ABSTRACT
The scholarly literature on the history of the term dhamma in Buddhist thought is fairly extensive and focuses on the ambiguity of the term caused by the wide range of meanings it covers. Among those meanings are included Buddhist teaching in general, any doctrine which forms part of that teaching, an element of experience, principle, phenomenon, nature, mental object, idea and others.1 A.K. Warder has shown that the Nikaya usage of the term dhamma (in both its singular and plural forms) is ambiguous and multivalent, and that its alleged ontological dimension is far from being clear. He indicates that
The four old Nikayas are not as clear about dhamma meaning an ‘element’ as is the Abhidhamma. They seem instead to offer discussions using the word a little more freely, apparently without defining it, out of which the precise concept of the Abhidhamma might have been extracted.2
