Dharma-dhatus: Elementary Components of Experience

While skandhas organize experience into five broad categories, Abhidharma's dharma-dhatu analysis goes deeper, identifying 75 or 100 elementary components (dharmas) that constitute all possible experience. These are not material substances but momentary events—qualities, sensations, mental factors, and consciousness itself—that combine and dissolve in rapid sequences. Patanjali's yoga psychology teaches samadhi (concentration) as a means to perceive increasingly subtle mental processes; dharma analysis provides the detailed map of what practitioners actually encounter in deep meditation. Each dharma has intrinsic characteristics (svabhava) that define its nature; meditators learning to identify these gain unprecedented psychological insight. This framework transforms meditation from vague introspection into precise phenomenological observation. By understanding dharmas, practitioners recognize that what seemed solid—thoughts, emotions, sensations—are actually brief, conditional events. This direct perception of experience's granular structure undermines attachment, aversion, and delusion, catalyzing the psychological transformation Patanjali promises through systematic observation of the mind's actual nature.