Sarvastivada
The Physicists of Buddhism
In the last episode, we mapped out the landscape of Sectarian Buddhism:
Eighteen schools,
Four core disputes.
But I left you with one final question:
What kind of philosophical edifice did Sarvastivada build?
Today,
we step inside that edifice.
Once inside, you'll find
it doesn't resemble a Buddhist temple;
it looks more like a laboratory.
Hello,
everyone.
I'm Wang Lijie.
Sarvastivada,
known in Sanskrit as Sarvāstivāda,
is the most significant branch of Sthavira Buddhism.
It broke away from the Sthavira school around the 3rd century BCE.
Its center of activity spanned Gandhara (modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan)
and Kashmir.
For several centuries,
it was the most influential Buddhist school in Northern India.
Why do I say they are like physicists?
Because they did something unprecedented in Buddhist history:
they attempted to compile a complete parts list of the universe.
The Buddha taught Dependent Origination—
all phenomena arise from the convergence of causes and conditions;
nothing has an independent, unchanging nature.
This doctrine sounds simple enough,
but have you considered a more specific question?
"Convergence of conditions:"
Exactly what is converging with what?
You say a flower is a product of conditions.
Fine.
But what are the specific elements of that convergence?
Seeds, soil, water, sunlight, air?
But the seed itself is a product of conditions.
Then what are the elements of the seed?
Once this inquiry begins,
it must go to the very bottom.
Just as physicists seek the smallest units of matter,
Sarvastivada sought
the ultimate units that constitute our empirical world.
Their answer was the Seventy-five Dharmas.
In Buddhism, "Dharma" is a catch-all term
with numerous meanings.
But in the context of Sarvastivada,
a "Dharma" is a fundamental element of all empirical phenomena.
You can compare them to elementary particles in physics.
Physics says matter consists of quarks and leptons;
Sarvastivada says experience consists of 75 Dharmas.
These 75 Dharmas are divided into five categories.
The first is Rupa (Form),
consisting of eleven types.
In Buddhism, "Rupa" doesn't just mean color;
it refers to material things.
Anything that has resistance and occupies space counts,
including the five sense organs: eye, ear, nose, tongue, and body,
plus their five corresponding external objects:
sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches.
Plus something called Avijnapti-rupa (Unmanifest Form).
What is Unmanifest Form?
It is a material force that you cannot see or touch,
yet it truly exists.
For example, if you take Buddhist precepts,
after the ceremony concludes,
a "precept-body" (jie-ti) forms within you.
It isn't a material form you can observe,
but it actively influences your behavior and psyche.
Sarvastivada classifies this as a type of Rupa.
The second category is Citta (Mind).
There is only one:
Mind,
also called the King of Mind.
This is the commander-in-chief of all conscious activity.
Note that
Sarvastivada posits only one Mind King,
unlike the later Yogacara school which identified eight consciousnesses.
In their system,
Mind is a single entity,
presenting different functions in different contexts.
The third category is Mental Concomitants (Caitasika dharmas).
There are forty-six types,
making it the largest group among the Seventy-five Dharmas.
These are mental functions that accompany the King of Mind.
Think of the Mind King as a phone's processor;
caitasikas are the apps running on that processor.
There are both good apps and bad apps.
These forty-six types are divided into six groups.
The first group is Universal (Mahābhūmika) dharmas.
There are ten of them,
including contact, attention, feeling, perception, volition, desire, wisdom, mindfulness, concentration, and resolve.
Why are they called Universal?
Because these ten mental functions are present in every single
conscious activity.
Like a band,
no matter what song is played,
these ten musicians are always on stage.
The second group is Virtuous (Kuśalamahābhūmika) dharmas.
There are ten types,
including faith, diligence, pliancy, equanimity, shame,
remorse, non-attachment, non-hatred, non-harm, and vigor.
Whenever your mind is doing a good deed,
these ten are necessarily present.
The third group is Defiled (Kleśamahābhūmika) dharmas.
There are six types:
ignorance, negligence, indolence, lack of faith, torpor, and restlessness.
Whenever there is affliction in your mind,
these six will follow.
The fourth group is Evil (Akuśalamahābhūmika) dharmas.
There are two types:
shame-lessness and lack of remorse.
Whenever you do something unwholesome,
these two are always present.
The former means not feeling ashamed;
the latter means not caring about hurting others.
The fifth group is Minor Affliction (Upakleśabhūmika) dharmas.
There are ten types,
including anger, hostility, concealment, affliction, envy, stinginess, deceit, flattery, pride, and harm.
These are the trivial afflictions that pop up occasionally.
The sixth group is Indeterminate (Aniyatabhūmika) dharmas.
There are eight types,
including regret, sleep, reasoning, investigation, greed, hatred, conceit, and doubt.
These functions sometimes align with good
and sometimes align with evil;
they are not fixed.
Let me use an example to show how precise this system is.
As you listen to me speak,
Contact:
Your ears receive the sound wave signals.
