The Abhidhamma Pitaka, the third division of the Tipitaka, is divided into seven books:
Mrs C.A.F. Rhys Davids (1857-1942) was President of the Pali Text Society (1923-42). She edited many of the PTS volumes of Abhidhamma and was "the best European expert in the Abhidhamma" (Pali Literature and Language, William Geiger).
These extracts are from her introductions to the Pali volumes.
"We may say that the Vibhanga was conceived as a manual for students no less than was the Dhammasangani. The object is not so much to extend knowledge as to systematise and formulate the theories and practical mechanism of intellectual and moral progress scattered throughout the sutta pitaka. This, coupled with the evident fact of its having been, as tradition tells, compiled not in writing but for oral teaching and for learning by rote makes it and all Abhidhamma matter so impossible as food for the reader".
"The length of the work is very considerable. Even Buddhaghosa finds it when expanded or uncondensed in its 2000 sections for recitation "endless and immeasurable". The Yamaka is no fit work for either reading or recitation. Perhaps paragraphs were read out periodically in viharas where Abhidhamma was taught. Perhaps in the hands of an earnest expositor these ten ‘valleys of dry bones’ might be made living and breathing vehicles of doctrine. But to sustain a catechism of questions and converse questions respecting ten sets of terms repeated, with slightly varying content, several thousand times, is a very salient feature indeed; so salient indeed, that like Sisyphus, we slide down from it gasping in despair.’
"It had long seemed to me that the work, in common with some other numbers of Abhidhamma Pitaka books, was more suggestive of a manual of logical exercises - or at most of applied logic - than of a compilation having the one aim of building up bhikkhus in solid and purified doctrine. There seemed to be, for aims so lofty, too great a chasm between much of this baffling and sterile catechising and the fruitful, edifying trend of Suttanta discourse... It may be a long day yet ere we derive much light from the Yamaka".
"There are still, no doubt, pious and erudite Abhidhammikas spending secluded lives in mastering these interminable permutations of possible modes of subjective experience. But for the majority of Buddhists, as for students of other persuasions, the Pali Text Society's editions aim more, I take it, at being a medium of enlightenment, in which the unessential elaborations of form are reckoned as relatively unimportant beside the high mission of conveying to the greatest possible number, the vital structure in a great phase of human thought".
