Abhidhamma is one of the three ‘baskets’ that together comprise the Pali Buddhist canon. It provides a highly systematic and detailed treatment of Buddhist doctrine, arranged in numerous lists and sequences.
My original motivation for studying Abhidhamma was to seek some rigour as I approached the nebulous area commonly referred to as ‘mind, brain and consciousness’. Since developing the Sigala project, I have narrowed this down to the consideration of safety-critical aspects in human cognitive processes. By safety, I mean protection from serious human loss across the khandhas i.e. body, feelings, perceptions, memory and mental formations and consciousness.
Abhidhamma says a lot about processes, so my basic idea is to identify key (safety-critical) processes in the lifecycle of social media use and then seek to model them formally in terms of Abhidhamma processes involved. Such processes may typically be characterised as wholesome, unwholesome or neutral — and can be broken down to the micro level — as cetasikas (‘thought moments’).
The mind maps below are offered as an aid to
navigating just a portion, concerning some of the
more well-known aspects. They were created using
XMind
on a Mac (for other systems, you may need to choose
another font for viewing).
Please download
the zip file and then unzip the archive. This
should provide you with five files:
- mātikā (classification of terms): matika.xmind
- citta (consciousness, heart/mind) : citta.xmind
- cetasika (mental properties): cetasika.xmind
- paccaya (conditions): paccaya.xmind
- vīthi (processes): viithi.xmind
Application to cognitive activities
How do we design systems that lead to generally wholesome states? We may use cognitive interventions!
Feel free to get in touch with queries via the contact form, though please note I am not an expert in Abhidhamma!
Tags
Abhidhamma, cetasika, citta, consciousness, khandhas, mind, mind maps, process, safety, XMind
This page was published on 19 March 2021 and last updated on April 13, 2023 .