Dharma — Part Two of Nigredo

A multivalent Indic term that may refer to teaching, truth, law, quality or phenomenon, depending on language and context. In this section it names both the Buddhist material being studied and the course’s attempt to map lawful patterns of conditioned experience. It should not be reduced to one English equivalent in every setting.

The analytical and classificatory literature of the Theravāda Buddhist tradition, preserved as part of the Pāli Canon and developed through extensive commentarial systems. It offers detailed accounts of consciousness, mental factors, matter and conditional relations. Its categories are religious-philosophical and contemplative; they are not interchangeable with the constructs of modern psychology or neuroscience.

Apparent reality is the ordinary world of persons, objects and concepts through which daily life is conducted. Conditioned reality is the course’s term for the causal processes of mind and matter underlying that appearance. The distinction is a working contemplative model, not a licence to deny shared practical facts or the consequences of action.

A moment or event of consciousness in Abhidhamma analysis: the knowing of an object. It does not arise alone, but together with mental factors. Translating citta as a momentary “frame” can help orientation, although exact cinematic or computational comparisons remain analogies rather than neuroscientific measurements.

A mental factor arising together with a citta and helping to determine its character. Traditional lists include universal functions such as contact, feeling, perception, volition, one-pointedness, life faculty and attention, alongside occasional, unwholesome and beautiful factors. The course uses these to examine how apparently personal moods and reactions are assembled.

Nāma refers here to the mental side of conditioned experience; rūpa to material phenomena. Their relation is analysed differently across Buddhist texts and schools. Neither term should be equated without qualification with a permanent mind-substance or with matter as defined by contemporary particle physics.

Earth, water, fire and air name traditional qualities of materiality: solidity or resistance, cohesion, temperature or maturation, and movement or pressure. They are not the four chemical elements of modern science. The language provides a phenomenological and doctrinal classification within the Buddhist model used by the section.

Intentional action and the conditioning consequences associated with it. In Buddhist traditions it is not simply fate, punishment or a cosmic system of instant moral retribution. The overview emphasises how repeated choices shape dispositions and future experience, while its claims about results across rebirth belong to a religious and philosophical framework rather than laboratory demonstration.

The cycle of wandering through birth, death and renewed becoming in Indian religious traditions. Buddhism connects this cycle with ignorance, craving and karma. The section treats liberation from saṃsāra as the larger aim of its map; readers need not treat accounts of rebirth as scientifically verified to understand their role within the tradition.

Dukkha includes pain, distress and the pervasive unsatisfactoriness of what is unstable and cannot provide lasting security. The Four Noble Truths organise this as suffering, its origin, its cessation and the path. The medical analogy describes the teaching’s structure; it does not turn the page into clinical diagnosis or treatment advice.

Paṭiccasamuppāda: the principle that phenomena arise dependent on conditions, often taught through a twelve-link sequence from ignorance to ageing and death. The overview also applies the middle links to immediate experience, especially contact, feeling, craving, clinging and becoming. Interpretations vary across Buddhist traditions and between momentary and multi-life readings.

A traditional Theravāda list of ten bonds relinquished across stages of awakening, beginning with identity view, doubt and attachment to rites and observances. The model belongs to a specific doctrinal account of liberation. It can support study, but it should not be used casually to certify one’s own or another person’s spiritual attainment.

Right view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness and concentration. These are mutually supporting aspects of wisdom, ethical conduct and mental cultivation rather than eight isolated tasks completed once. The section presents the path as the practical response to its analysis of suffering and conditioning.