dhammas

Dhammas is the plural of dhamma, a Pali term that can be translated as phenomena, elements of reality, or the universal law of nature. In Buddhist usage it often denotes the constituents of experience or the ultimate realities described in the teachings. The word is used both in a broad sense, for the teachings themselves (the dhammas of the Buddha’s doctrine), and in a technical sense, for the individual phenomena that make up experience.

In Theravada Buddhism, particularly in the Abhidhamma literature, dhammas are conceived as the smallest, indivisible constituents of experience. They are conditioned, impermanent, and non-self. The Abhidhamma divides dhammas into two broad categories: nama-dhammas (mental phenomena) and rupa-dhammas (material phenomena). Nama-dhammas include the mental states and factors that accompany consciousness, such as citta (states of consciousness) and cetasikas (mental factors like feeling, perception, intention, contact, attention, concentration, and other cognitive and affective elements). Rupa-dhammas refer to physical phenomena, including the body and the external material world as analyzed in terms of their arising, persistence, and cessation under dependent origination.

The analysis of dhammas serves to illuminate the nature of experience and to support meditative insight. By observing how dhammas arise in dependence on causes and conditions and how they cease, practitioners are led to see impermanence, dukkha (unsatisfactoriness), and anatta (non-self), which are central to the Buddhist path.

Outside of Theravāda, the term dhamma (dharma) is used more broadly to refer to doctrine, law, or universal truth. In all contexts, dhammas function as the building blocks through which Buddhist teachings describe reality.