get rid of ignorance.

Many people today consider the abhidharma (Pāli abhidhamma) to be both abstruse and irrelevant. As this volume demonstrates, this is unfortunate. Abhidharma thought constitutes the conceptual backbone of the entirety of the Buddhist tradition. An example that is probably familiar to many religious studies scholars is the Heart Sutra. In addition to finding its way into many religious studies textbooks, this is widely known and recited in many East Asian Buddhist traditions. Indeed it is chanted daily in some temples, or recited continuously by Buddhist adherents on pilgrimage. However, in addition to such ritual or devotional uses, it can be read as a concise Mahāyāna commentary on the ontological status of abhidharma categories. One of the perhaps most quoted lines from the Heart Sutra— " form is emptiness, emptiness is form " —is not an isolated assertion that can be addressed on its own. It is instead the first of a long list of

The Sarvāstivāda is a school which parted from the original line of the Sthavirāvadins  after the 3rd Buddhist Council held around 250 BCE in Pāṭaliputra under the patronage of the famous king Aśoka. They migrated to Kashmir and become most influential and powerful in the Northwest of India, spreading their teachings via the Silk Road over the West Asian kingdoms to China.
They questioned the impeccability of the arahants, but their central doctrine was the “sarvam asti”- all exists, it is the doctrine of the tri-temporal existence, as it is worked out in the Vijñānakaya-śāstra. The Sarvāstivādins saw the base of this doctrine in the teachings of the Buddha, but their doctrine had been widely disputed. This small paper should bring a small light into the core of their teachings.

Bon, an indigenous religion in Tibet and the Himalayas, originally seems to have centred on funeral rituals and divination. Since the seventh century, Bon seems to have absorbed Buddhist doctrines. In the West, Karmay (1988) proved that Bon, especially its esoteric doctrine rDzogs-chen, has similarities with Buddhist rNying-ma doctrines.

It is a common view in modern scholarship on Buddhist ethics that attachment to the self constitutes a hindrance to ethics, whereas rejecting this type of attachment is a necessary condition for acting morally. The present article argues that in Vasubandhu’s theory of agency, as formulated in the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya (Treasury of Metaphysics with Self-Commentary), a cognitive and psychological identification with a conventional, persisting self is a requisite for exercising moral agency. As such, this identification is essential for embracing the ethics of Buddhism and its way of life. The article delineates the method that Vasubandhu employs to account for the notion of a selfless moral agent, with particular emphasis on his strategies for dealing with one central aspect of agency, self-interested concern for the future.

The Buddhist doctrine of momentariness: a survey of the origins and early phase of this doctrine up to Vasubandhu. By Alexander von Rospatt. (Alt-00 und Neu-Indische Studien hrsg.vom Institut fur Kultur und Geschichte Indiens und Tibets an der Universitat Hamburg, Band 47.) pp. x, 285. Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag, 1995. DM 66.

This is a metaphysical and conceptual analysis of the concepts ‘change’ and ‘continuity’. The Buddhists are in agreement with Heraclitus that all are flowing and nothing remains. However, the Buddhists have a much more elaborate theory about change and continuity, and this theory is a key element in the entire Buddhist system of related doctrines, viz., that of karma and rebirth, the possibility of Liberation (nirv na) and others. Simply put, the Buddhist emphasizes that change is there in every aspect of reality.According to a later developed form of the Buddhist teaching, change is absolutely pervasive, and even these particles are subject to change as they are nothing more than putative objects which are conceptualized to be such and such, and without the conceptualization they are ‘nothing’ at all. (This is known as the Doctrine of Emptiness). Hence it seems that continuity is not possible. But in fact according to the later theory, change is not only possible, it is accepted as part and parcel of everyday life. The fact that nothing at all remains the same does not imply that continuity is not possible, since continuity does not always have to be that of an inherently existing object. A changing object can be continued also, in roughly the same sense as we say that an event, like a drama, continues even though everything in it is changing. The thread that ties the disparate elements of the event together in this case lies within our own conceptual imputation. This does not imply that everything is subjective, since the distinction between subject and object presupposes the idea of an absolutely existing individual self, which all Buddhist schools rejects. So in this later theory, absolute change is not possible because there is, ultimately speaking nothing to change, and when there is no change there is no continuation either. This is not to deny the empirical fact of changes and continuities that are present to us; things are there and they are indeed changing. What is being denied here is the belief that that there are essences to things which endure through all the changes. Since things are empty (of inherently existing nature) they can change, and continuity is only possible, not because there is something that exists and endures, but because there is change. A drama that does not move cannot be continued.The foregoing discussions of the Buddhist theories have many implications for the dialog between science and religion. One point is that science still seems to subscribe to the object/subject distinction. But if change and continuity are not real in the ultimate sense, then perhaps the distinction should be reconsidered. Another point concerns how to find continuity amidst all the change. But perhaps in some important sense continuity depends on us.

