Buddhism's Dream of a Perfect List
The dream of a perfect inventory was built once before — twenty-three centuries before the Vienna Circle, in a philosophical tradition where almost nobody would think to look for it.
In my last essay we followed a group of brilliant people who tried to engineer the fog out of human language — to replace our vague, fraying everyday words with a system as exact as mathematics, in which every legitimate idea had a precise address and everything else stood revealed as noise. The positivists of the Vienna Circle didn’t get what they wanted. What they got instead was a discovery about the price of precision: we can sharpen a concept, but the sharp version is always a slightly different thing than the one we started with. “Hot” becomes temperature in kelvin and stops being the warmth we feel. The sharpness is bought, and what it costs is contact with the lived, felt world.
I ended by claiming this had happened before (long before) in a tradition that bore little resemblance to Viennese logicians. I want to make good on that now, because the prequel was almost eerily similar in its detail, and because of how it ended. The same engine, the same overreach, even the same in-house critic rising up to take the machine apart. The tradition was Buddhist scholasticism. The system was called the Abhidharma (Pāli: Abhidhamma). What the Circle pursued through language, the Abhidharma pursued through a taxonomy of mind and world. The same dream lay underneath both approaches: building a foundational inventory. And the reason it matters to anyone thinking about AI is that all three of these — Vienna, the Abhidharma, and the machines we’re building now — keep stumbling over the same rock, and it’s worth knowing how old that rock is.
The comparison has been made before — and made badly
I need to start by noting that I’m not the first to join Buddhism to the Vienna Circle. Two of the twentieth century’s most important Buddhist philosophers got there first. K.N. Jayatilleke — who studied under Wittgenstein at Cambridge — argued that early Buddhism was a kind of empiricism, the Buddha a proto-verificationist refusing to answer questions that couldn’t be cashed out in experience. His student David Kalupahana trod over some of the same ground as I will.
But their comparisons aged badly, and it’s worth knowing why. They ran apologetically: the through-line was “the Buddha was a scientist all along,” Buddhism vindicated by its resemblance to a form of Western philosophy that looked to them the most rigorous. That flattering shape drew a hard and largely fair critique: it told us less about ancient India than about a modern wish to find our own reflections in it.
So let me be clear about the direction I’m running. The point here is not that Buddhism was secretly right, or scientific, or ahead of its time. It’s closer to the opposite. Two traditions, very far apart, fell for the same scholastic temptation — and the credit I’ll give Buddhism at the end is not for being correct but for producing the critic who diagnosed its own tradition’s mistake. That’s more like a confession than a flex.
The inventory
Anyone who has spent time around Buddhism knows it loves a list: the four noble truths, the eightfold path, the five aggregates, the twelve links of dependent origination, and on and on. There’s a whole book of them in the Nikāyas. The Abhidharma is what happens when that habit hardens into an ambition. Not just another list among many, but the list. The one complete inventory of what there ultimately is, nothing left out and nothing counted twice.
Starting around the third century BCE the Abhidharmikas took a look at the thick, ordinary world — people, chariots, mornings, promises, selves — and noticed that almost none of it survived hard scrutiny as a thing. The classic early image from the nun Vajirā is of a chariot: pull it apart and we find axle, wheels, frame, pole, but no extra item called “the chariot” over and above the assembled parts. “Chariot” is therefore just a convenient word for the parts arranged chariot-wise. And then we make the move: the same is true of us. Analyze the person and we find a body, sensations, perceptions, volitions, moments of awareness, but no extra item called a “self” riding along on top.
So far this is the famous Buddhist teaching of non-self. The Abhidharma’s distinctive step was to make it into a system. If chariots and selves and all kinds of other things are convenient fictions, can we complete an analysis of all the parts out of which such fictions are created? Their answer was a precise inventory: a finite catalogue of what they called “dharmas“ — momentary, irreducible factors of experience, mental and physical alike — out of which all the messy middle-sized fictions are assembled. A flash of warmth, a moment of contact, an instant of attention: these are the real constituents. The chariot and the self are designations laid over them.
The Abhidharma drew the line explicitly, in two grades of existence. The dharmas are dravyasat — substantially existent, real in the strict sense. Chariots, selves, forests, nations on the other hand are prajñaptisat — existent only by convention, by useful designation. This became codified into a more determinate notion of two kinds of truth: conventional truth, the serviceable everyday talk of persons and things, and ultimate truth, the precise dharma-language that says how things finally stand. Conventional truth isn’t entirely false — it’s how we get through the day — but it isn’t the last word. The last word is the inventory of dharmas and their interrelations.
