Turning a Teaching Into a System

The Dhammasangani represents a genuine shift in method from the Sutta Pitaka it draws its raw material from, taking concepts the Buddha taught in response to particular audiences and occasions and reorganizing them into an impersonal, comprehensive system meant to describe every possible configuration of experience abstractly and exhaustively rather than pastorally, a scholastic project scholars generally place several generations after the Buddha's own lifetime even though the tradition credits the underlying content directly to him.

Traditional accounts hold that the Buddha taught the full Abhidhamma, beginning with material corresponding to this book, to his deceased mother reborn as a deity in the Tavatimsa heaven during the seventh rains retreat after his enlightenment, descending each day to relay a summary to his disciple Sariputta, who then organized and further elaborated the teaching into the systematic form later fixed in this text, an account modern scholarship treats as a traditional framing narrative for a text whose content and method most historians date to a later period of scholastic development within the early sangha. The matika's categorizing scheme, once established here, becomes the organizing spine for the entire remaining Abhidhamma Pitaka, with several of the following six books each applying the same basic set of categories through a different analytical lens or method.