For those of you who prefer the Tibetan-language translation:  Tan Mar-tin, Mdzod phug nang gi sems byung la sogs kyi rnam grangs dang dum mtshams 'ga' zhig dbyig gnyen dang thogs med kyis mdzad pa'i chos mngon pa dang gshib bsdur byas pa'i thog ma'i zhib 'jug snyan zhu, IN: Phyi gling bas bon la zhib 'jug byas pa'i dpyad rtsom bdams bsgyur, Krung-go'i Bod Rig-pa Dpe-skrun-khang,Beijing 2005.

This dissertation offers a narrative perspective of the “Indian Buddhist discursive world” with respect to the power dynamics between the Buddha and his disciples. It selects multiple narratives revolving around figures from the early monastic community as represented by Śāriputra, Devadatta, Ānanda, and Kāśyapa, who attempt to compete with, challenge, or succeed the Buddha. Through close and contextualized readings, the dichotomy between the two concepts—“buddha” and “arhat”—in their usage in early texts is first challenged. A comparative reading of the narratives of Śāriputra and those of the Buddha in the Sūtra of the Wise and Foolish presents to us a variety of buddha–disciple interactions in which disciples not only obey but also challenge the Buddha’s authority. My treatment of the Devadatta narratives in their historical development and ideological complexities reveals that the Devadatta narrative itself is a body of multilayered, ever-changing and self-reflective rhetoric, whose pivotal function is to cope with the potential problems substantialized by Devadatta’s challenges to the Buddha. The narratives of how to pass down the Buddha’s authority in the fifth chapter concern not only the theoretical question of who are theologically legitimate inheritors, but also the practical issue of how monastic economy should be managed. All of the vibrant stories I analyze here, which are wide-ranging in terms of geography and chronology, are open windows into the Buddhist self-understanding of fundamental theological questions concerning the nature and significance of the buddha and the identity of being a Buddhist, as well as practical issues such as how to maintain their authority and accommodate their updated needs in an age without a buddha. Seeking its methodological basis in philology, history, literary theory, and linguistics, this dissertation sheds light on the dynamic interplay between narratives and ideologies and enhances our understanding of the significance of narrative in reflecting and stimulating new ideologies and constructing histories of early Buddhism.

This dissertation examines whether something like free will is implied by or consistent with the causal, ethical and soteriological theories presented in the works of the fifth century Indian Buddhist master, Vasubandhu (namely, the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya and Karmasiddhiprakaraṇa) and in the Theravādin Abhidhamma.  I argue that Vasubandhu and his Thervādin counterparts assume persons have the ability to choose or control their actions and have the conceptual resources to account for these freedoms.  I also explain why it is a mistake to read their claims about action and causation through the lens of the categories and assumptions that inform the modern, Western debate over free will.  I demonstrate that, despite what some interpreters have claimed (and despite significant differences in between their causal theories), neither Vasubandhu or his Theravādin counterparts engage with the problem of causal determinism.  They do, however, deny agent causation and explain a person’s ability to control his actions in terms of the impersonal mental events that issue in action.  The result is a view of action similar to some forms of compatibilism, but unlike most compatibilists, they are not primarily concerned with the rational control required for moral responsibility, but with the self-control required for liberation--a self-control born of habit, affection and moral sentiment as much as responsiveness to reason.  I pay particular attention to the role the distinguishing feature of karma, intending (cetanā), plays in both incontinent action and the cultivation of this self-control.  Conceiving of a karmic result as a kind of moral desert, many interpreters take intending to signal some variety of free will, but an intending is simply the movement of a mind toward an object or end.  I explain how this movement may be sensitive to desire and reason and thus amenable to various sorts of control, but also unconscious or compelled in ways that we and/or Buddhists would not consider free. In the final part of the dissertation, I explain how the view that persons are free to choose or control their actions is consistent with the view that actions are caused by impersonal mental events such as intendings and why both perspectives on action are essential to the Buddhist soteriological project.

