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Introduction to the Abhidharma

Preface

In part four of The Tree of Enlightenment, by Peter Della Santina, the author goes to great lengths to make sure the reader sees the the Abhidharma, and Buddhism in general, as something that is practical, with real world applications.

Santina references psychology and psychotherapy 109 times, and uses the words practice or practical 277 times, in a book that is only about 400 pages long. Almost every page of this book includes some form of emphasis on viewing Buddhism, at least in part, as a form of ancient psychotherapy, and how applicable these teachings are to our real-world everyday lives.

The masters of the Abhidharma are able to analyze the parts and processes involved in the life-cycle of a single thought in our consciousness (citta) and even describe the factors (cetasikas) that accompany different conscious experiences. All of this usually passes us by in a blur, hundreds of mental impulses in the snap of a finger, far too quickly for untrained people to rightly grasp and understand, any more than they could hope to talk a herd of elephants out of stampeding.

To have a felt appreciation of this, I reflected on times in my life where my experiences were clearly being shaped by my own conditions of consciousness, and the consciousnesses of others.

What I’ve decided to share today is a true story, from my personal experience, of one of those times. If you listen closely, you’ll hear themes that reflect Santina’s focus on the practical and psychotherapeutic nature of Buddhism and the Abhidharma. This story takes place before I ever called myself Buddhist, but the fundamental principles are always at work, even if we don’t know their names.

To help ease you into the Abhidharmic perspective, I’m going to put some words on the screen, and after the story we’ll get into how these words relate to the cittas and cetasikas, but for now, just let your eyes scan over these words and as you listen to this story, keep an eye open for moments when you see these factors and conditions present, not only present in the people and events of the story but also in yourself as a listener. If any of those moments really stand out to you, I invite you to mention it in the chat while the story is being shared, and we can review those together towards the end of the presentation.


Broken Wax

Imagine you’re a child, growing up in isolation, abuse, and poverty. Long before you know the meaning of the words domestic violence, your absent father is already just a vague memory associated with flashing red and blue lights and shiny badges.

Your mother, in her depression, will rarely get out of bed. Those are the good days. The bad days, when she does get out of bed, are the days you listen for footsteps and hope they’re not coming closer.

The highlight of your days are when you get to go to school. You enjoy learning, being around other kids, and you even like the teachers.

But, there are also reminders, echoes of your home life that reverberate into your life at school. Like seeing other kids with fresh new boxes of Crayola, while you get to rummage in the classroom’s communal box of discarded and broken wax, blemished with the rubbed off hues of their neighbors, they never color as perfectly as fresh crayons.

When the pages of coloring books are hung on the classroom wall, others have colors that are clear and bright, while yours is muted and somehow blurry.

Hunger is also an echo of home life that follows you into the school day, because free school lunches, like food stamps, are available, but a child cannot do the paperwork needed to make sure that they themselves have access to food, and if a child is in the sole custody of a parent who is unable or unwilling to present themselves under the harsh fluorescent lights of government offices and the pitying stares of civil servants, then such programs of public welfare might as well not exist at all.

Your first memory of compassion, comes in a moment when you can hear, but only vaguely comprehend, a teacher and a school administrator discussing if you should be given food that day, when a cafeteria worker whispers “mijo” and gives you a handful of fish-sticks between two slices of bread.

Eventually your mother will decide that it’s easier to just pull you out of school than to deal with the notes that get sent home or the phone calls from child protective services. She’ll claim you’re being given a proper Christian homeschooling, while not actually providing any sort of curriculum. Watching PBS on TV during the day is the most normal thing in your life, and Miss Frizz from the Magic School Bus and Bill Nye the Science Guy become your substitute teachers.

I’ll fast forward through the worst parts of childhood and adolescence, and it does get much worse from there, but just know that by the time you’re a teenager, hopelessness, shame, and anger are your first, middle, and last name.

Your best prospects for escaping the life you were born into is enlisting in the military, and to your own surprise as much as anybody else’s, you actually score very highly on the military’s aptitude assessment, their version of an IQ test, meaning that they’re willing to open a lot of doors for you and accelerate your life on a fast track to a highly technical career with a top secret clearance.

Skip ahead, you’re 19 years old, in post 9/11 America, nearing the end of your Combat Systems Electronics Technician school. You’re in a radar live training lab. This is where you learn how to do your part to put warheads on foreheads and ordinance on coordinates, and ensure that high traffic shipping lanes can be effectively navigated without suffering a sneak attack from a holy warrior on a speed boat.