Attention:
Your focus is drawn here.
Feeling:
You develop a sensation—
perhaps curiosity, or perhaps boredom.
Perception:
You are identifying what these sounds mean.
Volition:
You begin to judge—
does this make sense?
Should I keep listening?
These five Universal dharmas
operated simultaneously just now.
Moreover, if you find it interesting,
faith and vigor are also active,
adding two Virtuous dharmas.
If you feel tired,
torpor and restlessness might be taking over,
adding two Defiled dharmas.
You see,
the Sarvastivada school breaks down every second of your mental activity
into these precise components.
The fourth category is Disassociated (Cittaviprayuktasamskāra) dharmas.
There are fourteen types.
These are quite special.
They are neither material nor mental,
but rather some abstract regulatory existences.
For example, 'obtaining' (prāpti),
which is the condition for attaining a certain state.
Life-faculty (jīvitendriya);
the force that sustains life.
Birth, persistence, change, and extinction;
the four stages of everything from arising to vanishing.
Even the concept of impermanence itself,
in the Sarvastivada view, is a truly existing dharma.
It's not just a label we attach to things.
The fifth category is the unconditioned (asamskrta) dharmas.
There are three types.
The first four categories are all conditioned,
created by causes and conditions.
Unconditioned dharmas are not created by such causes.
What are these three?
First,
extinction through deliberation (pratisamkhya-nirodha);
the cessation of afflictions achieved through wisdom,
which is Nirvana.
Second,
extinction not through deliberation (apratisamkhya-nirodha);
cessation that isn't from active practice,
but because the necessary conditions simply aren't present.
The third is space (akasa).
Space itself isn't something produced;
it has always been there.
If you add these five categories up:
11 plus 1 plus 46 plus 14 plus 3,
it equals 75.
This is the Sarvastivada's universal inventory.
They believe
everything you experience,
no matter how complex,
is ultimately reducible to these 75 basic elements
operating in different combinations.
Does this remind you of anything?
It's essentially a periodic table from 2,000 years ago.
Chemists explain matter with 100+ elements;
Sarvastivada explains all experience with 75 dharmas.
The methodology is almost identical:
reduce complexity to basic units,
then analyze how they combine.
That's why I call them the physicists of Buddhism.
Their core worldview isn't intuitive or mystical;
it's analytical.
It's not about closing your eyes to feel emptiness,
but opening your eyes to slice reality as thin as possible,
until it can't be sliced anymore,
and seeing exactly what each slice is.
But the 75 dharmas are just their toolbox.
The core proposition they use this toolbox to prove
is what truly caused an uproar.
Real existence across the three times;
the eternal persistence of the dharma-essence.
We touched on this concept in the last episode.
Dharmas in the past, present, and future
all truly exist.
The essence of a dharma is always there;
only its state of function changes.
Let me use a concrete example to help you understand.
Imagine a row of 75 switches in front of you.
Each switch represents a dharma.
At any given moment,
some switches are on,
and some are off.
The "on" state means the dharma is currently functioning;
that is the "present."
The "off" state means it isn't functioning;
it has either already passed
or has not yet arrived.
But whether a switch is on or off,
the switch itself is always there.
This is what "real existence in the three times" means.
The dharma-essence exists throughout all three times;
it's just sometimes running in the foreground
and sometimes on standby in the background.
You might immediately have a sharp rebuttal:
one of Buddha's core teachings is impermanence.
Everything changes;
nothing is eternal.
If you tell me the dharma-essence is eternal,
isn't that openly contradicting impermanence?
The Sarvastivada school responded like this:
When we speak of "eternal existence,"
we aren't saying that dharmas never change.
The states of their function are always changing—
moving from future to present,
and from present to past.
This is impermanence.
But for a dharma to move from one state to another,
it must first exist in its own right.
If a dharma vanished completely in the past,
how could it produce subsequent causal effects?
If a dharma didn't yet exist in the future,
how could a practitioner strive toward a goal that doesn't exist?
Does this argument make sense?
To be honest,
it has an unsettling kind of logic.
The law of causality requires a connection between cause and effect.
If the cause no longer exists when the effect is produced,
on what basis can the effect arise?
The Sarvastivada answer is:
The cause has not vanished;
it has merely shifted from an active state to an inactive one.
But it remains there,
so the causal link is real.
Interestingly, however,
even within the Sarvastivada school,
precisely how the "three times" truly exist
was a subject of fierce debate.
According to the Abhidharmakośa,
four great masters provided four different explanations.
Dharmatrata said
it is the nature of the dharma that changes through the three times,
much like milk turning into yogurt;
the substance remains, but the nature changes.
Ghosa suggested
it is the characteristics of the dharma that change,
just as a person looks different at various stages of life.
Vasumitra argued
it is the position of the dharma that changes,
like a game piece moving from one square to another;
the piece itself doesn't change,
only its position on the board.
Buddhadeva proposed
it is the relation or status of the dharma that changes,
like a person interacting with two people simultaneously;
they have one relationship with person A,
and a different one with person B.
