Why Should I Care about the Abhidharma?

SOMEBODY COULD SAY, “Why bother? Why should I care about knowing how to directly perceive reality?” That is an excellent question. The point of the Buddhist teachings is that the direct perception of reality is necessary in order to be truly free. Our capacity to learn how to directly perceive reality is the sine qua non for traversing the path. In fact, how free we are depends on how directly we perceive reality.

These days in the West, any talk of a true reality is regarded by many as rather suspect. There are those who would say, “It’s a matter of opinion,” “One man’s meat is another man’s poison,” or “Life is just as you like”—anything goes. This is what the Buddha called nihilistic. So the notion of “the direct perception of reality” is, perhaps, the most important definition of Abhidharma.

In Sanskrit, abhi means “making manifest.” Dharma, in this case, means “what can be known or cognized,” “the plurality of factors of reality,” or simply “what there is.” There are three aspects to this definition: the first aspect is making manifest. You could do a whole study of Buddhism in terms of what is manifest and what is not yet manifest. The second aspect is direct perception. The third is this famous reality, or “just what is.”

The Abhidharma tradition has a very subtle and precise way of presenting what makes up our entire world, both physically and non-physically.

To elaborate on dharmas as “factors of reality” or “what there is,” there is a list of seventy-five dharmas (see page 39). We could look at it like we would a periodic table of elements with all the different atoms, from hydrogen through einsteinium. There are lightweight atoms and heavyweight atoms, each with their own characteristics, their own quantum spin (at the level of quarks), and their own capacity to engage in conditional relations with other atoms to make molecules. These molecules combine with other molecules to make bigger molecules. And sometimes, as with carbon, an atom continues making long strings called polymers, such as