Now it’s your second day in the schoolhouse, but it’s your first day in the lab. You’d been kicked out the day before, exiled to spend the whole day reading the technical manuals at a desk as an instructor was screaming at you because you were wearing a watch, in violation of the lab’s safety rule: “No watches, rings, or dangly things.” Such potential conductors of electricity had no place in a lab full of live equipment, where nine thousand volts of direct current Darwinism could turn your heart into a low amp fuse in a high amp circuit.

You were wearing a watch because you’re terrified of being late to anything. You’re terrified that if you flunk out, if you can’t make a career in the Navy, you’ll be sent back to the world from which you were trying to escape.

The prospect of failure feels like a looming death sentence, but even success has its own dangers. The war on terror is in full swing. Warships, like the USS Cole, are being targeted by small kamikaze boats packed full of explosives. In this environment, even small errors have cost lives, and could cause an international incident, escalate a war, or trigger an ecological disaster on such a scale that it would become a named historical event.

That’s what’s going through your mind when you look down and see this, an analog oscilloscope. The instructor is watching, and you’re afraid that if you touch the wrong thing you’ll be kicked out again. How many times can you get kicked out of the lab before you get kicked out of the school?

You can feel the stern glare of the instructor. Don’t mess this up. Don’t give them an excuse to kick you out. You try to make sense of the buttons and knobs in front of you, but you’re starting to feel overwhelmed. Why are there two time knobs? Remember to only handle one probe at a time to avoid causing an electrical short. One hand, one probe, that’s the rule. Is this thing grounded? Is it supposed to be grounded? Does the neutral probe go to ground, or is there a different probe for that somewhere?

You feel like you should adjust the volts per division but “voltage” sounds dangerous and the instructor is still staring at you… he’s staring at you like the principal was staring at you in school… as if it’s your fault you didn’t have a school lunch… what were you supposed to do? What are you supposed to do now? What are you going to do?

Panic. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a panic attack before, but you’re having one now. You can’t think clearly, and you can’t make sense of anything that’s in front of you. It’s all just one big confusing mess. You can’t breath, and your face feels like it’s going to combust as you try so hard to hold back tears that your vision begins to fade and your legs feel unsteady.

By some miracle, you manage to excuse yourself from the lab without incident, returning to your desk to read the manuals again. You start with the familiar words of the Sailor’s Creed, which you’ve recited countless times by now, and start to feel more composed.

What is the instructor going to say? Will that count as a failed attempt, even though you didn’t touch anything? You feel the tears coming back, so you just try to breath, and focus on the training manual.

As you’re reading, you start to notice that the training manual actually answers some of those questions you had. The handbook lists some terms in pairs, like frequency and amplitude. Some terms are listed three at a time, like heading, bearing, and azimuth. These lists help you understand important factors between the conditions that make one signal distinctly different from another signal.

You spend some time studying the handbook from front to back, and eventually feel ready to go back into the lab. Once you’re able to be present, no longer overwhelmed, not reliving past traumas or being overtaken by fears of the future, you’re able to see the parts and processes of what’s in front of you, and to finally make sense of what’s going on here and now as you return to the live training station.

You take a deep breath, and calibrate the oscilloscope. You see the flat line trace across the screen, a resting and undisturbed signal. Little vibrations are present in the signal as noise enters the system, but those do not grab your attention. You fix your eyes on the larger signals, the ones that actually interrupt that otherwise undisturbed flat line, and a picture begins to form in your mind of what obstacles must be present in the radar’s field of view.

Eventually, you’re able to write down what the signal is telling you about the size and direction of the obstacles, useful information that can be used to avoid a collision or track a target.

Let’s leave the story there and reflect on it from an Abhidharmic perspective. How did moment-to-moment states of consciousness, conditioned by such-and-such factors, connected through a stream of flowing karmic events, culminate in the experiences described in the story? I’ll share a few examples to stood out to me, and again I invite you to share any that stood out to you in the chat:

Through the lens of the Abhidharma we can see that, what felt like an overwhelming blur of events was actually a very understandable series of cittas and their accompanying cetasikas.

This reminds me of a scene in the movie The Matrix, where the main character is looking at computer screens full of overwhelming amounts of data, while another character is able to read through the code and find the useful information they’re looking for.


The Gist of The Abhidharma

Like Neo being unable to interpret the Matrix, as unenlightened beings, our perception of our moment-to-moment experience is often just one big messy overwhelming thing. We suffer, and we don’t have the language to make sense of our own consciousness, to articulate, ask the right questions of our spiritual teachers or even fully understand what they’re saying when they give us answers.

