[quote=“Deeele, post:37, topic:2638”]
AN 3.136 & SN 12.20 appears to state unexperienced dhamma is dhamma.
[/quote]I went looking for something resembling a discourse on “unexperienced dhammā” in SN 12.20 & AN 3.136 and did not find any.
SN 12.20, which I am more familiar with, has an āgama-parallel in SA 296 that is discussion here: Question about a translation choice in SA 296
It espouses a very unusual dhamma-theory, but still limits the range of what is considered a dhammā, for the purposes of that specific discourse, to 18 or so different dhammā:[quote]無明、行、識、名色、六入處、觸、受、愛、取、有、生、老、病、死、憂、悲、惱、苦，
ignorance, capability, knowing, naming [and] forming, the six senses’ touching, touching, receiving, lusting, taking, becoming, developing, aging, sickening, dying, worrying, grieving, [becoming-]angry, suffering,
(Choong Mun-keat): Ignorance, activities, consciousness, name-and-form, the six sense-spheres, contact, feeling, craving, attachment, becoming, birth, aging-sickness-death-sorrow-affliction-suffering.[/quote]Similarly, the Nikāya-parallel list of dhammā, although it deals more-so with these dhammā’s impermanence and the linking of these dhammā together in a “persistent” relationship (i.e. “that element still persists, the stableness of the Dhamma, the fixed course of the Dhamma,”):[quote]“‘With existence as condition, birth’ … ‘With clinging as condition, existence’ … ‘With craving as condition, clinging’ … ‘With feeling as condition, craving’ … ‘With contact as condition, feeling’ … ‘With the six sense bases as condition, contact’ … ‘With name-and-form as condition, the six sense bases’ … ‘With consciousness as condition, name-and-form’ … ‘With volitional formations as condition, consciousness’ … ‘With ignorance as condition, volitional formations’
[…]
Aging-and-death, bhikkhus, is impermanent, conditioned, dependently arisen, subject to destruction, vanishing, fading away, and cessation. Birth is impermanent … Existence is impermanent … Clinging is impermanent … Craving is impermanent … Feeling is impermanent … Contact is impermanent … The six sense bases are impermanent … Name-and-form is impermanent … Consciousness is impermanent … Volitional formations are impermanent … Ignorance is impermanent, conditioned, dependently arisen, subject to destruction, vanishing, fading away, and cessation.[/quote]Lastly, AN 3.136 simply labels all dhammā as not possessing selfhood.
…in short, I can’t see how what you are saying here [quote=“Deeele, post:37, topic:2638”]
AN 3.136 & SN 12.20 appears to state unexperienced dhamma is dhamma.
[/quote]is present as a discourse in any of the suttāni you listed. Nothing outside of “the all” of the Sabbasutta is labelled a dhammā. If the Buddha had said “if a dhamma of falling tree is witnessed by no one, not one sentient being anywhere, it is still a dhamma” than one might have a bit of an argument (but why would the Buddha say something as useless as that?).
[quote=“Deeele, post:37, topic:2638”]
For me, this a very wild interpretation, which I have noticed as very prevalent on the internet chatsite named ‘Dhammawheel’, by members that appear to assert a mind-only-theory of Buddhism.
[/quote]Since this relates to the earlier subdiscussion on the Heart Sutra and on if emptiness is ontological, I don’t feel too off-topic responding to this.
I think what you mean, instead of a “mind-only-theory of Buddhism” is a phenomenological approach to interpreting Buddhavacana. This is less extreme than hard ontological Cittamātra. The Buddha does not give us any reason to doubt if that tree indeed did or did indeed not fall, similarly, the Buddha does not give us any reason (as far as I know) to think that a sense object that does not interact with a sense base does not “exist” on account of its non-interaction with sense bases. Indeed, as I said previously, why would a sense-object that does not engage in contact with a sense-base even be considered a “sense object”? It wouldn’t. It would simply be an object. A great deal of speculation and classification of “latent objects”, that is, objects devoid of contact with sentient beings, is probably outside of the purview of Buddhavacana because it is irrelevant (completely so! since the qualifier earlier was “witnessed by no one, not one sentient being anywhere”). Such is the phenomenological approach.
It is likely (obvious, IMO) that formations exist outside of the realms of experience, that there is an “object reality” (for lack of a better word) in which sense-objects are to be found for contact, but the existence or nonexistence of such a realm of reality isn’t actually related Buddhist practice. Similarly the behaviour and ways of being in this reality alone, i.e., in the unperceived object-world, would be similarly unrelated to practice (as such a reality, alone, would be absent of sense bases). Not believing in any reality at all would also be an issue that I believe you are suggesting, but that Buddha rejects total nihilism, so that possibility is null.
The closest one can come to such a theory of dhammā is this rather general phrase in the pseudo-Sarvāstivāda discourse in SA 296:[quote]謂此有故彼有
To-speak-of this bhāva causing that bhāva,
(Choong Mun-keat): Because this exists, that exists;[/quote]Which seems to be simply a general affirming that causality indeed exists, furthermore, despite Choong Mun-keat’s translation of 有 as “existence” rather than “bhāva”, is still talking about experienced dhammā.