Our peculiar situation: of possessing a consciousness that has no beginning or end (when we look into it), and which blooms in a body that is limited in time and capacity.
—Susan Murphy
Without preservation, the brain turns to the consistency of a milkshake a few hours after death.
—Alberto Villoldo
The expansive dimensions of the Abhidharma cosmology revealed the interpenetrations of realms of existence and consciousness. Now we land back in the concrete world we know, and see that, even from this local vantage point, realities mesh with incredible complexity. Mind and matter are not simply pulled apart.
We live in a dualistic and divided culture. As much as I can say that Buddhism doesn’t separate mind from body, or consciousness from matter, it is hard for me to truly feel that mind and body aren’t distinct. We are taught throughout our existence to experience a rift between mental and physical realities. We are sympathetic to physical illnesses and often judgmental about psychological ones. We pit nature and nurture against each other. To dismiss something we say “It’s all in your head,” meaning it’s “just” mental processes, whereas if that same head houses a migraine, we suggest medication.
The field of physics claims to be able to describe “all the phenomena of the physical world except the gravitational effect … and radioactive phenomena.”98 The Abhidharma adds another element that the physicists don’t incorporate: matter interacting with consciousness, expressing it, and realizing it. No language adequately captures that intermingling and interdependence, which are beyond the duality of our deepest training.
Considering matter and consciousness interpenetrating might conjure up the image of a magician bending a spoon with mental effort. More common illustrations abound. I tend to feel the magnitude of human consciousness taking material form whenever I am driving on one of those huge, multilevel, concrete highway cloverleaf snarls. When I am banking around yet another tan cement curve, seeing curves ahead and above, and lines of dotted traffic straight below, and forking exit choices and banks of green signs, I am acutely aware that the universe of that moment is matter animated by the human mind. From the civil engineer producing a curve on a screen, to the person directing a slide of wet concrete, to me turning a round piece of plastic in gripped hands to stay on this road, matter is expressing human intention.
The Abhidharma’s description of matter does start with basics, the elements of the physical universe, but it does not isolate the elements. The four elements of earth, water, fire, and air are not presented as entities so much as distinct forces within interactive processes. The forces are interdependent with the physical objects that manifest them. In the Abhidharma, earth, for instance, refers to the characteristic of solidity, not to the dirt or stone that may realize and express this characteristic.
The Abhidharma description of matter is about process, just like the description of consciousness. It lays out ways that consciousness and karma and the elements work together inseparably to produce material phenomena. The chapter starts by defining matter as conditioned, mundane material that cannot take an object. Mental phenomena take or know objects; material phenomena don’t. Both sets of phenomena are subject to arising, maintenance, decay, and dissolution, but only an essential knowing activity separates what is an act of consciousness from all of those acts’ material ramifications.
Further, in the Abhidharma, matter is a momentary phenomenon. This is another disorienting way to say that we are going to be looking at processes of the material world when we study matter, not concrete objects. It took me a long time to absorb that this doesn’t just mean we are studying a moving object. Even a still object, as we perceive it, only exists for an instant. The sense of smell illustrates this well. If we inhale twice we know we are taking in a whole new set of molecules and an evolved scent. We notice its change and dissolution. But all objects and perceptions are like that. Although a consciousness moment is quicker than a material phenomenon moment (remember, the seventeen steps of a full perceptual process or seventeen cittas equal one material moment), everything we take in is constantly changing, decaying, moving, shrinking, growing, absorbing new light in a turning world.
Matter is grouped into eighteen Inherent or Concretely Produced Types and ten Non-Concretely Produced Types of Matter. Concretely Produced means that this manifestation of matter comes about in some perceivable form from one of the four modes of origin of matter (more on that in a bit). The Non-Concretely Produced Types are really modalities or attributes of other material processes and are more descriptively useful than original processes in themselves. Some Abhidharma scholars call them “nominal entities,”99 derivative categories that are simply convenient for an analysis of the material world.
The list of eighteen Inherent Types of Matter starts with the four elements of earth, water, fire, and air. This division is familiar and historically predates even the development of Buddhism, having been used in ancient Egypt and Greece. The Abhidharma, of course, has a rather particular usage of the elements. Each element is presented with the “four defining devices” for realities (characteristic, function, manifestation, and proximate cause), as well as descriptions of how we experience the elements and the principles they represent.
