Conditioning Forces — Part 2
SUBSIDIARY INFECTIONS, VARIABLE FACTORS, AND NONMENTAL/NONMATERIAL
First Floor - Small Vehicle • Module 14
Estimated time to complete: 80 minutes
The Louder Neighbors
The grudge you nursed for a week after a friend’s careless remark. The pang of jealousy when a colleague announced a promotion. The afternoon you spent refreshing social media instead of doing anything you actually cared about. You probably didn’t need the Abhidharma — the Buddhist tradition’s systematic analysis of mind and experience — to tell you something was off in those moments. The discomfort was obvious.
That is exactly the point. The subsidiary infections we are about to study are the louder neighbors of the six root infections. The Abhidharma describes them as upakleśa: “near” or “in the neighborhood of” the root infections, but more coarse and more obvious. Where the root infections are like a low-grade fever you barely notice, many of the subsidiary infections are like a headache you cannot ignore. And that is, paradoxically, good news for investigation. We can start to recognize what is actually happening in our minds precisely because these forces are not subtle at all.
These twenty subsidiary infections also sharpen our labeling vocabulary. Within the broad category of “negative,” they provide finer distinctions — not just “something negative is happening” but “that particular tightness is jealousy” or “this heaviness is the dullness that undermines my meditation.” The more precise the label, the more clearly we can see what we are working with.
After the subsidiary infections, two shorter sections complete the fourth aggregate survey. Four “variable” mental factors — forces that are positive or negative depending entirely on context — complicate the neat categories we have been building. And then the twenty-four nonmental and nonmaterial conditioning forces reveal something unexpected: this aggregate actually contains forces like time, causality, and lifespan that have nothing to do with the mind at all. By the end of this module, we will see why the word “mental” in the standard translation of this aggregate’s title has always been misleading.
What to watch for: How each subsidiary infection relates to a root infection but manifests more obviously. The jealousy teaching — why causing yourself anguish over someone else’s good fortune is “no skin off your back” when you could simply rejoice instead. The two forces that are the biggest obstacles to meditation: dullness and wild mind. The three forms of laziness — especially the first, which doesn’t look like laziness at all. And the driving analogy for discernment: what it means to monitor, comprehend, and anticipate all at once.
Video 1: Twenty Subsidiary Infections
Duration: 21 minutes
Finer Grain
Notice the structural claim running through that lecture: every single subsidiary infection is described as painful. Not just harmful in some abstract karmic sense, but actually unpleasant to experience right now. Jealousy hurts. Grudges are exhausting. Even laziness — which can feel like comfort — carries a deeper dissatisfaction, a sense of not doing what we know we could be doing. The Abhidharma is making an empirical claim about the quality of these states, and it is one we can test against our own experience.
Notice too the meditation connection that surfaces toward the end: dullness and wild mind — the two biggest obstacles to śamatha — are on this list. They are subsidiary infections. They are not merely inconvenient technical problems that arise when we try to concentrate. They are forms of suffering in their own right, and like all forms of suffering, they proliferate into further suffering — pulling us deeper into distraction, heaviness, or restlessness. That is precisely why they need to be reduced: not just because they interfere with concentration, but because they are painful states that generate more painful states.
The next video examines four mental factors that refuse to stay in any single category — forces that are positive in one context and negative in another. If the subsidiary infections were the clear-cut villains, these are the ambiguous characters whose role depends entirely on the story.
What to watch for: Why “variable” is the right translation and “neutral” is wrong — these forces are never neutral, always positive or negative depending on context. The distinction between regret and guilt — and why guilt, in this framework, is not on the list at all. Listen for how even sleep can be a positive or negative mental activity depending on what it replaces.
Video 2: Four Variable Mental Factors
Duration: 8 minutes
Nothing Is Neutral
The variable factors complicate the picture. These are forces where the classification depends entirely on what else is happening. Regret for a harmful action is positive. Regret for a kind action is negative. Thinking in general terms is positive when it runs alongside faith, negative when it accompanies animosity. The mental factor itself does not change — the context changes everything.
This matters for our labeling practice. Some conditioning forces will be straightforward to classify. But some — regret, certain patterns of thinking — will require us to look at what they are associated with before we can see their karmic direction. That extra step of investigation is itself vipaśyanā at work.
The final video steps back from mental factors entirely and reveals that the fourth aggregate contains an entire category of forces that are neither mental nor material — forces that shape experience from a direction we have not yet considered.
What to watch for: The concept of attainment as a “glue” that holds karmic effects to consciousness — and why the Abhidharma needed such a concept to explain how actions have consequences across time. The four characteristics of conditioned things: production, continuity, deterioration, dissolution. Most importantly: how this list — including forces like lifespan, group homogeneity, and the very production and dissolution of phenomena — demonstrates that the fourth aggregate is not really about “mental factors” at all. It is about every conditioning force that shapes experience, whether mental, physical, or something else entirely.
Video 3: 24 Nonmental and Nonmaterial Conditioning Forces
Duration: 27 minutes
Bigger Than the Mind
This is the conceptual payoff of the two-module survey of conditioning forces. The fourth aggregate turns out to be genuinely vast. It does not just catalog how the mind works. It catalogs the forces that condition all of experience: how things come into being, how they persist, how they decay, and how they disappear.
