Materiality and the great lists

In one sentence

Materiality is described not as matter but as twenty-eight ways in which what can be experienced shows itself — and beside it stands the one thing that does not arise conditioned.

In today's language

Up to here it was about the mind. The sixth chapter turns to what does not cognise but is experienced. It begins with four primary kinds that together carry every material appearance: solidity and resistance, cohesion, temperature, motion and pressure. The old names for these are earth, water, fire and air, but no substances are meant — what is meant is what can be ascertained at all in one's own body. MN 28 goes through them in exactly this sense.

Everything further is dependent on these four: the five sense organs, the objects they meet, sexuality, the life force of the body, nutriment, and besides these such marks as lightness, malleability, or ageing and passing away itself. The chapter counts twenty-four such dependent kinds; with the four primary kinds they come to twenty-eight.

What matters is how they occur: never singly. The material appears in groups, the smallest of which already contains eight kinds at once — the four primary kinds, colour, smell, taste and nutritive essence. What we see as one object is an immense quantity of such groups arising and falling apart. This is not physics: it is the information that at no place is anything to be found that would stand on its own.

At the end of the chapter stands Nibbāna, and it stands there differently from everything before it. It does not arise from conditions, it does not fall apart, it has no degrees. Ud 8.3 puts it straight out: were there no unborn, no escape from the born would be discernible. In the enumeration of the four ultimate things it is therefore the fourth — not as one more piece of reality, but as what remains when the conditions cease.

The seventh chapter changes the direction of view. It describes nothing new but orders the whole of the material so far into four collecting grids: the lists of the unwholesome — taints, fetters, hindrances, latent tendencies; the mixed lists, which can occur in the wholesome as in the unwholesome; the lists of awakening — the four foundations of mindfulness, the four right efforts, the factors of awakening, the eightfold path; and last a comprehensive scheme into which every thing falls: the five aggregates, the twelve sense fields, the eighteen elements, the four truths.

This method is not new. DN 22 does the same in the contemplation of phenomena: list after list, each gone through completely. The Abhidhamma differs only in laying the lists side by side and asking how they overlap.

Why this matters

Whoever thinks of an object at the word “body” looks in meditation for something that does not exist in that way. The description as properties makes the body observable: heaviness, warmth, motion are present, a “body” never is.

Canonical basis

MN 28 demonstrates the four primary kinds in one's own body. DN 22 shows the list procedure of the seventh chapter in canonical form. Ud 8.3 gives the grounds for the special position of the unconditioned. SN 22.57 and SN 35.28 are examples of how the canon itself enumerates completely.

Components

• Materiality (rūpa) — what is experienced and does not cognise
• The four primary kinds (mahābhūta) — solidity, cohesion, temperature, motion
• Dependent materiality (upādā-rūpa) — the remaining twenty-four kinds
• Group (rūpa-kalāpa) — the smallest unit in which the material occurs
• Nibbāna — the unconditioned, without arising and passing away
• Aggregates (khandha) and sense fields (āyatana) — two of the comprehensive schemes

Connection with other teachings

The comprehensive scheme of the seventh chapter is the same one the existing path treats in its stages on the five aggregates and on the sense fields. New is only the question whether the lists cover one another without gaps.

Significance for practice

The practice for this is the contemplation of the elements: while sitting, to notice heaviness, warmth and motion, without making a body out of them again.

Common misinterpretations

• “The groups are Buddhist atoms.” — They are compositions of properties, not particles of matter; their very point is to show that nothing indivisible is to be found.
• “Nibbāna is one thing among the four ultimate things.” — It stands in the enumeration because it does not disappear under the analysis, not because it would be an object.
• “The elements are earth, water, fire, air.” — Those are the names. The matter itself is properties that can be felt (MN 28).