The Abhidharma aims to give us the language and the skills needed to interpret our own experience of phenomena, and identify the factors that are present in that conscious experience. Santina quotes the Buddhist elder Nagasena in response to the questions of King Milinda, when Nagasena says “If a man were to take a boat out to the sea, and if he were to take a handful of sea water and were then able to tell you that in it this much water is from the Ganges, this much from the Yamuna, and this much from the other great rivers of India, this would certainly be a very difficult thing to accomplish. In the same way, the Buddha has analyzed a single conscious moment of experience – for instance, the experience of seeing a form – into its various component parts: matter, feeling, perception, volition, and consciousness.”

So, what, technically, is the Abhidharma? As I’m sure you already know, the Pali Canon of Buddhist scripture is divided into three baskets: The Sutta Pitaka (which contains the teachings of the Buddha in the form of discourses, in a story-telling format), the Vinaya Pitaka (which contains the rules for monks and nuns), and then we have the Abhidharma Pitaka.

When we refer to “the Abhidharma” we’re either referring to any of the texts in the Abhidharma Pitaka, or, we can also be referring to some texts in the Sutta Pitaka where lessons about the Abhidharma were included in the stories of the Buddha’s discourses.


Section 1: The House of Gems

Historically, the Abhidharma has been held in high esteem in Buddhist studies, and traditionally, the Buddha himself is regarded as the source of these teachings, having spent the fourth week after his enlightenment meditating on the Abhidharma in an event referred to as the “House of Gems.” The story says that the Buddha traveled to Tavatimsa “Heaven of The 33 Devas” to teach the Abhidharma to his mother and the gods there.

After the Buddha returned from the Tavatimsa Heaven, one of the Buddha’s most revered disciples, Sariputta, was quick to grasp the meaning of the Abhidharma.

In DN33, the Sangiti Sutta, the Buddha says to Sariputta “Sāriputta, the Saṅgha is alert and focused. Go ahead and give them a Dhamma talk on whatever inspires you. My back is tired, I’m going to lay down for a stretch.”

So what does Sariputta teach in that moment? The Abhidharma.

This story shows us two things:

1. The Buddha is demonstrating how much he trusts Sariputta’s inspired wisdom by giving Sariputta the precious opportunity to teach in front of such a great audience (and no pressure, right, because the Fully Enlightened One himself just handed Sariputta the spotlight and said “Go ahead and freestyle on the mic for a minute while I kick back and watch.)

2. Sariputta is demonstrating the importance of the Abhidharma by deciding that it was the best thing to teach in that moment.

This establishes that the Abhidharma is clearly considered important, and the roots of this style of teaching go all the way back to the Buddha and his immediate disciples. Now let’s dig deeper into what Abhidharma actually teaches.


Definition of Abhidharma

There’s dharma, then there’s Dharma.

The term “Abhidharma” can be translated as “special,” “higher,” or “further” Dharma. But in this context, we’re not just talking about Dharma teachings in general, but specifically about the analysis of dharmas, or apparent phenomena and the experiences associated with those apparent phenomena.

One key aspect of the Buddha’s teaching method highlighted here is his use of two perspectives: the conventional, or Vohara, and the ultimate, or Paramattha. On one hand, he used everyday language in the stories of the Sutta Pitaka, talking about people, places, and things—making the teachings accessible to beginners. On the other hand, he also spoke from the ultimate standpoint when giving the teachings that would become the Abhidharma Pitaka.

By bridging the gap between the ordinary and the profound, the Buddha made the path approachable for newcomers while still offering depth for those who are ready to see beyond the ordinary illusions of conventional appearances.


Section 2 – Psychotherapy and Phenomenology

In the simile of the snake, the Buddha described the importance of approaching the Middle Way correctly. Phenomena are like snakes; they’re not inherently good or evil. If we see phenomena as they really are and handle them skillfully, by understanding their true nature, like someone trained in catching snakes, they can lead us toward a desirable outcome. If grasped wrongly, they can lead us to harm.

One of the ways that we tend to grasp wrongly is by failing to see the emptiness, impermanence, and interconnectedness of all things. This is a critical error in our thinking that the Abhidharma aims to correct by helping us identify the parts and processes that typically go unnamed and unrecognized in our consciousness.

To illustrate this, here’s a graphic that I made based on an example from A Concise History of Buddhism by Andrew Skilton.

