The good reasons for the compilation of Abhidhamma

There’s this phrase you find in the suttas, ye vā pan’aññe. It means “or whatever else …”, or more idiomatically, “and so on”, “etc.” The same idiom is still used in the canonical Abhidhamma; in other words, they do not pretend to offer complete lists of everything.

In the commentaries, however, they specified exactly the content of ye vā pan’aññe. It’s no longer an open-ended system, but an exhaustive listing.

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