If that structure sounds familiar from the last essay, it should: it rhymes with Carnap’s Aufbau. Carnap took a sparse basis — bare moments of experience plus a single relation, this resembles that — and tried to construct everything else, step by patient step, with the constructed objects real only as logical assemblies of the basic stuff. The Abhidharma took a sparse basis of momentary dharmas and constructed the whole familiar world on top, the constructed wholes real only as conventional designations. Two tiers, a precise floor and a convenient surface, with a strict accounting of which is which. The dream of a perfect inventory of reality, drawn up in a monastery instead of a Viennese café.
It was not intended to be dry bookkeeping, any more than the Vienna Circle’s was. The Abhidharmikas held that this analysis was itself the path — that the discernment of dharmas (in the Nikāyas, dhamma-vicaya) was a key factor of enlightenment, and that wisdom, Vasubandhu would later say, just is the sorting of experience into its real constituents. Seeing through the fiction of a permanent self to the impersonal flux underneath would set us free. Clearing the fog was, here too, a liberation project.
The same trade
Now watch the price come due — the exact same price paid in Vienna.
These dharmas are sharp. Each is defined by its svalakṣaṇa, its own particular characteristic, the precise mark that makes it the dharma it is and tells it cleanly apart from every other. That sharpness is the whole appeal: a determinate inventory, every existent in its slot, no fraying at the edges. It is everything “pile” and “person” and “chariot” are not.
And yet we still need to ride chariots, so the real cost hides somewhere other than we’d first look. Recall Carnap’s own example of the trade: the word “fish” once took in whales — creatures that live in the sea — and biology built a sharp category, drawn by ancestry and anatomy, that does real work the old word couldn’t, and dropped the whales. The scientific concept is exact, powerful, and not the word our grandparents used. In some cases we’re willing to make the trade, in others, not so much. For example, we’ll happily stop calling whales “fishes,” but we talk all the time of objects being colored when vision science tells us that color-phenomena are largely intrinsic to our vision apparatus.
The Abhidharma builds that same kind of structure for the person: a precise inventory of momentary factors with no entry for the one who keeps promises, grieves, and rides the chariot home. That’s just fine, the Buddha taught exactly that; being imputed is no insult, and on this the Abhidharmikas are simply following his lead. The cost is that no one can live only in the inventory. We can’t keep a promise in the language of dharmas, or grieve in it, or find our way home in it. We need “person” and “chariot” to get through our ordinary afternoons — conventional truths are not so much lower truths we tolerate as they are the only medium in which a life can actually be lived, or a path followed. (Our machines have lately taught us the same thing, as we’ll see). Sharpness was bought; what it cost was a language we could live inside. The positivists paid in the very same coin: a vocabulary exact enough to be unlivable.
The objection that turns out to be the hinge
Here a careful reader will plant their feet. Surely the parallel breaks, and breaks at the most important point. The Abhidharma is famous for its reliance on the notion of svabhāva — “own-being,” the intrinsic nature each dharma is said to possess. That’s a full-blooded metaphysical claim about what ultimately exists. The Vienna Circle would have been horrified by it; their whole program was the abolition of metaphysics. So how can these be the same move?
The objection is right about the facts and wrong about the conclusion, and seeing why is the center of this essay. Svabhāva is doing two separable jobs for the Abhidharmikas, and they come apart cleanly. One job is sharp definition: svabhāva as svalakṣaṇa, the precise defining mark of each dharma that yields a determinate inventory. The other is metaphysical reality: the claim that the things so marked ultimately exist, as against the merely-constructed wholes built from them.
The parallel runs on that first job, svalakṣaṇa. On sharp definitions the Circle is a full participant: logical atoms, elementary experiences, the incorrigible observation reports they hoped to build knowledge on are all sharply defined basic elements yielding a precise inventory. It’s the same architectural move exactly. The second job, declaring the base ultimately real, is where the traditions seem to part: the positivists, with their horror of metaphysics, would never say it — Schlick held that the old dispute between realism and idealism was itself a pseudo-problem, meaningless. So the Abhidharma’s realism looks like a clean disanalogy. But underneath the realism sits a more basic question, and that one the Circle fought over among themselves, bitterly.