Four explanations,
four analogies,
and none could satisfy everyone.
Vasumitra's explanation was later considered the most orthodox,
but even so,
the internal debates never fully subsided.
When a school generates four incompatible explanations
for its core doctrine,
it reveals one thing:
the inherent tension in the premise of "existence across three times" is real.
But external critics were even sharper in their attacks.
The Sautrantika school asked,
"If you say the essence of a dharma is eternal,
how is that different from the Brahmanical concept of a permanent Self?"
The Buddha's very mission was to oppose this clinging to permanent entities.
You've built a sophisticated classification system,
yet your foundational assumption is exactly what the Buddha told you to let go of.
The later Madhyamaka school was even more direct.
In his Madhyamakakarika, Nagarjuna dismantle the logic of Sarvastivada point by point.
He said:
"If the essence of a dharma is eternal,
then it exists independently;
it would therefore have a 'self-nature' (svabhava).
If it has a self-nature,
it cannot participate in dependent origination.
Because the definition of dependent origination is that everything arises based on conditions;
nothing has an independent self-nature.
You cannot speak of dependent origination
while ascribing self-nature to the very elements that are supposed to be dependent.
This is a logical contradiction."
This critique was almost fatal.
It pointed out the deepest internal tension of Sarvastivada:
they tried to analyze the world using the Buddha's framework of dependent origination.
But their analytical tools themselves,
the seventy-five dharmas with inherent existence,
directly violate the premise of dependent origination.
It's like a physicist saying,
"I study the universe through reductionism,"
but when asked what the fundamental particles are,
claims they are unanalyzable, eternal, ultimate entities.
Modern physics has already moved past this stage.
We know that
even fundamental particles are not truly solid entities.
They are just excited states of quantum fields,
relationships and processes,
not fixed objects.
As we said when discussing cosmic emergence,
particles are more like a melody hummed by spacetime geometry
than tiny hard balls.
The philosophical dilemma Sarvastivada faced 2,000 years ago
is strikingly similar to that of modern physics.
The deeper you analyze,
the more you realize
that the foundation you thought was solid is not.
Particles are not the ultimate existence,
and neither are the dharmas.
But this discovery only begins when you start analyzing seriously.
If Sarvastivada hadn't questioned the nature of dharmas,
Nagarjuna would have had nothing to deconstruct.
This is the strangest part of intellectual history.
Some mistakes are great mistakes.
Only because someone walked a path to its very end
could those who followed see where it leads,
and where it doesn't.
Returning to our calibration anchor:
Is Sarvastivada closer to or further from
what the Buddha saw under the Bodhi tree?
I think it’s a two-sided answer.
Methodologically,
it moved closer.
The Buddha said all things are dependently originated;
Sarvastivada asked what the units of that origination are.
This direction of inquiry is correct.
You can't stay on the macro-narrative of dependent origination forever;
someone has to do the micro-deconstruction.
But in terms of its core spirit,
it moved further away.
The Buddha's dependent origination is absolute;
nothing can escape the web of interdependence.
By placing dharmas with inherent existence at the bottom,
Sarvastivada laid a foundation of independent existence beneath it.
This is exactly the illusion the Buddha wanted us to see through.
You think you've seen the ultimate reality,
but that reality itself is dependently originated.
Yet it was this very deviation
that sparked an even more powerful return.
When Nagarjuna later wielded the sword of Madhyamaka,
his first target was the Sarvastivada idea of eternal dharma-essence.
Without this target,
that sword would have had nothing to strike.
Intellectual progress is never a straight line;
it's more like a spiral.
Moving forward seems like drifting from the start,
but it's that very deviation
that creates new perspectives,
allowing the next generation to look back from a higher vantage point.
Sarvastivada left two legacies for Buddhist thought.
First is the methodological legacy.
It proved Buddha-dharma can be studied with rigorous analytical tools.
This tradition reached its peak in the Abhidharma system.
What is Abhidharma?
Why is it called the source code of the Buddhist operating system?
How shockingly sophisticated is this system?
In the next episode,
we'll break it down.
The second is the legacy of a negative example.
Its dilemma showed later generations that
reductionism has its limits.
Once you slice the universe into its smallest parts,
you find the parts themselves require explanation.
The knife of analysis cannot cut down forever,
because in the end,
the knife itself is dependently originated.
If this story sounds familiar,
it is because modern science is undergoing the same journey.
From atoms to protons and neutrons,
from quarks to string theory,
every time we think we have found the fundamental unit,
we discover that it can be further deconstructed.
Physicists have yet to break out of this cycle,
but the Buddha offered a possible exit 2,500 years ago.
Perhaps there is no ultimate fundamental unit.
Perhaps relationship itself is everything.
Perhaps searching for an ultimate entity that exists independently,
is in itself the deepest form of attachment.
What do you think?
At the end of reductionism,
where do we truly arrive?
I am Leo Wang.
See you next time.