The Abhidharma did describe the concept of an atom, but the earth element is a little different from that. The Abhidharma atom is estimated to be 1/576,108,288 of a cubic inch and only seen with the divine eye; it is microscopic.100 The element of earth, which is manifest in huge quantities of these atoms, represents solidity and spatial extension. The earth element is not the hard thing but the hardness, which depends on the hard thing for its realization. It is experienced as variation of texture and is considered the foundation for the other elements and all material processes. Whenever things are happening in the material world, it is because something is extending into space and changing the way it is relating to space.
While earth extends and is manifest as receiving, water represents a principle of cohesion. We generally think of liquid as dispersing or flowing to the lowest point, but the imagery of the Abhidharma emphasizes water making things stick together and not scatter. This principle is described in terms of wet cloth, but hair works well too. Wet hair hangs together, whereas dry hair frizzes and frays. Water intensifies coexisting material states, like the saturation of color in wet objects. Because of this principle invisibly holding material phenomena together, the water element, unlike the other three, is not considered tangibly perceived by the human body but inferred through observation and reason.
The fire element’s description is relatively straightforward. It is experienced as the full range of temperature of the body and other materials. Its function is to mature or ripen material phenomena, a kind of creative energy. In this sense the fire element might be seen as similar to how heat speeds up certain chemical processes. The fire element is what keeps the live body from rotting.
Air, in the Abhidharma lexicon, manifests as conveyance and represents principles of motion and pressure. By viewing air in motion, the element reads a bit more like how we might traditionally think of moving water. Lots of time with breathing meditation probably influenced the Abhidharma creators’ views of air as an active element. Air causes movement and distension of the body; it is seen as keeping matter erect, full and propelled, and we experience it as tangible pressure.
The four elements are the principles of everything substantial and always arise together and condition one another, simultaneously and reciprocally. The solidity of earth is the base for the other three elements, and fire’s sustaining force maintains the other three. The cohesion of water holds things together, and the distension of air makes things full and mobile.
Although the earth element is foundational to matter, the four elements combine together without a set hierarchy. Their dynamics are constantly interpenetrating, and what is dominant is based on intensity of perception, not dominance within the four elements. For instance, if you touch a flame, the heat element will clearly overwhelm perception. But at that moment, the water element of cohesion is holding the fire together so that it just emanates from the candle wick, and the earth element is defining its extension and shape into space, while the air element is operative in the moving flame, which darts and reshapes itself as the finger touches it.
I used to think of the four elements combining in a kind of pictorial way, like a river rushing past earth with the sun shining and the wind blowing branches of trees. The Abhidharma view of the elements as properties combining makes me see every element within each element’s manifestation in the picture. It feels more complicated and dense, as well as more true and beautiful.
The other fourteen of the eighteen Inherent Types of Matter continue with completely dynamic definitions that describe what matters does, with the emphasis on interactions in organic, conscious dimensions. The next five items are the sensitive phenomena of the body: eye-sensitivity, ear-sensitivity, nose-sensitivity, tongue-sensitivity, and body-sensitivity. They begin the lists of secondary material phenomena “derivative” from the basic four elements.101
These categories are the sensitive matter within each of the sense organs, not the organ itself. They refer to the very cellular structures that receive sensory data, the minute point of chemical or motion contact. In the Abhidharma the sensitive matter is confined to points described as the size of the head of a louse.102 The exception is the sense of touch, which soaks up perception all over the body.
These sensitivity points are the foundations of the sense consciousnesses, the physical bases and doors for humans registering the world in the modes that we do. As described in the Six Sixes with sensory bases and doors, it is not easy to draw a line between physical matter and points of process with these phenomena. They are what make sensory process possible, through receptivity manifest in subtle electrical, chemical, and mechanical responses.
The next five types of matter are the reciprocal forms of objective material that meet the sensitive material: visible form, sound, smell, taste, and tangibility. Again, the list does not refer to physical objects but to their qualities as perceived by beings. We do not see apples, but we respond to the wavelength of light that is a color, shading into the form of a curve. An interesting note is that color alone is seen as the objective material of vision, because shape and form are actually seen by discriminations of color and shading, and can be determined with touch as a sense also.103 There is even some description in the Abhidharma of wave theory; sound stimuli are described as being slower to hit the ear than visual stimuli hit the eye.104
The material of the sense objects is presented in fragments, and by the time we name what we saw as “apple,” we have probably processed thousands of material sense data and certainly experienced many cittas putting together the experience. The scale of explanation is even bigger when we are involved with the particulars of an apple in the unique, current moment; an apple can be delicious to a hungry person, heavy in a bag at the grocery, or rotting under a gnarled tree.
