wichaa › Subjects › Buddhist Canonical › Abhidhamma
The higher-doctrine basket — the Abhidhammapiṭaka, the teaching taken apart into its bare constituents of mind and matter and reassembled as a system. At 273 witnesses it is the smallest of the three canonical baskets here and by a distance the most technical.
It is also the one almost every Thai person has heard, at close range, without knowing what it was.
Someone dies. The body is laid out at home or at the wat. That evening, and the evening after, and the evening after that, four monks sit on a low platform beside the coffin and chant. What they chant is the Abhidhamma.
The contributed ritual manuals in this archive set the whole thing out with the precision of a stage direction. From Setting Up Ceremonies, Ancient Edition (p.6), the standing roster for a funeral, royal or common, identical either way:
That last line is the one that stays with you. A man dies at seventy-three and seventy-three monks are invited to chant him out. And the text they chant, the mātikā, is the Abhidhamma's own matrix — tradition holds it is the list of triads and dyads that opens the Dhammasaṅgaṇī, the index of the system, read over a body.
The same manual (p.152) times it: the chanting begins the day the body is laid out and runs every night, "1 night, 3 nights, 5 nights, 7 nights" — and in some cases, after the seven-day merit-making, once a week until the hundredth day, or until the cremation. Its companion volume, Conducting Religious Rituals Complete (p.62–63), gives the stage plan: an altar for the Buddha images, a cabinet table for the Dhamma texts with two vases, two candlesticks and an incense pot, four seats for the chanting monks, four sets of robes and four sets of lay-offerings, one libation vessel — and one set of sacred thread run from the corpse, so that what is chanted travels down the cord.
And then the detail that proves how deeply this is understood. From the same Setting Up Ceremonies manual (p.115), advising a layperson planning a pha pa merit-offering: invite as many monks as you like — "except that 4 monks should be avoided, because a group of 4 monks is customarily used for the Abhidhamma-chanting rite, which is considered an inauspicious occasion."
Four is unlucky at a happy event because four means Abhidhamma, and Abhidhamma means a corpse in the room. The most abstruse philosophy in the Pali canon has become, in ordinary Thai usage, a number of chairs you do not set out at a party.
Tradition holds — the Abhidhammapiṭaka is seven books: the Dhammasaṅgaṇī (the enumeration), Vibhaṅga (the analysis), Dhātukathā (on elements), Puggalapaññatti (on persons), Kathāvatthu (points of controversy), Yamaka (the pairs), and Paṭṭhāna (the twenty-four conditional relations). The satta-pakaraṇa — the seven treatises — recited from their opening lines is what those four monks are chanting.
All seven are in this collection, every one of them in double figures within the Abhidhamma basket:
And they are also here as a set, which is the real find. ms 1187 at Wat Sung Men, 1834, bundles ธัมมสังคิณี, ปัฏฐานมหาปกรณะ, ปุคคลปัญญัตติ, กถาวัตถุปกรณะ, ยมกปกรณะ — five of the seven in one hand. ms 602 at Wat Na Pang in Nan, 1817, has กถาวัตถุ, ยมก, ปัฏฐานมหาปกรณ์. And ms 256 at Wat Phra That Chang Kham Worawihan in Nan runs พระวิภังคะ, พระปุคคลบัญญัตติ, พระกถาวัตถุ, พระยะมักกะ, พระมหาปัฏฐาน — each title prefixed พระ, "Venerable" — on mulberry paper, in Thai script, and catalogued as illustrated. Only eight of the 273 are illustrated at all, and six of those eight are on mulberry paper rather than palm-leaf, including a Shan-script bundle of Kathāvatthu, Yamaka and Paṭṭhāna at Wat Pa Pao in Chiang Mai and two more at Wat Kam Ko in Mae Hong Son. Inference — these are not study copies. Palm-leaf is for the library; a decorated folding book is for carrying to a house where somebody has died.
Best of all, four manuscripts say so on the label. อภิธัมมาเจ็ดคัมภี — "the Abhidhamma in seven books" — sits at Wat Sung Men four times over, in Tham Lanna on palm-leaf, dated 1781, 1823, 1862 and 1866: the 1781 copy runs 179 folios in six fascicles, the 1823 one 217 in seven, the 1862 one 167 in seven, and the 1866 one swells to 332 folios in nineteen fascicles. Inference — one temple, four copies, eighty-five years, roughly a generation apart, and the set getting fuller each time. That is the profile of a working text that wears out: not shelved, carried to funerals, unwrapped, read from, rebound, and eventually replaced.