As we develop more nuanced language for talking about the parts of our experience, describing the phenomena, naming the dharmas, we’re finally able to ask the right questions. In fact, being able to ask the right questions is so important in the Abhidharma, it gets into a study of the act of asking a question, with the Fourfold Classification of Questions:

  1. Directly Answerable Questions: Clear questions with straightforward answers.
  2. Questions Requiring Qualifications: Those that could be answered differently depending on how the question is interpreted.
  3. Questions Needing Counter-Questions: Where we need more information to respond appropriately.
  4. Unanswerable Questions: These are the famous metaphysical ones the Buddha remained silent on.

An important note on why being able to classify questions is so important, is because some metaphysical questions about the size of the universe, for example, are not helpful in the scope of Buddhist practice and any answer would likely lead the unenlightened person to getting tangled up in extreme views of existence and nonexistenceeternalism and nihilism. The Buddha taught that, like mishandling a snake, clinging to either extreme doesn’t reflect reality and can hinder our path, and thus he advocated avoiding extremes and emphasized The Middle Way.

If I can extend the snake simile a little, it’s as if the Sutta Pitaka tells us the stories of the snake-handlers, and the Abhidharma is like a manual on herpetology, laying out the anatomy of the snake and documenting it’s nature.

In this way, the Abhidharma specifically dissects and analyzes our conscious experience, and then, in accordance with The Middle Way, synthesizes that analysis into the interconnected relational model we all know as Interdependent Origination.

That analysis of factors and synthesis of understanding must go hand in hand. Without analysis, we can’t even begin to articulate anything meaningful, but having analysis without synthesis would be like disassembling a musical instrument to figure out where the song is coming from.


Section 3: Enter the Matrika

The first book of the Abhidharma Pitaka is called the Dharmasangani, which can be translated to “Collection of Phenomena,” and it contains lists of dharmas called Matrika, which is a word with the same root from which we get the word Matrix.

What is a Matrika? Remember back in our original story, where the training manual listed ideas two or three at a time, and those ideas represented the factors that contributed to identifying the useful information in our signal? The Matrikas are like that, listing factors two at a time, in what are called diads, and three at a time, in what are called triads.

The Abhidarma Matrika lists 122 groups of dharmas, some two at a time, some three at a time, organized by various qualities, giving us classifications of conditional factors of consciousness and material phenomena.

Before we go any further into the Matrix and get slowed down with numbered lists, I want to quote the Venerable Bhikku Bodhi, who in a 2018 lecture on the Abhidharma, was asked by a student why the numbered lists of factors in the Abhidharma were so important. Why do the numbered lists matter?

The Venerable Bhikku Bodhi says that, in what he referred to with a laugh as “Abhidharma Without Numbers,” it is more important to understand the principles at work than it is to get bogged down in the numbered lists of dharmas in the Matrikas.

Additionally, in chapter 34 of The Tree of Enlightenment, Santina says “It is not enough just to hear or read about the classifications of consciousness… these schemes of classification will not begin to make sense until one spends some time running them back and forth in one’s mind. Finally, after study and consideration, one can use them in one’s meditation.”

When you are able to use them in your meditation, you’ll be able to sit with them and observe these consciousness conditions as they arise, know and apply the antidote to unwholesome mental states, and observe them passing away.

For now, as this may be for many of us our first exposure to the Abhidharma, let’s just allow these new ideas to run freely in our minds, to see what connections and insights come to us easily. Don’t try to memorize anything just yet, but instead try to focus on the principles at work.

With this in mind, what we’re about to run through is not meant to be an exhaustive study of the Abhidharma. If, as Santina says, these ideas need to run back and forth in your mind, again and again, before they make sense, then consider this as a warm-up jogging lap around the Dharma track.

The Cittas

Our warmup starts with looking at the cittas, which are states of consciousness described in the Abhidharma.

Sense Sphere Cittas

The sense-sphere (kamavacara) of consciousness supports our awareness of phenomena both in and outside of meditation. Unwholesome (akusala) categories of consciousness (cittas) arise when, as a result of ignorance, we succumb to greed, hate, and delusion.

With wisdom, morality, and focused effort, we can cultivate wholesome (kusala) cittas within the sense sphere and in other spheres of consciousness as well. Kusala and akusala cittas generate karma, causing other cittas that passively arise as naturally resultant (vipaka) karmic effects.

Enlightened beings, having transcended kusala and akusala, only generate functional (kiriya) cittas as needed to perform actions without attachment to resultant conditions. There are 54 different cittas in the sense sphere, arising from various combinations of factors such as pleasure, spontaneity, knowledge, and others.

Form Sphere Cittas

In the first meditative absorption (jhana) we overcome hinderances and do not create akusala cittas, although meditation at this level still includes objects of form (rupa) as their focus, producing 15 cittas.
Jhana factors fade away in higher states of absorption as they are no longer needed to support progress.
All five jhanas can be experienced while meditating on objects of form.

