[Buddha-l] Vipassana?

[Bruce Burrill]

At 11:58 AM 10/16/2005, Curt wrote:

 >What "dharma" means here is "a thing that has inherent existence".

Well, that is a tricky one. Nanamoli in a 
footnote in his PATH OF PURIFICATION, pages 317-8, states:

"In the Pitakas the word _sabhaava_ seems to appear only once...,"

  it appears several times in Milindapanha, and 
it is used quite a bit in the PoP and it 
commentaries. He states it often roughly 
corresponds to _dhaatu_, element and to _lakkhana_, characteristic.

An interesting passage from the PoP reads:

"On the contrary, before their rise [the bases, 
aayatana] they had no individual essence 
[sabhaava], and after their fall their individual 
essence are completely dissolved. And they occur 
without mastery [being exercisable over them] 
since they exist in dependence on  conditions and 
in between the past and the future." Page 551 XV 15.

And another XV 21:

"These are elements (dhaatu) since they cause [a 
state's] own individual essence [sabhaava] to be borne (<i>dhaarenti</i>)."

There are several other passages that could be 
quoted. Nyanaponika quotes a sub-commentary to an Abhidhamma text:

"There is no other thing than the quality borne 
by it." (na ca dhaariyamma-sabhaavaa an~n~o 
dhammo naama atthi). Abhidhamma Studies, page 40.

Warder, in INDIAN BUDDHISM, page 323, discussing 
the Pali Abhidhamma commentarial literature, states:

"The most significant new idea in the 
commentaries is the definition of a 'principle' 
or element (<i>dharma</i>): <i>dharmas</i> are 
what have (or 'hold', 'maintain', dhr. is the 
nearest equivalent in the language to the English 
'have') their own own-nature (svabhaava). It is 
added that they naturally have this through conditions."

Harvey in his excellent INTRODUCTION TO BUDDHISM, 
page 97, states in reference to the Mahayana 
critique of the Abhidharma (of the Sarvastivadins):

"That is, seeing a dharma as an ultimate building 
block of reality, with an inherent nature of its 
'own', is to hold that it can be identified 
without reference to other dharmas on which it 
depends. This implies that it can exist 
independently, making it a virtual self."

Harvey characterizes the Theravadin position, page 87:

"'They are _dhammas_ because they uphold their 
own nature [sabhaava]. They are _dhammas_ because 
they are upheld by conditions or they are upheld 
according to their own nature' (Asl.39). Here 
'own-nature' would mean characteristic nature, 
which is not something inherent in a  _dhamma_ as 
a separate ultimate reality, but arise due to the 
supporting conditions both of other _dhammas_ and 
previous occurrences of that _dhamma_. This is of 
significance as it makes the Mahayana critique of 
the Sarvastivadin's notion of own-nature largely irrelevant to the Theravada."

As Piatigorsky points out:

a dharma [in the Pali Abhidhamma], in fact, ‘is’ 
no thing, yet a term denoting (not being) a 
certain relation or type of relation to thought, 
consciousness or mind. That is, dharma is not a 
concept in the accepted terminological sense of 
the latter, but a purely relational notion.

> >These are the things that are "real", or 
> "really real" - the things that everything else 
> is made out of - but which themselves are not 
> made from anything else. If you took the 
> Universe completely apart until you couldn't 
> take it apart any more - all you would have 
> left is "dharmas". Vipassana meditation tends 
> to be somewhat complicated precisely because it 
> assume that there are actually lots of these 
> things ("dharmas") to investigate. 
 But things 
> are more complicated than that - because 
> "vipassana" is not limited to schools or traditions.


But that is not necessarily how vipassana works 
from the standpoint of the modern Theravadin 
vipassana movement. The following is a good, 
detailed and scholarly discussion of modern vipassana:

<http://www.dharma.org/~study/strongroots/>http://www.dharma.org/~study/strongroots/

How vipassana is understood by the Theravadins is 
not necessarily how it is understood by other school.