I trust checking this topic may be a good idea:
From it I quote Bhante @Sujato’s answer to the topic’s opening question:
This is a really good point. It’s incredibly important that we don’t see the subsequent generations of Buddhists as mere losers who got everything wrong. That raises just too many problems; but more important, it’s not a compassionate or wise way of looking at things.
As one of the few people in the world who works pretty much full time with Pali and related texts, I am acutely conscious that much of what I do is “abhidhamma” in the original meaning of the word. That is, it’s doing stuff that’s “about the teachings”.
As just one example, yesterday we posted a major upgrade to our PTS dictionary, fixing hundreds of thousands of issues. Most of these are petty details, mere conventions and markup. Now, acting as a dictionary is one of the function of the old Abhidhamma (and in a different way, the commentaries). In fact, in their lists of terms and synonyms we could argue that they are the word’s first Thesaurus. The benefit of doing this is obvious; collect various terms, collate similar terms, and clarify the meaning of different terms in various contexts.
Now, these days that’s not very useful. Modern dictionaries are much more useful, and I can easily use search across the whole corpus to find what I want. But I can only do these things because of the “abhidhamma” work done by myself, other SC developers, and the countless scholars and volunteers on whose work we rely.
This is far from denying that there are major issues with the abhidhamma project in general, and the Theravadin Abhidhamma texts in particular. But to understand these we have to start by empathizing with and understanding their goals and methods.
Long ago I wrote The Mystique of the Abhidhamma, which I believe is the most humorous essay on Abhidhamma ever written. Of course, there’s not much competition; none, to be precise. The point of the article, as explained in the final paragraph, is that we can never understand Abhidhamma properly if we insist on worshiping it and making it into something that it quite obviously is not.
I find it frustrating that even today there are so many people following Burmese methods based on the assumption that everything in the Abhidhamma is true. It’s not, even in the canonical Abhidhamma; and almost everything taught as “abhidhamma” in fact stems from much later commentaries. We have thousands of meditators believing with complete conviction that they are seeing kalāpas and mind moments and the rest. But these things just don’t exist. And they were certainly never taught by the Buddha. How is this a path to non-delusion? If we’re unable to rise above denial regarding even the simple facts of history, how can we see subtle truths of the mind?
The problem is not so much the abhidhamma texts as such, it’s the role they’ve been pressed into by the community. If we see them as attempts to write a curriculum, to make dictionaries and concordances, to classify and clarify concepts, then they can be seen as valuable or not in so far as they achieve these goals. To force them to serve as a model of “absolute truth” is to disrespect the texts and their authors. This is not listening to the actual Abhidhamma, it’s worshiping a false idol.