The last four types of Inherent matter refer to basic organic processes: the material phenomena of sex, the material phenomena of heart, the life faculty, and edible food. While the sutras and commentaries are filled with tales of basic human bodily processes, including meditations on excrement and decaying corpses, this is one point of bodily focus in the Abhidharma. Again, the descriptions are not of tangible objects but of the factors that underlie the animation of these objects and organic bodies.
The material phenomena of sex are the faculties of femininity and masculinity that cause all of the physical and cultural characteristics associated with gender. Like the touch sense, they are spread throughout the body. Heart phenomena are the materials of the heart base, which support the mind element and mind consciousness. The capacity for mental processing rests on a subtle base in the heart, assisted by the four elements and maintained by the life faculty. This concept rests on a kind of fulcrum of humanity, reminding us that cognitive phenomena are much more expansive than brain events.
The life faculty is a material process that runs parallel to the mental life faculty, a universal cetasika that accompanies every moment of consciousness. It is called a faculty because it exerts a dominating influence in maintaining the life process. Life phenomena are material processes of maintenance, or qualities in matter that cause it to persist and support associated organic processes. Life faculty might be illustrated by the rhythm of the heartbeat, each contraction and dilation naturally progressing into the next while life persists.
Finally, edible food is listed as an inherent type of matter, representing the nutritive essence of the food, not the actual object. The actual food is a compilation of the four elements, plus color, odor, and taste, but the nutritive essence, like the life phenomena, supports the ongoing existence of the physical body.
These bodily processes, as material phenomena, take nothing for granted. The processes of being human, from the basic animation of life to sexual manifestations, are delineated because they do interact with everything else, including karma and consciousness. These causal interactions will be described further in Chapters 12 and 13.
The list of the Eighteen Types of Inherent Matter may already look pretty abstract for a discussion of matter. Inherent doesn’t mean “concrete” in the sense of physically solid; it denotes instead a pattern of interdependent arising, suitable for insight contemplation. The Ten Kinds of Non-Concretely Produced Matter are indirectly related to the original causes of matter, and seem to be added as necessary explanations of what makes matter function. These ten types of matter are more like accessories in describing the material world.
The first type of Non-Concretely Produced Matter, space, is sometimes considered a fifth element. Space is the void region that separates and delineates objects and phenomena. It includes the paradoxical idea of interior space, such as body cavities105 or perhaps the holes in Swiss cheese. The concept of space was necessary for the world to make sense.
The next two modalities of matter are human modes of expression: bodily and vocal intimation. Bodily and vocal intimation refer to the smallest units of human intention in movement. Physics describes the strong, weak, electromagnetic, and gravitational forces that occur over different ranges and at different strengths. Bodily and vocal intimation are personal-scale, human force affecting organic matter. They name the moment when will and matter interpenetrate. I read about these material phenomena about a dozen times before the significance of the concept started to sink in. The Abhidharma supplies a missing link here, in the impact of consciousness on the material world. By looking at events so microscopically, the early Buddhists noticed a juncture connecting matter and human communication.
The intimations arise with and follow or conform to a pattern of thought, and they appear as a slight tension located anywhere in the body at the onset of movement. They are doors to volition or karma,106 like a sense base can be a door to perception. They are set up by the seventh javana in the sequence of perception,107 at the end of the karma-producing series of “running-over” cittas. The intimations might be frontal lobe processes in the brain, where awareness and motivation coalesce into a plan of action, which is then relayed to muscle-activating neurons. They are neither intention nor action, but the force that links the two.
I find this concept useful in considering all of the inadvertent, unconscious, and subliminal human communication that occurs, which I think is the majority of communication. The intimation itself is not purposeful, but it links the actual quality of thought to an organic tension that will be expressed in some mode. What adds the decisive or consciously directed element to the potential movement, statement, or behavior? Maybe this is a juncture for the expression of exquisitely trained mindfulness. If a person is aware of this intimation or can meta-process the cittas that create thoughts linking to intention, the expression might be deliberately crafted. Cultivating awareness of this important link in human communication could create a revolution in improved personal interactions.
In the earliest Theravadan Abhidharma, the intimations were clearly distinguished from actual movement and were described as inferred mind-objects, not sensually discernable events.108 Other branches of the Abhidharma included willed motion, and they saw bodily intimation as motion mixed with intention,109 compared to something like the movement of hair in the wind. In this way, bodily and vocal intimations can be subtle or quite overt. They underlie what we understand as body language or tone of voice. The intimations are the most basic and interpersonal ways that human will and matter influence each other.
