Disentangling the Tangle

Chapter 4 argues that Buddhaghosa interpreted the Abhidhamma as a series of methods of analysis, oceanic and immeasurable in scope and practice. Its lists and formulas are distilled from the contextually embedded narrative contexts of the suttas, to provide, in an abstract form, the analytical practices to examine experience. Such lists and methods are, in principle and in practice, unending. This argument is counter to interpretations of Abhidhamma and Buddhaghosa that suggest that they be read as offering a metaphysics of irreducible reals or essences, and the chapter refutes these positions. It shows how the many phenomena listed in the Abhidhamma matrices operate in a modal and modular fashion as practical methods to help one to “know and see” within the therapeutic aims of the Buddhist path.