Abhidhamma Pitaka

Abhidhamma Pitaka, the third—and historically the latest—of the three “baskets,” or collections of texts, that together compose the Pali canon of Theravada Buddhism, the form predominant in Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka (Ceylon). The other two collections are Sutta (“Discourse”; Sanskrit Sutra) and Vinaya (“Discipline”) Pitakas. Unlike Sutta and Vinaya, the seven Abhidhamma works are generally claimed to represent not the words of the Buddha himself but those of disciples and great scholars. Nevertheless, they are highly venerated, particularly in Myanmar (Burma).

The Abhidhamma texts are not systematic philosophical treatises but a detailed scholastic reworking, according to schematic classifications, of doctrinal material appearing in the Suttas. As such they represent a development in a rationalistic direction of summaries or numerical lists. The topics dealt with in Abhidhamma books include ethics, psychology, and epistemology.

As the last major division of the canon, the Abhidhamma corpus has had a checkered history. It was not accepted as canonical by the Mahasanghika (Sanskrit: Great Community) school, the forerunners of Mahayana. Another school included within it most of the Khuddaka Nikaya (“Short Collection”), the latest section of the Sutta Pitaka.

The Pali Abhidhamma Pitaka encompasses the following texts, or pakaranas: (1) Dhammasangani (“Summary of Dharma”), a psychologically oriented manual of ethics for advanced monks but long popular in Sri Lanka, (2) Vibhanga (“Division” or “Classification”—not to be confused with a Vinaya work or with several suttas bearing the same name), a kind of supplement to the Dhammasangani, treating many of the same topics, (3) Dhatukatha (“Discussion of Elements”), another supplementary work, (4) Puggalapannatti (“Designation of Person”), largely a collection of excerpts from the Anguttara Nikaya of the Sutta Pitaka, classifying human characteristics in relation to stages on the Buddhist path and generally considered the earliest Abhidhamma text, (5) Kathavatthu (“Points of Controversy”), attributed to Moggaliputta, president of the third Buddhist Council (3rd century bc), the only work in the Pali canon assigned to a particular author, (6) Yamaka (“Pairs”), a series of questions on psychological phenomena, each dealt with in two opposite ways, and (7) Patthana (“Activations,” or “Causes”), a complex and voluminous treatment of causality and 23 other kinds of relationships between phenomena, mental or material. Historically one of the most important of the seven, the Kathavatthu is a series of questions from a heretical (i.e., non-Theravada) point of view, with their implications refuted in the answers; the long first chapter debates the existence of a soul.