The next three items on the list of Non-Concretely Produced Matter move us away from the strictly human domain. They are called the lightness triad: lightness, malleability, and wieldiness. They are derived from lightness as a quality interacting with matter, and they express movement, flexibility, and effectiveness. The same three items appear on the list of mental factors that accompany consciousness. As mental factors they enliven awareness, and as material factors they enliven activities of matter. They are a basic description of health and balance in a system.
The final four items of Non-Concretely Produced Matter are basic steps of any organic process in time: production, continuity, decay, and impermanence. These are modalities of matter becoming development. Forces bring a moment of matter into existence, support that existence, start to wear in the course of that existence, and bring that particular instance of matter to an end. This is another parallel to the explanation of consciousness processes, where basic development is spelled out, with each citta arising, persisting, and dissolving. At the end of the list of types of matter we find an existential list of matter’s activities.
I did not expect that matter would get as complicated as cittas, the actions of consciousness, or cetasikas, the mental factors. It does. The dynamic and interdependent view of the Abhidharma does not let up here. Matter is not separable from the processes of mind; in fact, many underlying processes run in parallel. Mind and matter do not operate on distinct systems, but seem to be different instances of some basic principles of process. The classifications of matter also are interactions and have that extra dynamic dimensionality we have grown accustomed to in Abhidharma study.
The first few categorizations of matter are binary lists of qualities: internal or external, bases or not bases, doors or not doors, faculties or not faculties, subtle or gross, etc. Internal material phenomena are the sensitive materials that allow sensory experience. The phenomena that are bases are the sensitive materials of the body and the heart, phenomena that support both sensory and mental processes. The phenomena that are classified as doors are the sensitive materials and the two intimations, which are channels for sensory object perception and action, respectively. The phenomena that are categorized as faculties assert control over coexisting processes: the sensitive materials, sexual and life faculties. The subtle processes are not smaller than the gross processes, but they require inference to detect.
There are a few other categories that cover how intensely the material processes impinge on the cognitive and sensory processes. Finally, material phenomena are also categorized and then subgrouped in terms of their causes. This theory is the master interweaving of consciousness, will, and matter.
How matter comes to exist at all is a mysterious question, usually explained by the Big Bang theory in our universe. The four modes of origin of matter in the Abhidharma are karma, consciousness, temperature, and nutriment. These modes address the continual arising and transformations of matter less than its ultimate creation.
Karma is the base, but most difficult, component in the formula. In A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidharma, karma is defined as volitional action: “The direct results of kamma are the resultant (vipaka) states of consciousness and mental factors that arise when kamma finds the right conditions to fructify. Kamma also produces a distinct type of matter in the organic bodies of living beings.”110 Another way to put it: “Karma is nothing else but the acting principle of consciousness which, as effect (vipaka), also steps into visible appearance.”111 Volition, abetted by circumstance, keeps the gears of human activity grinding, and it is a cause of the material phenomena of conscious human life.
In the Abhidharma this is meant in a real sense. Our lives arise in a flow of karmic motion that determines actual existence. In discussing cittas and cetasikas, we looked at ways that intention and association shape ongoing mental processes, but here we are talking about ways that intention shapes the fact of life itself. According to the Abhidharma, karma is the major player in determining both what realm we are born into and the nature of the processes that govern our experiences within these realms.
There are eighteen types of material phenomena produced by karma, and these include the “eight inseparables” (or the “pure octad”), the sense faculties, sexual determination, life faculty, heart base, and space. The eight inseparables are eight material phenomena that always occur together in all material objects. They are parallel to the seven Universal cetasikas. The pure octad includes the four essential elements and four of their derivatives: color, smell, taste, and nutritive essence. Although the Abhidharma recognizes something akin to the atom, the basic unit of tangible matter is this dynamic cluster of the eight processes of the pure octad, just as the basic unit of consciousness is the cluster of seven universal mental factors supporting the consciousness event.
This is saying that this basic octad—the elements and how we perceive them—is the fundamental unit of experience for material process. Karma causes us to be alive, take on gender, and have bodily experience in a natural grouping. Where processes are grouped, as described with the four elements, they are not hierarchical or derivative. They are interpenetrating, like axes of a sphere. There are many other groupings of the material phenomena in groups numbering from eight to thirteen, each brought about by one of the four material causes.
