ABSTRACT
Abhidharma is a designation of Buddhist literature in which the core teachings from the Buddha’s sermons are systematized, interpreted, and defended. Certain authors attracted to this genre (abhidharma) took on the task of systematizing a diverse set of doctrines scattered across thousands of sermons. The end result was a number of such systems, similar in overall content but differing in detail. These differing systems and the ontologies and epistemologies that they articulate come to define Buddhist sectarian boundaries sometime during the first half of the first millennium CE.
