Theravāda and the Abhidharma

Theravāda (“the teaching of the elders”) is the only surviving school of the early Buddhist schools of India, and today the dominant form of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, with some 150 million followers. It preserves the Pāli Canon, the only complete collection of early Buddhist scriptures in an Indian language, and claims to preserve the original teaching of the Gautama Buddha as transmitted by his elder disciples. Its philosophy is the Abhidhamma (“higher teaching”), a systematic analysis of all experience into its ultimate constituents, and its ideal is the arhat, the “worthy one” who has destroyed greed, hatred and delusion and will not be reborn.

History

Theravāda descends from the Sthavira (“elders”) branch of the early community, which separated from the Mahāsāṅghikas about a century after the Buddha. According to the Sri Lankan chronicles, the emperor Aśoka‘s son Mahinda brought Buddhism to Sri Lanka in the third century BCE, and his daughter Saṅghamittā brought a cutting of the Bodhi tree, which still grows at Anurādhapura. The Pāli Canon was written down in Sri Lanka in the first century BCE. In the fifth century CE, the Indian monk Buddhaghosa came to Sri Lanka and translated and systematised the Sinhalese commentaries, producing the Visuddhimagga (“The Path of Purification”), which became the definitive statement of Theravāda doctrine. From Sri Lanka the tradition spread to Burma (11th century), Thailand and Cambodia (13th–14th centuries) and Laos.

The Abhidhamma

The third “basket” of the Pāli Canon, the Abhidhamma Piṭaka, in seven books, analyses experience into ultimate realities (paramattha dhammas), as opposed to conventional realities (sammuti) like persons, chariots and tables, which are only names for collections. There are four kinds of ultimate reality:

1. Consciousness (citta), classified into 89 (or 121) types by plane, ethical quality and object;
2. Mental factors (cetasikas), 52 in number — contact, feeling, perception, intention, attention, greed, hatred, delusion, faith, mindfulness, compassion and so on — which arise together with consciousness;
3. Matter (rūpa), 28 types — the four great elements (earth, water, fire, air) and their derivatives;
4. Nirvāṇa, the one unconditioned reality.

The first three are momentary: each moment of consciousness arises, persists for an instant and ceases, conditioned by preceding moments. The Abhidhamma’s Paṭṭhāna, the last and longest book, analyses twenty-four kinds of conditional relation between them. The result is a remarkably detailed phenomenology of the mind — a “Buddhist psychology” — that has interested modern cognitive scientists.

Other early schools had their own Abhidharmas. The Sarvāstivāda (“all exists”) held that dharmas exist in all three times — past, present and future — which explained memory and the delayed fruition of karma; the Sautrāntikas rejected this, holding that only the present moment exists. Vasubandhu‘s Abhidharmakośa summarised the Sarvāstivāda system and criticised it from a Sautrāntika standpoint.

The path

Theravāda practice follows the threefold training of morality (sīla), concentration (samādhi) and wisdom (paññā), set out in Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga. Concentration is developed through forty meditation subjects — breathing, the four elements, the repulsiveness of the body, death, loving-kindness (mettā) and others — leading to the meditative absorptions (jhānas). Wisdom is developed through insight (vipassanā) into impermanence, suffering and not-self, culminating in the four stages of awakening: the stream-enterer, who will attain nirvāṇa within seven lives; the once-returner; the non-returner; and the arhat.

Modern Theravāda

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Burmese reformers — Ledi Sayadaw, Mahasi Sayadaw, U Ba Khin — taught vipassanā meditation to laypeople, and their students, above all S. N. Goenka (1924–2013), spread it worldwide through ten-day silent retreats; the modern “mindfulness” movement descends largely from this lineage. Thai forest monks such as Ajahn Chah founded monasteries in the West.

In conversation

The Abhidhamma’s lesson for anyone: a “person” is a name for a stream of moments, each arising and passing away — look closely enough, and you will find events, not a thing.