The next mode of matter arising is consciousness. This is another Abhidharma concept that throws Western scientific understanding on its head. We think of consciousness as responding to matter and not creating it, but in the Abhidharma matter can be set up by or arise in response to a thought.112 The material phenomena brought about by consciousness are technically one step behind those brought about by karma, because karma induces the first citta in life and, in the very next moment, other actions of consciousness begin, unfolding according to karma and producing more karma as they go. More developed consciousness then occurs later in the cognitive process and activates the bodily intimations. The intimations are the manifestations of intention influencing the matter of the human body. They are will arising in motion, consciousness overtly affecting the material world.
In the intimations, the most minute traces of volition are folding into one another and shaping the organic processes of the body. The myriad implications of these actions compound, from health factors to interpersonal events, right up to the multiple highway overpass cloverleaves that illustrate matter and intention on a grand scale. Clearly correlations such as those between mental stress and high cortisol levels, which cause bodily inflammation, show material phenomena to be meaningfully related to consciousness events. The whole field of psychoneuroimmunology is implied by this Abhidharma analysis.
The karma-born groupings of material phenomena include the pure octad plus basic life-sustaining factors. They start with the rebirth-linking moment (the citta that initiates consciousness processes in one life, linked with previously existing consciousness elements) and determine the broad strokes of physical existence. The consciousness-born groupings, such as the bodily intimations and the lightness triad, have qualities that we might more readily recognize as human expression. Movements like a quick bodily gesture, the capacity to accurately aim a dart, or moving air through the vocal chords so that we can speak all rely on the consciousness-born groupings of material phenomena.
The groupings based on temperature and nutriment as causes are more basic and just include the pure octad, sound phenomena, and the lightness triad. Temperature origination is based on the fire element and the dynamics of heat as procreative. The nutritive essence maintains existence and the possibility of all organic phenomena. These last two causes return to a more physical basis of explanation. Whereas karma starts physical life and consciousness colors it, temperature develops it and nutritive essence sustains it.
Oddly the chapter of the Sangaha on matter ends with the most extensive discussion of nirvana in this summary of the Abhidharma. The chapter spans from tangible particles to what is beyond conceptualization. It might have seemed like a landing of sorts to examine solid matter after the ethereal realms of existence. But the end point of understanding matter is another letting go of conceptualization.
A discussion of the death process links the two topics. After describing the causes of matter, the Abhidharma explains the dissolution of living matter. Death is described as the dropping of material processes grouped by their causes. At the moment of death, in a mundane sense-sphere existence, the final citta sheds all earlier karma-born material processes, and then the material phenomena born of consciousness cease. Following that, the material phenomena born of nutriment cease, and the body has only material qualities produced by temperature.
Rebirth is then described as occurring in realms where a type of developmental ascension is defined by the inclusion of fewer material phenomena groups. If you look at the planes of existence, you find twenty-eight material phenomena in the sense planes and twenty-three material phenomena in the fine-material planes. In non-percipient realms, where beings have limited rounds of life and death left to be experienced, seventeen material phenomena can occur, but none occur in the immaterial plane.113
Finally, the fourth ultimate reality—which is free of all matter, all conditioning, all aggregates of construction, all defilements—is considered nirvana, which literally means “extinguished.” The dynamics of life cycles or material processes are no longer relevant. Nirvana is described by the three aspects of being void, signless, and desireless. It is beyond anything we know, beyond any name we might think of for anything, beyond the grasping of our deepest being. The chapter on matter takes us through material processes to beyond them. Although nirvana transcends all realms of existence, it is also within all realms, or possible to experience from all realms through the power of meditative training.114
As a plain organic being reading these words, with sense receptors and multitudes of cognitive processes, I can just begin to imagine what these descriptions imply. Like all Abhidharma analysis, we end with and return to the purpose of emancipation. A sutra entitled Meditation on the Elements115 brings this point home directly, in terms of the study of the particulars of matter. This sutra quotes Buddha’s instructions to his son, Rahula, at the age of eighteen. It says, “Rahula, any kind of material form whatever, whether past, future or present, internal or external, gross or subtle, inferior or superior, far or near, all material form should be seen as it actually is with proper wisdom thus: ‘This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.’” Even with matter, the goal is to keep conceptualization from locking up. Of course we assume matter is solid, but as soon as we grasp to beliefs about how that works for our particular self, we lose pace with the momentum of life.
We are used to viewing our mental life in dynamic terms. When the most tangible aspects of our life become equally lively, it can be disconcerting. More and more of our conceptual bases break free of rigidity and our assumptions about the world loosen. The Abhidharma leaves no stone, of a concrete or conceptual sort, unturned.