Formless Sphere Cittas

Meditation on immaterial objects (such as infinite space) is considered formless (arupa) and does not rely on the first jhana, even though it is still considered worldly and mundane (lokiya).

Nirvana-Directed Cittas

Beyond the worldly spheres of consciousness, we have the supramundane (alokiya) sphere, where those nearing or entering complete enlightenment will cultivate cittas that are Nirvana-directed (lokuttara), eliminating the ten fetters as they progress towards total liberation.

Each of the four stages of enlightenment produce path cittas and fruition cittas, for a total of eight lokuttara cittas.

  • Supramundane Consciousness (lokuttara) is the consciousness directed toward nirvana, associated with enlightened beings
    • the stream-winner,
    • once-returner,
    • non-returner,
    • and the liberated one.

Section 4: Run!

What we just went over was the Abhidharma’s objective analysis of consciousness, concerned with the objects of consciousness. Now, we’re going to take a deeper look at the anatomy of a citta and the subjective qualities or factors of consciousness, the cetasikas.

To illustrate the relationship between cittas and cetasikas, let’s take a moment to think about your heart beat. A nurse may describe your pulse as strong, fast, slow, weak, or shallow, depending on the qualities that accompany the rise, duration, fall, and rest intervals of a heart beat.

A cardiologist, whose specialty requires the deepest understanding of the heart’s activity, can look at the waveform of a pulse and identify, from moment to moment, the parts of a pulse and the different electrical signals of the heart.

They divide the pulse into moments of time and describe the nature of the pulse in each moment. When certain factors are observed together at the same time, these experts can name identifiable and predictable patterns, like sinusoidal rhythm, atrial fibrillation, etc.

This ability to identify and name patterns enables them to know which dangers are present, what benefits are possible, what should be prescribed or avoided.

The masters of the Abhidharma are like cardiologists of the mind. Just like the cardiologist can describe the progression of electrical signals in the heart, the Abhidharma describes the progression of cittas through 17 moments in the thought process.

And, in the same way that doctors and nurses can say this is a healthy pulse, this is a weak pulse, and so on, the Abhidharma masters can describe the cetasikas, qualities of our thoughts from moment to moment.

Our heart beat is the product of many subtle processes we have going on in our body. For example, my pulse will feel differently if I’ve had a cup of herbal tea, versus if I’ve just had a venti Pumpkin Spice Frappuccino with an extra shot of espresso.

The cetasikas are subtle characteristic mental factors that mix together and contribute to how the citta is experienced. There are some universal cetasikas that are present with every citta, then there are some particular cetasikas that are occasionally present with certain types of consciousness. There are also unwholesome cetasikas, and beautifully wholesome cetasikas.

We’re not going to look at these in any further detail than to just understand their function and how they relate to the cittas, and our perceptions and experience of phenomena. Understanding that functional relationship is a vitally important and distinct aspect of Abhidharmic studies, and is a powerful tool for overcoming suffering.


Section 5: Matter

We’ve jogged a lap around cittas and cetasikas, and now we can cool down and get into our final topic, matter.

If this is your first exposure to the Abhidharma then the only thing we need to know about matter at this stage is that we’re not talking about your grade school science class definition of matter with solid, liquids, and gasses. We’re not talking about the molecular or atomic structure of the universe. What we are talking about, what we’re always talking about in the Abhidharma, is your experience of (and responses to) phenomena through a psychotherapeutic lens.

So when we say “matter” we’re not talking about particles in a vacuum, we’re talking about the experience of matter as it is processed in your consciousness.

The Abhidharma does list some things that we would classically think of as tangible material elements, like earth, air, fire, and water, but like Bhikku Bodhi said it’s more important to know the function than to get into the specifics, so in this case just know that those elements and components of matter represent principles of how the world around us is consciously experienced as conditioned reality.

Remember that analysis always needs to be followed by synthesis, as we take these little dots of ideas, these little points of data, and bring them together in one unified understanding and experience of the Abhidharma.

On that note, lets do a quick recap…


Questions:

  • In what ways can recognizing and analyzing cittas (mind moments) and cetasikas (mental factors) assist in transforming unwholesome mental patterns into wholesome ones?
  • How does the Abhidharma’s categorization of relative and ultimate realities influence our perception of phenomena and our responses to life’s challenges?
  • How does the Abhidharma’s perspective on phenomena (dharmas) encourage us to see beyond surface-level experiences to the deeper causes of our suffering and joy?