The Foundations of Buddhism

The Abhidharma 2II

this is what defines them as greed as opposed to some other

dharma.

In this technical sense of a dharma the characteristic of 'con-

sciousness' is the bare sense of being aware of some object: it is

the phenomenon of being conscious of something. We can never

actually experience just this bare consciousness, for 'conscious-

ness' never arises as a single isolated dharma; according to the

Abhidharma, for the mind to be aware of some object it needs

the help of a number of associated mental factors, some of the

fifty-two dharmas of the associated mentality group. The min-

imum number of associated mental factors required is seven. In

other words, to be conscious in fact requires the occurrence of

a minimum of eight dharmas: consciousness, contact, feeling, recog-

nition, volition, one-pointedness, life-faculty, and bringing-to-mind.

I shall pass over the precise technical definitions that the

Abhidharma supplies for each of these dharmas, but the basic

Abhidharma conception of how the mind functions is this: a col-

lection of at least eight dharmas (consciousness and associated

mental factors) arises for a moment and then falls away to be

immediately followed by the next combination of conscious-

ness and associated mental factors. Each combination is con-

scious of just one object. The arising and passing of each moment

of consciousness is understood to occur extremely rapidly-so

rapidly that a countless number passes even in a finger-snap. The

flow of consciousness is thus analogous to the rapid sequence

of the frames of a movie film; consciousness is experienced as

a continuous flow, but is in fact made up of the rapidly occur-

ring sequence of consciousness moments, each with a particular

object. We may think that we are thinking of two or three things

at once, but according to the Abhidharmikas we are just very
rapidly turning from one thing to another and back again. Sim-

ilarly we experience each moment of consciousness as unified,

yet rather like the way in which a colour photograph in a printed

book is seen as an unbroken whole when it is in fact made up

of countless tiny dots of just four colours, so consciousness is

made up of separate dharmas. Thus, to extend the analogy, the

infinite variety and richness of the mind is to be explained by the