The Dhammapada

Time is the medium of arising and passing — every conditioned thing is impermanent (anicca). The cycle of rebirth (saṃsāra) is real but beginningless and to be transcended rather than completed. "The world is on fire" (Dhammapada 146) — time is not a neutral container but the rhythm of decay. The Abhidhamma developed a more elaborate ontology of discrete momentary dharmas; the Dhammapada's verses are consistent with that picture without requiring it.

Space is presupposed rather than thematised. The verses are concerned with the field of mental and ethical action, not with cosmology. Where space appears, it is the lived space of the practitioner — forest, village, monastery, the body — not Newtonian extension. Causality is local: actions have consequences that ripen for the doer (Dhammapada 117, 119).

The material body is one of the five skandhas (rūpa, form) — a composite that arises and dissolves. The body is not a privileged site of selfhood; the verses repeatedly use it as the paradigm of impermanence: "This body, alas, will soon lie on the ground, discarded, without consciousness, like a useless log of wood" (Dhammapada 41). Matter is real, relationally constituted, and unstable.

The empirical "person" is plural in the sense of being a stream of distinct mental events without a unifying self (anatta). Knowledge in the highest sense is total — the arahant has nothing more to do — but it is gained immediately, in this very life, through practice rather than discursive reason. There is no creator and no providence: the practitioner is on her own. "By oneself, indeed, is evil done; by oneself is one defiled. By oneself is evil left undone; by oneself, indeed, is one purified" (Dhammapada 165).

Not thematised as such; the closest analogue is the karmic momentum that propels rebirth. Karma is not energy in the physical sense but a moral-volitional analogue: actions accumulate force, condition further actions, and the whole system is dissipative — energy in this sense is irreversible (each action only adds to the burden until extinguished by liberation).

No persisting substantive self carries information across lives — instead, the karmic deposit propagates. This is conservation of information in a deflationary sense: the *pattern* persists across discontinuous moments without a metaphysical bearer. The discrete mind-moment ontology of the Abhidhamma reads Information Granularity as Discrete.