Abhidhamma · Pāli: abhidhamma; Skt: abhidharma

Abhidhamma is the Pali name for the third of the three baskets of the Buddhist canon, sitting alongside the discourses (sutta) and the monastic discipline (vinaya). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that for the Buddhist exegetical tradition the word means approximately “higher” or “further” teaching, and that it covers both a scholastic movement and the body of texts that movement produced. Where the earlier discourses are colloquial, the Abhidhamma method sets the teaching out in technical terms defined for analytical exactitude, taking conscious experience apart into its constituent mental and physical events.

In Theravada the Abhidhamma Pitaka is divided into seven books, of which the first, the Dhammasangani, and the last, the Patthana, carry the weight of the system. That list is specifically Theravada. The Sarvastivada tradition understood its own canonical Abhidharma as a different set of seven texts, surviving in full only in ancient Chinese translations, and Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakosha became the manual most influential for later Chinese and Tibetan Buddhism.

Authorship is told two ways, and both are worth stating. Theravada tradition holds that the essence of the Abhidhamma was formulated by the Buddha in the fourth week after his awakening, and that it was fixed in its present form at the Third Council around 250 BCE. Scholarship describes the same texts as works that evolved over decades, if not centuries, out of material already present in the Sutta and Vinaya. Either way the analysis carried far beyond its own school, setting the agenda for the Mahayana schools of Madhyamaka and Yogacara. Our full guide walks through the Abhidharma collection by collection.