Remember Neurath’s boat from the last essay — the image that we are sailors rebuilding our ship plank by plank at sea, with no dry dock, no solid ground, only the tossing waves. Neurath was arguing against someone. His opponent, Moritz Schlick, held that knowledge must bottom out in something certain and self-standing: a bare report of immediate experience (”Red, here, now”) that simply cannot be wrong, a true foundation. Neurath said there was no such floor — the basic reports are just more planks, revisable like everything else. That dispute — is there a self-standing base at all, or only more dependent structure? — is the foundation question, fought inside the Vienna Circle itself.
It’s worth getting precise about the levels, because a sharp reader will otherwise catch an equivocation. Schlick and Neurath fought it at the epistemic level: is there an incorrigible foundation for knowledge? Svabhāva makes a similar claim at the ontological level: is there a self-standing foundation for being? Same shape, two floors of the same building — and it’s this question of a self-standing foundation, not realism, that runs internal to both traditions. The Abhidharma then took one step the positivists refused: having claimed a self-standing base, it declared that base ultimately real. That surplus step — realism about the floor — is its distinctive overreach, and it’s precisely where its own greatest critic would aim. But that’s getting ahead of our story.
The parallel between our two groups is functional, not doctrinal — and the difference matters. The Abhidharmikas thought they were doing ontology; the positivists thought they were destroying it. Their self-understandings were opposite. What they shared was the engine: take vague conventional talk, analyze it into a privileged inventory of sharp elements, treat that inventory as where things really stand. And both inventories were contested from within — Buddhist schools never quite agreed on the dharma-count any more than the Circle ever pinned down what an “elementary experience” was.
I should also flag a scope limit I’ll lean on at the end: the full-strength svabhāva-realism I’ve described is most squarely the Sarvāstivāda — the “all exists” school, whose own great compendium is the source here. The Theravāda’s account of sabhāva often reads it more modestly, as characteristic rather than substance. Whether that defense holds is contested, and not something to wave away; for now, we’ll take the realist wing as the target.
The mistake isn’t precision
It would be easy to read all this as “they over-sharpened,” as if the lesson were be less precise. That misses the point. Precision and clarity are magnificent. Mathematics built science, the most world-gripping language we have. The Abhidharma’s taxonomy is, on its own terms, a real intellectual achievement, and so was Carnap’s. Purchased sharpness is a purchase, not a failure.
The mistake is more specific than “too much precision.” Notice first that vagueness almost always earns its keep: even “pile” does. Sharpen it into a grain count and the word turns useless. We’d be counting sand before we could say anything, and the precise number of grains was never quite what “pile” tracked anyway.
There’s hardly a vague word we’d truly give up. So the distinction that matters isn’t between vagueness we keep and vagueness we’d trade away — we’d keep nearly all of it. It’s between vagueness that’s mere convenience and vagueness that’s load-bearing. “Pile” is convenience: when a sharp line would genuinely help — a shipping rule, a lab threshold — we draw one without a qualm, because we know it’s merely a useful stipulation and not a discovery. No fact about piles is being missed. “Person,” “cruelty,” “fairness,” “harm” are the opposite. There we resist the sharp line, because in those concepts the borderline cases are where judgment and practice live — and a line drawn through the middle, or a reduction to some final catalog of basic objects, doesn’t so much refine the concept as displace the judgment the concept existed to summon.
It would be natural to say the Abhidharma’s sin was sharpening the person — forcing a bright line through one of those load-bearing concepts. But that isn’t quite right, and the gap is instructive. The Buddha analyzed the person too: in Vajirā’s image the chariot comes apart into axle and wheels with nothing further left over. A “person” is only a convenient way of speaking about the aggregates beneath it. The Buddha said as much. So the taking-apart is not the overreach. However the Abhidharma then added a single, foundational concept: svabhāva, own-being. It granted own-being only to the elements at the bottom of their analysis. Those elements, the dharmas, then stopped merely being instruments for seeing how suffering is assembled to become a catalogue of the ultimately real. That promotion was the overreach; not the analysis, but the pedestal. And the pedestal threatened to overwhelm its own purpose. Crown a set of elements as what really exists, and we risk feeding the very proliferation our analysis was meant to quiet. We condition papañca, the tradition’s own term: fruitless mental rumination. The point was never to build an inventory of the real. It was to see how the parts conspire to produce suffering, and then to set the tools down.
We’ve already watched the Circle do the same thing — and, tellingly, fall out over where its own floor lay. In neither tradition was precision the mistake. It was the conviction that some precise base is the bottom, the place where things finally, really stand. (It’s worth pausing on that word “really,” and asking what we mean by it). Call it the floor-claim, and watch it charge the same two tolls.
