The Dispeller of Delusion

The Abhidhamma's book of analysis explained, with its longest pages spent on how one life's causes reach into the next.

Pali, the original language

Original title: Sammohavinodanī
Original language: Pali

Overview

Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli's English translation of the Sammohavinodanī, The Dispeller of Delusion, appeared only after his death, revised by L. S. Cousins, Nyanaponika and C. M. M. Shaw and issued by the Pali Text Society in two volumes, in 1987 and 1991. The book is the Pāli commentary on the Vibhaṅga, the "Book of Analysis" and second of the seven books of the Abhidhamma, the scriptures' systematic analysis of mind and matter. The tradition ascribes it to Buddhaghosa, in the fifth century, and modern scholarship debates the ascription; its closing verses, like the opening verses of the Aṭṭhasālinī, name a monk called Buddhaghosa as the one who asked for it. The Vibhaṅga takes eighteen subjects, among them the aggregates, the elements, the noble truths, the foundations of mindfulness and meditative absorption, and analyses most of them twice: once in the language of the discourses, once in the technical terms of the Abhidhamma. The commentary follows that double method throughout. Its longest section is on dependent origination, the chain of twelve conditions by which ignorance leads, through craving and becoming, to birth, ageing and death. Here it reads the chain as running across three lives, past causes yielding present results and present causes future ones, joined at three points and falling into four groups. It also explains why the Buddha taught the chain in different orders on different occasions, sometimes from its beginning, sometimes from its end, sometimes from the middle.

Key concepts

What are the twelve links of dependent origination?

They are the chain of conditions behind suffering: ignorance conditions formations, formations consciousness, then mind-and-body, the six senses, contact, feeling, craving, clinging, becoming, birth, and finally ageing and death with their sorrow. Each link arises because the one before it is present and ceases when it ceases. The chain describes how suffering keeps going without anyone to whom it belongs.

What are the three joints and four groups of the chain?

They are how the commentary maps the twelve links onto three lives. Past ignorance and formations are one group of causes; consciousness through feeling are this life's results; craving, clinging and becoming are this life's causes; birth and ageing-and-death are future results. The joints are the three places where cause passes into result, or result into new cause, such as where feeling gives way to craving.

How can matter be past, present or future?

The commentary answers that it depends on the scale. Over a lifespan, what came before this birth is past. Over a continuity, matter produced by one shared cause, such as one meal or one spell of warmth, counts as present while it lasts. Over a moment, only what is arising, standing or dissolving now is present. The same body is old or new depending on which scale one uses.

What are the five aggregates?

They are the five groups into which the Abhidhamma sorts a person: material form, feeling, perception, formations, the intentions and other mental activities, and consciousness. The commentary uses them to show that what looks like one enduring person is a heap of conditioned processes, each arising from causes beginning with ignorance, and each impermanent, unsatisfying and without a self.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The Chain Across Three Lives

Twelve conditions lead from ignorance through craving to birth, ageing and death. Whether that chain describes one moment or many lifetimes, and where it can be broken, is what the longest section of the book sets out to answer.

The commentary reads the chain as running across three lives: past ignorance and formations yield the consciousness and body of this life; this life's craving, clinging and becoming yield a future birth and its death. It finds three joints and four groups in the twelve, and refuses to treat ignorance as a first cause, since ignorance has its own conditions. The Buddha taught the chain forward, backward and from the middle, it explains, as men gathering a vine might start at its root, its tip or its middle.

dependent origination
ignorance
karma
rebirth
causation
craving
suffering
feeling
consciousness

Enter a dialogue

Every Subject, Analysed Twice

The Book of Analysis takes eighteen subjects, from the aggregates to the absorptions, and goes through most of them in two languages. The commentary asks what each language shows that the other cannot.

The Vibhaṅga first explains a subject in the plain terms of the discourses, then again in the technical terms of the Abhidhamma, and its commentary keeps both in play. The result reads like an encyclopaedia of the inner life: the scales on which matter can be called past or present, sixteen great fears, the kinds of place that cool a meditator's mind. It never loses the person in the lists, stopping to tell how a quarrel over a late meal ended in a wife blinded by her husband's anger.

abhidhamma
classification
aggregates
elements
materiality
four noble truths
body contemplation
mindfulness
meditation
non-self
impermanence

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 1,268
distinct concepts: 832
by passages held, corpus-wide: #49

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “karma” and “rebirth”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 24 pairings. 88 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
karma	rebirth	40
consciousness	rebirth	36
abhidhamma	classification	34
meditation	mindfulness	32
consciousness	karma	28
dependent origination	rebirth	27
consciousness	dependent origination	19
abhidhamma	consciousness	18
dependent origination	karma	18
classification	consciousness	17
consciousness	meditation	12
abhidhamma	dependent origination	9
classification	dependent origination	7
meditation	rebirth	7
classification	meditation	6
karma	meditation	6
abhidhamma	meditation	4
abhidhamma	mindfulness	4
classification	karma	4
classification	rebirth	4
classification	mindfulness	3
dependent origination	mindfulness	3
consciousness	mindfulness	2
mindfulness	rebirth	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

Manorathapūraṇī
The last of his four commentaries on the collections of discourses: its closing verses name it the Manorathapūraṇī, "fulfiller of the wish", because it completed his wish to explain them all.
PI
Pañcappakaraṇa-aṭṭhakathā
Five commentaries gathered as one work, ascribed to Buddhaghosa, completing the explanation of the Abhidhamma that the Aṭṭhasālinī and the Sammohavinodanī begin.
PI
Papañcasūdanī
Written for a monk Buddhaghosa had once lived with in a port town, probably in South India, and the home of his reading of the mindfulness discourse.
PI
Paramatthajotikā II
Ascribed to Buddhaghosa by tradition and doubted by modern scholars, a commentary that explains each discourse of the Suttanipāta by first asking what occasioned it.
PI
Sāratthappakāsinī
Made for the elder Jotipāla, and home of the "dry insight" gloss on the Susīma discourse that is still argued over.
PI
Sumaṅgalavilāsinī
Begins with history, the council that first recited the texts, before explaining the long discourses, the first collection in the canon's order.
PI
The Dispeller of Delusion (Sammohavinodanī) you are here PI
The Expositor (Aṭṭhasālinī)
The first of the three Abhidhamma commentaries ascribed to Buddhaghosa, said by a Sri Lankan chronicle to have been written in India, before he crossed to the island.
PI
The Illustrator of Ultimate Meaning (Paramatthajotikā I)
The smaller of two commentaries sharing one name, both ascribed to Buddhaghosa: this one explains the nine recitations that open the Minor Collection.
PI
The Path of Purification (Visuddhimagga)
His one treatise rather than a commentary: the book his commentaries on the long and middle-length discourses send the reader to whenever meditation comes up.
PI

— or open another of their works