A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma

Bhikkhu Bodhi (ed.)

3 ideas

1. Mind as discrete momentary cognitive events

   Consciousness is not a continuous stream or a persisting self but a rapid succession of discrete mind-moments (citta), each arising, briefly persisting, and dissolving. Each moment is a single act of knowing an object, bundled with a specific set of co-arising mental factors, and the appearance of a continuous perceiver comes from their unbroken sequence. Seeing the mind this way shifts analysis from 'who is experiencing' to 'which kind of moment is occurring now and what conditions produced it.'

2. Sense-door cognitive process as mind-moment sequence

   The manual describes a sense-door process as a series of mind-moments: the life-continuum (bhavanga) is disturbed, the mind adverts to the sense door, sense-consciousness arises, then receiving, investigating, and determining moments follow, leading into javana moments and, in certain processes, registration. Volition accompanies every citta, but the javana phase is where kamma is generated, so the ethical quality of a response is determined in javana rather than in the earlier moments that present the object.

3. Twenty-four conditional relations explain causation

   The Patthana method replaces single-cause explanation with twenty-four distinct kinds of conditional relation between phenomena, such as root, object, predominance, contiguity, co-nascence, mutuality, support, and decisive support. Any mental or material event arises from many conditions at once, each linked by a specific relation type, so two things can be related as simultaneous mutual supports rather than as prior cause and later effect. Analyzing an experience means identifying which relations are active, which exposes causation as a network with no independent agent behind it.

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