Kathavatthu

The Kathavatthu, Points of Controversy, is structured entirely differently from every other Abhidhamma book: rather than systematically enumerating and cross-referencing categories of experience, it stages over two hundred formal debates on contested points of doctrine, each opening with a disputed proposition, such as whether an arahant can fall away from full liberation, or whether everything exists in past, present and future simultaneously, that the text attributes to various rival early Buddhist schools, and then works through a structured logical refutation exposing the position's internal inconsistencies according to the orthodox Theravada view.

The disputed positions addressed range across questions of meditative attainment, the nature of the person, the status of arahantship, and the workings of karma and rebirth, effectively cataloging, through the specific arguments raised against them, a wide range of doctrinal positions held by other early Buddhist communities that split off from a shared earlier tradition in the centuries following the Buddha's death, communities whose own primary texts have in most cases not survived independently and are known today largely through exactly this kind of refutation preserved in a rival school's canon. The debates are conducted in a tightly formalized question-and-answer style, testing each contested claim against its logical consequences until the opposing position is shown to collapse into an admission its own holder would presumably reject.

The Kathavatthu occupies a unique position within the Abhidhamma Pitaka as the only one of its seven books the Theravada tradition itself credits to a specific named historical author, the elder Moggaliputta Tissa, working at a specific historical occasion, the Third Buddhist Council held under the patronage of the emperor Ashoka around 250 BCE, rather than attributing its content directly to the Buddha as the other six books are traditionally described. This traditional attribution, largely accepted by modern scholars as broadly plausible even if not verifiable in every detail, makes the Kathavatthu one of the most useful anchor points available for dating the wider closure and fixing of the Abhidhamma Pitaka, since a text explicitly responding to doctrinal splits among named rival schools cannot be earlier than the emergence of those schools, and its inclusion within the canon shows the Abhidhamma Pitaka as a whole was still open to genuinely new composition as late as the mid third century BCE, considerably later than the core Sutta and Vinaya material.

Because its refutations preserve, however polemically framed, some of the only surviving textual evidence for the specific doctrinal positions of several early Buddhist schools whose own scriptures did not survive independently, the Kathavatthu remains an indispensable, if inherently one-sided, source for historians reconstructing the diversity of early Buddhist thought before the traditions that survive today had fully separated and stabilized.