The single most-copied of the seven here is the last and hardest: the Paṭṭhāna, มหาปัฏฐาน — the Great Book, which runs the twenty-four modes of conditionality through every permutation of the categories until the combinations run into the millions. The archive holds it in every register at once: plain Pali mahāpaṭṭhāna; Sap mahapatthan, the word-gloss; Pali dukka tikka paṭṭhāna and Pali anuloma dukka tikka paṭṭhāna, the dyad-and-triad tables in forward order; a Paccaya-dīpanī, an explanation of the conditions; and — the giveaway — ยมก 4 ผูก, โวหารกถุวัตถุ 2 ผูก, โวหารมหาปัฏฐาน 4 ผูก at Wat Sung Men, 1842: Yamaka in four fascicles, Kathāvatthu in vernacular in two, Mahāpaṭṭhāna in vernacular in four.
Inference — somebody was preaching the Paṭṭhāna. In Lan Na. To people. The most forbidding text in Theravāda scholasticism, cut into fascicles a preacher could get through, in the language of the audience.
The Abhidhamma holds the earliest dated witness of any of the three baskets, and it is fitting that it is the Yamaka: บาลียมกะ, monolingual Pali on palm-leaf, 510 folios in 20 fascicles, at Wat Lai Hin Luang in Ko Kha, Lampang, dated CS 859 — 1497 CE. Two years earlier the same library dated the Milindapañha, the oldest thing in the whole archive. Fourteen years later อนุฏีกาปัฏฐาน, a sub-commentary on the Paṭṭhāna, is dated at Wat Duang Di in Chiang Mai, 1511.
Inference — before the great nineteenth-century copying campaign at Wat Sung Men there was already, in the last years of the fifteenth century, a Lanna library holding the Yamaka in Pali with no gloss at all. Whatever the north's scholastic reputation rests on, this is the receipt.
Two figures mark it out from its siblings. Language: 142 monolingual Pali against 104 Pali-and-Lan Na — the only canonical sub-genre where untranslated Pali is the majority, the signature of a text read by people who needed no vernacular crutch. And concentration: Wat Sung Men holds 152 of the 273 (56%), the highest keystone-library share of the three baskets, with Phrae supplying 153, Lampang 37, Nan 28 and Chiang Mai 22. Behind Sung Men come Wat Lai Hin Luang (18), Wat Hia in Nan (13) and Wat Phra Sing in Chiang Mai (10). 68 of Sung Men's Abhidhamma witnesses carry the single date 1836, the hinge year of the campaign described on the parent genre page.
Physically: 260 of 273 on palm-leaf (95%), 12 on mulberry paper, one on khoi. Script 192 Tham Lanna, 71 Tham Lao — an unusually large Lao-script share — eight Shan. 220 are dated, spanning 1497 to 1946.
The system is not, however, approached raw. 26 witnesses are saṅgaha digests — Nisai sangkaha, Sap aphithammasangkaha, Pali yojanā abhidhammāsaṅgaha — the Abhidhammatthasaṅgaha, the compact textbook that made the seven books teachable, plus its construes. 13 more are the Aṭṭhasālinī, the great commentary on the Dhammasaṅgaṇī. Inference — the north read the Abhidhamma the way anyone sane reads it: through a manual, with a commentary open beside it, and with a word-gloss for the terms. Nine of these carry nisai in the title outright.
There is a piece of furniture in this story. When the four monks chant, the text they chant from sits on its own table, and Thai practice has a dedicated object for it: the ตู้พระอภิธรรม, the Abhidhamma cabinet. It is a standard item of donation, and the corpus preserves the Pali formula for handing one over (Conducting Religious Rituals Complete, p.162) — imaṃ bhante abhidhammamañjusaṃ saparivāraṃ… — offered to the saṅgha "as an act of homage to the Buddha," for the benefit of the donor "and of our beloved ones beginning with mother and father."
That is a scripture-cabinet given in the names of the dead, so that the text read over the dead has somewhere to live. The archive holds the sermon on the merit of doing exactly this — อานิสงส้างหีดธัมม์, the merit of making a scripture-chest, and อานิสงส้างหอธัมม, the merit of building the ho trai — over on the Anisong shelf. Furniture, text, sermon, and funeral, all in one archive.
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