If the five aggregates are the Buddhist answer to “what is a person,” the analysis of mind and mental factors is the answer to “what is happening right now.” It is the most detailed layer of the Abhidharma, and the layer with the most direct bearing on meditation.

The basic move is a separation. There is citta — consciousness, the bare knowing of an object — and there are cetasikas, mental factors, which are the qualities and functions that accompany it. Neither occurs without the other. A moment of experience is one citta together with a specific set of cetasikas, arising and ceasing together, taking the same object.

Citta: consciousness #

Citta is not a thing that persists and has experiences. It is the event of cognising, arising in dependence on a sense faculty and an object, lasting a moment, and ceasing — immediately conditioning the next such event.

The Theravada Abhidhamma enumerates 89 kinds of citta (121 in an expanded reckoning that subdivides the supramundane states by the level of jhana). They are classified along several axes:

  • By plane — sense-sphere, fine-material sphere (the jhanas), immaterial sphere, and supramundane (path and fruition consciousness).
  • By ethical quality — wholesome, unwholesome, resultant, or functional. The distinction between active consciousness that generates karma and resultant consciousness that is the fruit of past karma is central; bare seeing is resultant and karmically inert, while the response to what is seen is active.
  • By root — whether accompanied by greed, hatred, delusion, or by their wholesome opposites.

One category deserves particular mention. Bhavanga, the “life-continuum,” is the passive mode of consciousness that runs between active cognitive processes — in dreamless sleep, and between one sense-door process and the next. It is the Theravada’s solution to the continuity problem: what maintains the individual continuum when nothing is being actively cognised. It is not a self and not a subconscious in the Freudian sense, though the comparison is often made, and it is a distinctively Abhidhamma innovation not found in the discourses.

The fifty-two mental factors #

The cetasikas are grouped in a way that makes the ethical structure immediately visible.

Universal factors (7) #

Present in every single moment of consciousness without exception:

Contact (phassa) — the coming together of sense faculty, object, and consciousness. Feeling (vedana) — the pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral tone. Perception (sanna) — recognition. Volition (cetana) — the directing and organising factor. One-pointedness (ekaggata) — the unifying of mind on its object. Life faculty (jivitindriya) — the vitality sustaining the associated states. Attention (manasikara) — the turning of the mind towards its object.

That volition is universal is a strong claim: there is no purely passive moment of experience. That one-pointedness is universal means concentration is not created from nothing by meditation but strengthened from a factor already present in every moment.

Occasional factors (6) #

Ethically variable, present in some moments: applied thought (vitakka, the initial directing onto an object), sustained thought (vicara, keeping it there), decision, energy, joy (piti), and desire-to-do (chanda). The first two and piti are the factors that define the lower jhanas, and their progressive dropping away is what distinguishes one jhana from the next.

Chanda, desire-to-do, is worth flagging: it is ethically neutral and can be wholesome. The wish to practise is chanda, not craving. Buddhism does not hold that all desire is a problem, and the Abhidhamma’s vocabulary makes the distinction precisely.

Unwholesome factors (14) #

Four are present in every unwholesome moment: delusion (moha), shamelessness, fearlessness of wrongdoing, and restlessness.

The rest arise in groups. With greed: greed (lobha), wrong view, conceit. With aversion: hatred (dosa), envy, stinginess, worry. Separately: sloth, torpor, and doubt.

The three roots — greed, hatred, delusion — organise the whole. Every unwholesome state is rooted in at least one, and delusion in all of them.

Beautiful factors (25) #

Present in wholesome consciousness. Nineteen are universal to it, including faith, mindfulness (sati), shame and fear of wrongdoing (the ethical guardians), non-greed, non-hatred, balance, and six pairs covering tranquillity, lightness, malleability, wieldiness, proficiency, and rectitude of both consciousness and the associated factors.

Then three abstinences — right speech, right action, right livelihood, present when one actively refrains. Two illimitables — compassion and sympathetic joy, part of the brahmaviharas. And wisdom (panna), which is not universal even to wholesome states: generosity performed without understanding is wholesome but not wise.