First, manifest loss: take the precise base for what’s real, and the lived medium above it gets ranked as a dispensable convenience — the warmth on the skin, once “really” there is only temperature in degrees kelvin; the impermanent, conventional self the Buddha pointedly never denied, once “really” there are only dharmas. Second, proliferation: because the floor never quite holds, each tradition spends its centuries shoring up the base instead of doing what it set out to do. The Abhidharmikas never agreed on the list of dharmas; the positivists never agreed whether bedrock was the physical world or the bare given — the very felt warmth that physicalism called “mere appearance” was, for Schlick, the one thing that cannot be doubted.
So what
Here is why this is not antiquarianism, and why I keep circling back to the machines.
We are, right now, running the engine a third time. When we want an AI system to behave well, the temptation has been overwhelming to hand it a crisp specification of the thing we care about — a precise definition of “harm” to avoid, a clean metric of “helpfulness” to maximize, a sharp rule for “fairness.” It feels like rigor. It feels like the grown-up, responsible thing to do. And it tends to go wrong in a particular, almost predictable way: the system takes the sharp spec exactly at its word, satisfies the letter of it, and sails straight past the thing we actually meant. (Engineers have a description for the general phenomenon: “When a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure.”) It’s the floor-claim again, in a lab coat — we treat the spec as the real target, the bedrock that our vaguer talk of “harm” or “fairness” was only groping toward — and both tolls fall due. The manifest loss: the value we cared about lived in the judgment the spec displaced, so a crisp line guts the very thing it was meant to capture, and we get something else wearing its clothes. The proliferation: because the spec never quite holds, we patch it, the patch springs a fresh loophole, and we patch again — forever shoring up a floor that was never the thing we actually needed to work on.
Meanwhile the systems that actually function do the opposite. As I argued two essays back, a neural network doesn’t store “harm” or “cat” as a sharp definition. It stores a region in a vast space of resemblances, edges soft, fog intact — which is to say, it represents concepts the way our own brains do, the way the Abhidharma and the Vienna Circle both tried to pull us away from. Machines actually became intelligent exactly when we let the concepts stay vague. The dream of a perfect inventory failed in Vienna, failed in the monasteries, and is failing again, quietly, every time someone tries to write human value down as a clean objective function.
The Abhidharma story has one more turn, though. Every system that declares a precise, self-standing base seems to grow its own internal critic, someone inside the tradition who turns the analysis on the inventory itself and asks the obvious, devastating question: if the chariot and the self are empty of own-being, hollow at the core, mere designations over what’s underneath, then what about the dharmas themselves? The Circle had Neurath turning that question on Schlick’s certain foundation. The Abhidharma had someone do it far more radically, to the whole inventory of ultimate existents.
His name was Nāgārjuna, and what he did with that question will be our next essay.
Notes & further reading
The essay this one follows from: The Dream of a Perfect Language.
The earlier essay establishing the vagueness claim: Concepts Don’t Have Edges (Not in Us, Not in AI).
On the Abhidharma as analysis-into-dharmas and the two grades of existence (dravyasat / prajñaptisat): Mark Siderits, Buddhism as Philosophy, the chapter on the Abhidharma. The clearest analytic statement of the two-truths-as-semantics reading I’m leaning on.
Vasubandhu on wisdom as the discernment of dharmas, and on the Abhidharma as taught for the sake of that discernment: Abhidharmakośabhāṣyam I.2–3, trans. Leo M. Pruden, vol. 1, pp. 56–58.
On svabhāva and the distinction between its “sharp definition” and “metaphysical reality” senses: Jan Westerhoff, Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction, the chapter on svabhāva.
The chariot: the Milindapañha (the questions of King Milinda); the parallel verse is Vajirā’s at Saṃyutta Nikāya 5.10.
Carnap’s blueprint and his notion of “explication”: Rudolf Carnap, Der logische Aufbau der Welt (1928) and Logical Foundations of Probability (1950), ch. 1. The “fish” example is Carnap’s own.
The earlier comparisons I’m running against: K.N. Jayatilleke, Early Buddhist Theory of Knowledge (1963); David Kalupahana’s work on the Abhidharma and Nāgārjuna.
About the Author
Doug Smith holds a PhD in philosophy of mind and is a scholar of early Buddhism. He is the creator of Doug’s Dharma on YouTube. This essay was, once again, written in collaboration with an instance of Claude — one of those soft-edged, resemblance-clustering systems the essay defends.