This study presents highlights from an investigation of the Saṃyukta-āgama quotations in Śamathadeva’s Abhidharmakośopāyikā-ṭīkā. These are drawn from collated editions, translations and comparative readings of partial or full discourse (sūtra) quotations paralleling discourses found in selected saṃyuktas of the Chinese translation of the Saṃyukta-āgama (Taishō no. 99). The examples are grouped together as representative of textual features at both the discourse (sūtra) level (setting, proper names, modules, phraseology and internal structure) and at the collection level (titles, uddānas, intra-/inter-textual references, abbreviation patterns). The quantity and quality of similarities and discrepancies between the parallel versions show pervasive variance and variability in the patterns of correspondences, at the mini-, micro- and nano-levels. The findings do not however allow for identification according to neatly defined lineages of transmission within the Mūlasarvāstivāda and Greater Sarvāstivāda (inclusive of Sarvāstivāda and Mūlasarvāstivāda). They testify to the intricacies of textual transmission within these traditions, showing that the recensions of the Saṃyukta-āgama represented by the Abhidharmakośopāyikā-ṭīkā and the Sanskrit Saṃyukta-āgama underlying the received Chinese translation are quite closely related yet not identical. The study articulates a model of multiplicity of versions for the discourse transmission that is not dissimilar to what is emerging in recent scholarship in the case of the Sarvāstivāda and Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinayas. This may be read as a reflection of textual transmission among fragmented and spread-out textual communities which nevertheless coalesce under a unifying denominational and ideological umbrella – that of ‘Greater Sarvāstivāda’. These textual characteristics would express particularism, but also a degree of constancy in institutional and communal identity.

The suicide accounts of three bhikkhus in sutta literature probably inspired the formulation of a particular type of person who attains Arahantship at death, later designated as an ‘equal-headed’ (samasīsin) person in the Abhidhamma. It is inconceivable for an Arahant to break the precepts. Regarding suicide as an offence, the Theravāda tends to depict those bhikkhus as non-Arahants before suicide. The Pali commentary explains that they did not attain Arahantship until their deaths and refers to two of them as each being an ‘equal-header’ (samasīsī). By contrast, the (Mūla-)Sarvāstivāda sūtras and Abhidharma portray them as Arahants during their lifetimes, a stance compatible with the Sarvāstivādin view that suicide is not an offence. The Sarvāstivādins deny the concept of samasīsin proposed by the Vibhājyavādins, which include the Theravāda and Dharmaguptaka schools. The Pali commentaries provide various explanations and classifications of samasīsin, which have one idea in common: the term signifies the concurrence of two events, and it denotes at least a person who only becomes an Arahant at death, and sometimes someone who becomes an Arahant at the same time as a certain kind of event occurs. The Paṭisambhidāmagga, a quasi-Abhidhamma text, has a chapter that expounds ‘equal-head’ (samasīsa) in an oblique way by enumerating various kinds of sama and of sīsa separately. The Paṭisambhidāmagga commentary tries to make sense of the term samasīsa by associating this textual exposition of sama and sīsa with the more commonly found term samasīsin.

The Abhidharma created a systemic presentation of the Buddha’s teaching that described phenomenon in ultimate terms called dharmas with an analytic approach called dharmic analysis. Dharmic analysis failed to describe how karma and kleshas relate to consciousness, yet the Abhidharmists continued to hold this analysis in a privileged position.  Despite theses shortcomings, the Abhidharma created a successful analytic for discerning the quality and the factors of a moment of consciousness.  The semantic clarity arrived upon through dharmic analysis facilitated debate between Buddhist schools over the centuries, yet modern scholars tend to favor in their research later condensed systematizations of the Abhidharma material, (e.g. the Visuddhi-magga, Vimuttidhi-magga, Abhidharmakośa, and the Abhidhammattha-sangaha.) 
In researching the Abhidharma, I have heavily consulted William Waldron’s The Buddhist Unconscious.  Waldron traces a philosophical genealogy from early Buddhism to the Yogācāra school, within which he succeeds in delineating aspects of the Abhidharma, and clarifies the Abhidharma’s limitations.  Modern scholar practitioners Nyanaponika Thera, and Lama Anagarika Govinda offer insight into the Abhidharma, their views express, to an uncertain degree, evolution that has occurred in the Abhidharma over the centuries.  Erich Frauwallner is one of few scholars to specifically, and deeply research the early Abhidharma.  He provides a critical view on the Abhidharma that balances more religiously traditional views held by Nyanaponika, and Govinda.
If the canonical Abhidharma literature offered significantly more insight than later condensed systematizations of the Abhidharma material, then I would expect scholars and practitioners to prefer the canonical Abhidharma texts over these later condensed works, however I observe that scholars use these later condensed works instead. If scholars ignore canonical Abhidharma literature in favor of later condensed systematizations, we ought to investigate and clarify why this is so.

