Every experience, taken apart.
Abhidharma is the analytical wing of the Buddhist canon: instead of parables and dialogue, it maps the mind and the world into their smallest working parts, and asks exactly how those parts fit together — moment by moment.
These are classical Nikāya treatises — the scholastic tradition also called "Hīnayāna" in older sources — distinct from the Mahāyāna sūtras and śāstras found elsewhere in Dharma, but foundational to how every later school, East and West, has thought about the mind ever since.
What "Abhidharma" means
Abhidharma — "higher teaching" or "about the teaching" — is the third basket of the Buddhist canon, alongside the discourses (sūtra) and the monastic code (vinaya). Where a discourse teaches through story and dialogue, Abhidharma teaches through classification: it lists every mental and physical factor (dharma) that can arise, and works out the rules for how they combine.
Two independent Abhidharma traditions survive in full: the Theravāda's Pāli Abhidhamma, and the Sanskrit Abhidharma of the Sarvāstivāda school, preserved mostly in Chinese translation. This section is for the second — the tradition that produced the Abhidharmakośa.
Not Mahāyāna — and why that matters
Vasubandhu wrote the Abhidharmakośa as a Sarvāstivāda–Sautrāntika scholar, before his brother Asaṅga persuaded him toward the Mahāyāna. The Kośa itself teaches no bodhisattva path and no emptiness of dharmas — it is squarely a Nikāya (small-vehicle) treatise.
It stayed required reading anyway. Every major Mahāyāna monastic curriculum in East Asia — Chan, Tiantai, Huayan, Yogācāra — still opens with the Kośa, because its map of mind, karma, and cosmology is the shared vocabulary the later schools argue with, refine, or transcend.
Choose a treatise to enter.
We are building this collection one treatise at a time, starting with the single most widely studied Abhidharma text in the Chinese tradition.
Abhidharmakośa
Vasubandhu's systematic restatement of Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma, sharpened by his own Sautrāntika criticisms. Enter here for the nine-chapter map of the whole treatise and the fascicle-by-fascicle table of contents.
Mahāvibhāṣā Śāstra
The vast Sarvāstivāda compendium the Abhidharmakośa is written against — two hundred fascicles compiled at the council of Kashmir. A future doorway into the tradition's fullest encyclopedia.