The Abhidharma framework presented in this video comes from the Small Vehicle philosophical school whose distinctive philosophy we will study comparatively on the Great Vehicle floor. For now, what matters is the structural point: these schools posit forces that belong to neither the mental nor the material category. These forces are conditioned — they arise from causes — but they are not reducible to either mind or matter.
Pay particular attention to the concept of “attainment” (prāpti). The Small Vehicle philosophical school needed to explain how karma actually works mechanistically — how an action performed today can produce a result years or lifetimes later. Their answer was “attainment”: a real, nonmental force that acts like a glue, binding karmic consequences to the consciousness that produced them. It is an elegant solution to a genuine problem. But it is also a deeply mechanistic one — it assumes that karma requires a separately existing “thing” to carry it forward. On the Great Vehicle floor, the Mahāyāna schools will challenge this assumption directly, arguing that the mechanistic picture of karma is one of the things that needs to be seen as provisional rather than accepted as true. For now, simply take note of the solution being proposed and the kind of problem it is trying to solve.
With this module, the entire fourth aggregate is now in view — all fifty-one mental factors and the twenty-four nonmental and nonmaterial conditioning forces.
But the abstract need not remain abstract. Like in the previous module, we can try to remember a time when we experienced each one of these twenty subsidiary “negative” forces—even if it was only small. By finding past experiences, we attach these abstract labels to a concrete experience so that we can spot them when they arise naturally later on. Try later in meditation to tune into the different stories we tell ourselves to see whether they have the flavor of any of these “negative” forces. Once we are familiar with how all 51 terms apply to our experience, we are ready to turn to the more complete version of the Four Applications of Mindfulness — mindfulness of phenomena — which explores the entire Abhidharma map through direct observation in meditation.
✦ A few Insights:
When I look at the twenty subsidiary infections, I find it very hard to admit that I get caught in even one of them. But whenever I am honest with myself, I immediately see how I am unconsciously stuck in all of them. I once heard about a study where they asked meditators and non-meditators about their personal faults or negative emotional tendencies. The study creators thought that they would find that meditators would have fewer faults due to having overcome them through meditation. But it turned out that meditators and non-meditators reported the same number of faults. The only difference was that meditators seemed to be more at ease and had more humor about them. Everyone knows that we have to admit our faults and negative emotional tendencies—and the suffering they cause us—before we can overcome them. But few of us have the courage or honesty to do so without beating ourselves up or wallowing in crippling self-judgment. Through vipaśyanā practice, we are supposed to be cultivating the ability to acknowledge the facts openly, honestly, and non-judgmentally—which starves the fire of further fuel. The objectivity of vipaśyanā also gives us the distance we need so that we can take whatever positive steps are required to change our habitual patterns. If we can even find some self-deprecating humor in our faults, we can feel genuine healing even before the habits are overcome. According to Buddhists, a real meditator even feels joy to find personal faults because it means they can now easily be overcome.
As for the nonmental and nonmaterial forces, they are basically an early Buddhist theory designed to explain the mechanism through which karma must act in both the physical and mental world. Later Buddhist schools refute the logic of these forces but use them at the most coarse level of analysis to explain causality, just as scientists use general relativity and quantum theory to refute Newtonian physics in outer space or subatomic contexts but still use Newton’s formulas to calculate motion on Earth.
For instance, Buddhists widely accept the concept of “attainment” (prāpti) — a nonmental and nonmaterial force that sticks to us and carries the consequences of what we do forward across time. However, some later Buddhist authors explained attainment to be a feature of a consciousness that unconsciously registers and tracks what we do, like neural pathways that get stronger every time we repeat either a negative or positive action. As any objective scientist or meditator should know, theories often have explanatory strengths and weaknesses within a certain frame of reference, but none of them solve all problems or are even practical beyond that context. When we get to the Great Vehicle floor, we will see how certain Buddhist schools use the metaphor of a dream to completely sidestep the ontological problem inherent in explaining causality mechanistically.
? Questions for Reflection
These are not comprehension questions. They are observation prompts — invitations to investigate in your own experience over the coming days and weeks.
1. The Recognizable Infections Consider, of the twenty subsidiary infections, which ones you recognized most immediately in yourself. Not which ones you think you “should” have — which ones landed with the shock of recognition? Jealousy? Laziness? The distraction of bouncing between thoughts? Are these states inherently painful, even when they feel familiar or comfortable?
2. Regret as a Variable Think of a recent moment of regret. Before classifying it, ask: what was the regret about? Was it regret for something harmful — in which case the tradition would call it positive? Or regret for something kind or beneficial — in which case the force is moving in a negative direction? Notice how the same felt quality of regret changes its significance entirely depending on its object.
3. The Three Laziness Types Over the next week, watch for all three forms of laziness described in the lecture: busyness that fills time without benefit, torpor or sluggishness that resists engagement, and discouragement that talks you out of something before you try. Which form visits you most often? Does recognizing it as laziness — rather than “being busy” or “being tired” or “being realistic” — change how it feels?
4. Dullness and Wild Mind in Practice If you are meditating, begin to notice the interplay between dullness and wild mind — the two poles of meditation’s biggest obstacles. When you sit, which direction does your mind tend toward: sinking into heaviness, or scattering into restless thought? Does this tendency remain consistent across sessions, or does it shift? In vipaśyanā practice, rather than trying to fix these—like in śamatha practice—we aim only to observe which way the needle points and investigate what the causes are. Could it be bad sleep? Too many carbs? Just that time of day?
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