The rules of combination #

The system’s real content is not the list but the constraints on how factors combine.

Some cannot co-arise. Greed and hatred never occur in the same moment: a mind cannot simultaneously pull towards and push away. What feels like ambivalence is a rapid alternation, not a mixture.

Mindfulness is a beautiful factor. It arises only in wholesome consciousness. This is the technical basis for a claim that matters in contemporary debate about secular mindfulness: sati in the Abhidhamma sense is not mere bare attention, which can accompany any state, but an ethically wholesome factor that cannot co-arise with greed or hatred. A skilled thief attending closely to a lock has attention; on this analysis, he does not have sati.

Wisdom is optional in wholesome states. Hence the traditional distinction between meritorious action and liberating action.

The unwholesome roots are the target. Because every unwholesome state has one of three roots, the entire path can be described as their weakening — which is how the stages of awakening are specified, by exactly which defilements have been eliminated.

Why this is useful in practice #

The taxonomy converts vague self-description into something observable.

“I’m in a bad mood” is not actionable. “There is aversion, with restlessness and worry, and mindfulness is weak” identifies specific factors, and the Abhidhamma tells you which wholesome factors are incompatible with them. Since hatred cannot co-arise with non-hatred, cultivating metta is not merely a pleasant alternative to anger — it is structurally incompatible with it.

The traditional applications are similarly concrete. The five hindrances map onto identified factors, each with a prescribed antidote: sloth and torpor answered by energy and applied thought, restlessness and worry by tranquillity, doubt by investigation. The jhana factors are named, so a meditator can tell which is missing.

And the emphasis on cetana, volition, locates ethics exactly. Karma is volition; the karmically decisive moment is the response, not the arising of the object. This is why the whole of mindfulness practice can be described as widening the interval before the response.

Other systems #

The Sarvastivada’s list has 46 factors, organised somewhat differently, and is the version studied through Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakosha in Tibetan monastic education.

The Yogacara system has 51 factors within a 100-dharma list, and adds two consciousnesses to the standard six: the manas, the afflicted mind that generates self-reference, and the alaya-vijnana or store-consciousness, which holds karmic seeds. The Yogacara additions are responses to the same continuity problems that produced bhavanga.

Common questions #

Is this a psychology? It is a systematic analysis of mental events, and unusually good at process, conditionality, and the absence of a central subject. It is not psychology in purpose — its categories are organised by what conduces to liberation — and it makes claims about rebirth-linking and other realms that no psychology makes.

Can I verify any of this? Some of it, in ordinary attention: that feeling has a tone prior to elaboration, that recognition is fast and often wrong, that attention precedes response. The finer-grained claims — the seventeen-moment cognitive process, the exact co-arising constraints — are presented as the fruit of highly developed insight practice, and most practitioners take them on the tradition’s authority.

Do I need to memorise the fifty-two? No. What repays study is the structure: the three unwholesome roots, the ethical guardians, the incompatibility rules, and the place of volition.

Does the Abhidhamma have an unconscious? Bhavanga and the Yogacara store-consciousness both address problems that Western psychology handles with an unconscious — continuity, latent disposition, material not currently in awareness. Neither is a repository of repressed content, and the analogy should be handled carefully.

Sources & further reading #

Bhikkhu Bodhi (ed.), A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma (BPS, 3rd ed. 2000), chs. 1–2 — the definitive presentation of citta and cetasika. Nina van Gorkom, Cetasikas (Zolag, 2nd ed. 1999) — a factor-by-factor treatment oriented to practice. Y. Karunadasa, The Theravāda Abhidhamma (Hong Kong University Press, 2010), chs. 5–7. Vasubandhu, Abhidharmakośabhāṣyam, trans. Leo M. Pruden (Asian Humanities Press, 1988–90), ch. 2 — the Sarvastivada list. Rupert Gethin, “Bhavaṅga and Rebirth According to the Abhidhamma,” in The Buddhist Forum III (SOAS, 1994).