This paper presents the doctrinal argumentation on the continuity of the life of an individual sentient being found in the Abhidharma Buddhist texts translated by Xuanzang and his Tang Dynasty (618–907) collaborators. Vasubandhu, in the Treasury of the Abhidharma, and Saṅghabhadra, in his two commentaries on this text, the Abhidharma Treatise Conforming to the Correct Logic, and the Treatise Clarifying Abhidharma Tenets, enlist the doctrines of the continuum (Skt. saṃtāna; Ch. xiangxu 相續) and the aggregates (Skt. skandha; Ch. yun 蘊) to support the idea that the life of an individual sentient being does not end with the death of the body. The conceptualization of survivability, articulated by Vasubandhu and Saṅghabhadra in these three Abhidharma masterworks, is that an individual sentient being continues in life, and survives death, the afterlife, and reincarnation, in the form of aggregates bundled together in the continuum. This paper enlists a source criticism methodology to compare the translations of the Abhidharma texts by Xuanzang and his coterie, with earlier recensions of the texts in Chinese, and received versions in Tibetan and Sanskrit, to describe the definitions, examples, and logic employed by Vasubandhu and Saṅghabhadra in their argumentation in defense of the doctrine that the life of an individual sentient being persists throughout the four stages of the Buddhist life cycle: life, death, the afterlife, and reincarnation. Ultimately, for Vasubandhu and Saṅghabhadra, as well as for Xuanzang, the individual life constituted by the continuum of a sentient being persists in the face of constant change and radical impermanence.

The Abhidharmakośabhāṣya (Treasury of Metaphysics with Self-Commentary) is a pivotal treatise on early Buddhist thought composed around the fourth or fifth century by the Indian Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu. This work elucidates the Buddha's teachings as synthesized and interpreted by the early Buddhist Sarvāstivāda school ("the theory that all [factors] exist"), while recording the major doctrinal polemics that developed around them, primarily those points of contention with the Sautrāntika system of thought ("followers of the scriptures"). Employing the methodology and terminology of the Buddhist Abhidharma system, the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya offers a detailed analysis of fundamental doctrines, such as early Buddhist theories of mind, cosmology, the workings of karman, meditative states and practices, and the metaphysics of the self. One of its unique features is the way it presents the opinions of a variety of Buddhist and Brahminical schools that were active in classical India in Vasubandhu's time. The work contains nine chapters (the last of which is considered to have been appended to the first eight), which proceed from a description of the unawakened world via the path and practices that are conducive to awakening and ultimately to the final spiritual attainments which constitute the state of awakening. In its analysis of the unawakened situation, it thus covers the elements which make up the material and mental world of sentient beings, the wholesome and unwholesome mental states that arise in their minds, the structure of the cosmos, the metaphysics of action (karman) and the way it comes into being, and the nature of dispositional attitudes and dormant mental afflictions. In its treatment of the path and practices that lead to awakening, the treatise outlines the Sarvāstivāda understanding of the methods of removing defilements through the realization of the four noble truths and the stages of spiritual cultivation. With respect to the awakened state, the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya gives a detailed description of the different types of knowledge and meditational states attained by practitioners who reach the highest stages of the path.

This paper gives a close-up look at the canonical quotation in the third chapter of the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya of the opinion that the scent of the Pārijāta Tree spreads fifty leagues against the wind, which is held to be “stated concerning ‘not to exceed a [single] tree’” (vṛkṣānatikramaṃ saṃdhāyoktam ity). The focus is in particular on the corresponding citation found in the third chapter of Śamathadeva’s Abhidharmakośopāyikā-ṭīkā (Up 3085). The paper presents the text and translation of the Abhidharmakośopāyikā-ṭīkā’s quotation, and then comments on the significance of its textual features in relation to Śamathadeva’s work and his mode of quoting canonical material as well as to the study of the development of the Prajñapti, a work of the Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma Śamathadeva references for this quotation alongside a discourse (sūtra) from the Madhyama-āgama.

This paper discusses a limited number of metaphysical topics discussed by the four main schools of Buddhist thought (Abhidharma, Madhyamaka, Yogācāra, and epistemological-logical school of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti), focusing on issues that are particularly characteristic of each school or that have a close connection with problems raised in the contemporary philosophical debate. These are the relation between part and whole and the theory of momentariness for Abhidharma, notions of ultimate and conventional truth, causation, and property-instantiation for Madhyamaka, the question whether everything is mental for Yogācāra, and the rejection of universals and its semantic consequences for the school of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti.