What this concept is saying
一切法 (yīqiè fǎ; *all dharmas*, Sanskrit *sarva-dharma*) means the totality of conditioned and unconditioned dharmas, defiled and purified dharmas, worldly and supramundane dharmas. Here “dharma” does not mean only “the Buddha’s teaching.” Depending on context, it can mean a phenomenon, an event, a mental factor, an object of cognition, a principle, or an analytically distinguished element of experience. “All dharmas” is therefore much wider than “everything material,” “everything in my mind,” or even “everything that exists” in an ordinary metaphysical sense.
The expression does several kinds of work in Buddhist teaching. It maps the field of experience; it tells practitioners what must be observed; and, in the Prajñāpāramitā and Madhyamaka traditions, it prevents anything within that field—including nirvāṇa, emptiness, and Buddhist doctrine—from being turned into an independently existing absolute.
Its place on the path can be summarized in four movements:
1. Recognize the whole field in which suffering and attachment occur. 2. Discern how phenomena arise through conditions. 3. Cease appropriating any phenomenon as “I,” “mine,” or an enduring essence. 4. Act within conventional distinctions without being imprisoned by them.
The early discourses give “all” a rigorously experiential meaning. In the *Saṃyukta Āgama* (《雜阿含經》), the field is described through the six sense systems:
- the eye, visible form, eye-consciousness, eye-contact, and the painful, pleasant, or neither-painful-nor-pleasant feeling born from that contact; - the ear, sound, ear-consciousness, ear-contact, and contact-born feeling; - the nose, odor, nose-consciousness, nose-contact, and contact-born feeling; - the tongue, taste, tongue-consciousness, tongue-contact, and contact-born feeling; - the body, tangible objects, body-consciousness, body-contact, and contact-born feeling; - the mind, mental objects, mind-consciousness, mind-contact, and contact-born feeling.
This definition matters because it keeps “all dharmas” from floating away into speculation. Whatever becomes a lived world appears through a sense faculty, an object, the corresponding consciousness, their contact, and the feeling conditioned by that contact. The mental field is explicitly included: memories, images, plans, concepts, and fantasies are 法 (*dharma*) as objects of mind. But this does not mean that external sights and sounds are secretly nothing but private thoughts. The teaching preserves the distinct roles of faculty, object, consciousness, contact, and feeling.
The same collection also says that the correct exposition of “all dharmas” is the 四念處 (four establishments of mindfulness): contemplation of body as body, feeling as feeling, mind as mind, and dharmas as dharmas. This is not a competing inventory. It reorganizes the entire field as something to be directly observed. “All” becomes a practice assignment: no dimension of experience is exempt from careful knowing.
These two presentations answer different questions. The six sense systems answer, “Where does an experienced world occur?” The four establishments answer, “How should that world be contemplated for liberation?”
Other traditions classify the field differently. The *Mahāprajñāpāramitā Sūtra* (《摩訶般若波羅蜜經》) includes paired divisions such as wholesome and unwholesome, determinate and indeterminate, worldly and supramundane, contaminated and uncontaminated, conditioned and unconditioned, common and distinctive dharmas. These pairs must not be collapsed into one moral scale:
- 善法 and 不善法 are wholesome and unwholesome dharmas. - 記法 and 無記法 concern whether something receives a determinate characterization or remains indeterminate; “indeterminate” is not automatically spiritually pure. - 世間法 and 出世間法 are worldly and supramundane dharmas. - 有漏法 and 無漏法 are contaminated and uncontaminated dharmas, distinguished by their relation to the “outflows” or afflictive processes. - 有為法 and 無為法 are conditioned and unconditioned dharmas. Conditioned dharmas arise in dependence upon causes and conditions; “unconditioned” is not merely something that lasts a very long time. - 共法 and 不共法 are common and distinctive dharmas; the latter can refer to qualities distinctive to advanced realization or buddhahood in the relevant doctrinal setting.
The point is comprehensive inclusion. Ethical states, ordinary events, stages of the path, liberated qualities, conditioned processes, and what is called unconditioned all fall within the scope of inquiry.
The *Mahāprajñāpāramitā Śāstra* (《大智度論》) offers an epistemic formulation: all dharmas are what consciousness can take as an object and what wisdom can know. It also sorts them through twofold, threefold, fourfold, fivefold, and still more extensive classifications. No single list is meant to be mistaken for the substance of reality; each is a diagnostic map suited to a question.
The *Mahāyāna Śatadharma-prakāśamukha Śāstra* (《大乘百法明門論》), for example, organizes all dharmas into five classes:
- 心法 (*citta-dharmas*, mind or consciousness factors): eight forms of consciousness. - 心所有法 (*caitta-dharmas*, mental factors associated with mind): fifty-one factors, including feeling, recognition, volition, attention, wholesome factors, afflictions, and other associated processes. - 色法 (*rūpa-dharmas*, material or form dharmas): eleven, including the five physical sense faculties, their corresponding sensory objects, and form included in the field of mental objects. - 心不相應行法 (*conditioned factors not associated with mind*): twenty-four. These are neither consciousness nor ordinary material form; they designate conditioned relations or statuses such as acquisition, life faculty, similarity of beings, names, sentences, birth, aging, duration, impermanence, sequence, direction, time, number, conjunction, and disjunction. - 無為法 (*unconditioned dharmas*): the fifth class. The supplied passage establishes this category but does not enumerate its subdivisions, so they should not be silently imported from another recension or commentary.
This fivefold system is one analytical model, not the sole canonical meaning of “all dharmas.” Its usefulness lies in showing how much falls between the crude modern alternatives of “physical matter” and “a private mind.”
Then the wisdom literature changes the question. It asks not merely what kinds of dharmas there are, but how any dharma exists.
The *Diamond Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra* (《金剛般若波羅蜜經》) famously says, “一切法皆是佛法”—“all dharmas are Buddha-dharma”—and then applies its characteristic pattern: “所言一切法者，即非一切法，是名一切法,” roughly, “what is spoken of as all dharmas is not all dharmas; therefore it is called all dharmas.” This has three movements:
- The conventional designation is used: “all dharmas.” - Its imagined self-existing referent is denied: it is “not all dharmas” in the sense of an independently established totality. - The usable designation is restored: therefore it is called “all dharmas.”
The first movement avoids nihilism; language, ethics, vows, and practice remain usable. The second avoids reification; the name does not reveal an essence sealed inside things. The third permits compassionate action without requiring metaphysical possession of the world.
Thus “all dharmas are Buddha-dharma” does not mean that cruelty becomes wholesome merely because it occurs, or that every opinion is a Buddhist teaching. Conventional and ethical distinctions remain indispensable. It means that no phenomenon lies outside the scope of awakening’s discernment: wholesome and unwholesome, delusion and wisdom, bondage and release must all be known without self-nature being imputed to them.
The same scripture states, “一切法無我、無人、無眾生、無壽者”: in all dharmas there is no self, person, being, or life-holder. These four negations prevent us from finding an independent owner, controller, fixed personal entity, or enduring identity behind conditioned life. They do not deny that persons conventionally live, suffer, remember, promise, and bear responsibility.
This is where 空 (śūnyatā; emptiness) enters. “All dharmas are empty” does not add a substance called Emptiness behind phenomena. It means that phenomena are empty of independent self-nature. They arise intelligibly through causes, conditions, parts, contrasts, cognition, and designation. Emptiness is therefore not a second world behind this one; it is the absence of the imagined independence we habitually project onto this world.
The *Mūlamadhyamakakārikā* and its traditional commentary (《中論》) apply this examination without exception: cause and effect, characteristic and characterized, action and agent, experience and experiencer are all examined. “Breaking” or refuting all dharmas means breaking claims that they possess intrinsic existence; it does not mean destroying functioning phenomena. Indeed, dependent functioning becomes coherent precisely because things are not frozen in self-contained essences.
The *Mahāratnakūṭa Sūtra* (《大寶積經》) uses several distinct images: dharmas are like an illusion, a dream, the moon reflected in water, and an image in a mirror. These should not be compressed into the vague slogan “nothing is real.” Each comparison illuminates a different feature:
- An illusion appears through conditions but is not what it seems to be. - A dream can generate genuine fear or longing without containing the solid world imagined by the dreamer. - The moon in water appears at a location where no moon can be grasped. - A mirror image depends on object, mirror, light, angle, and vision; it appears vividly but has no independent body inside the glass.
Appearances are therefore causally consequential without being self-grounded. A nightmare can make the heart race; a false accusation can damage a life; a digital number can trigger panic. “Like a dream” is not permission to neglect consequences. It is an instruction to investigate the mode of appearance and to stop grasping at the imagined substance within it.
The Prajñāpāramitā texts also speak of all dharmas as 無所有 (*not possessable or findable as an own-being*), 無相 (*signless*), 不可得 (*unobtainable*), and ultimately inexpressible. “Inexpressible” does not mean that silence alone is wisdom or that doctrinal precision is pointless. These very scriptures use extensive language. The warning is that descriptions cannot convert relational, dependently designated phenomena into self-existing objects.
Nor should “all dharmas are 法性 (dharmatā; dharma-nature)” or “the suchness of all dharmas and the suchness of the Tathāgata are nondual” be read as asserting one cosmic substance from which separate objects are manufactured. 真如 (tathatā; suchness) names phenomena as free from the distortions of reifying thought. It is not a hidden super-object standing alongside visible and mental things.
Chan literature often calls all dharmas 萬法 (*the myriad dharmas*). The saying “萬法本閑，唯人自鬧”—“the myriad dharmas are originally at ease; only people make a commotion”—points to compulsive appropriation: bare events do not themselves announce, “This insult must define you forever,” or “This pleasure must be repeated.” The mind adds pursuit, resistance, comparison, and identity. Yet Chan’s warning against becoming attached even to “quietness” is crucial. Making “original ease” into a special blank state would simply create another object to chase.
A walkthrough in ordinary life
Imagine opening your phone on a crowded morning train and seeing that a close friend has read your message but has not replied.
First, walk through the six-sense account carefully.
There is the eye faculty and the visible form: the screen, the message, the “read” indicator, its colors and shapes. Given eye and visible form, eye-consciousness occurs. Their conjunction is eye-contact. Conditioned by that contact, a feeling arises—perhaps unpleasant.
The unpleasant feeling is not yet the complete story “My friend no longer cares about me.” Feeling here means the affective tone of pleasant, painful, or neutral. It does not mean a fully interpreted emotion, worldview, or judgment.
Next, the mind takes mental objects: the remembered conversation, an imagined cold response, the concept of rejection, and predictions about the relationship. Mind-consciousness occurs in dependence on mind and these mental objects; there is mind-contact, followed by further feeling. A remembered scene can therefore produce a fresh painful tone even while the eyes are now looking at the train floor.
This is where people often map the teaching incorrectly. The friend’s message indicator is not “just a thought”; it belongs initially to the visible field. Your imagined explanation is not the visible object; it is a mental object. The pain is not identical with either one. And none of these alone is an owner who stands behind the process.
Other conditioned factors rapidly join in: recognition identifies the familiar name and the meaning of the indicator; volition inclines toward refreshing the app, sending another message, withdrawing, or retaliating; attention repeatedly returns to the screen; attachment wants reassurance; aversion rejects uncertainty. These distinctions are practical. If you call the whole mass simply “anxiety,” you may experience it as one solid enemy. If you discern its conditions, several possible interventions appear.
Now use the four establishments of mindfulness:
- Body: tight jaw, heat in the face, shortened breath, pressure in the chest, the hand gripping the phone. - Feeling: the unpleasant tone conditioned by successive contacts. - Mind: contracted, agitated, resentful, frightened, or longing. - Dharmas: the operative patterns—attachment, aversion, uncertainty, recollection, attention, impermanence, and the arising and passing of the whole configuration.
Contemplating “body as body” means not immediately converting tightness into “I am unlovable.” Contemplating “feeling as feeling” means neither denying pain nor appointing it as a reliable judge of the relationship. Contemplating “mind as mind” means knowing an anxious mind-state as present, not concluding that anxiety is one’s permanent identity. Contemplating dharmas as dharmas means seeing lawful patterns: repeated checking feeds attention; attention intensifies feeling; feeling conditions a new story; the story prompts more checking.
Now apply conventional discrimination. Perhaps the friend is busy; perhaps there is a genuine conflict; perhaps your communication pattern needs repair. Emptiness does not decide these factual questions for you. You may need to wait, ask kindly, apologize, or establish a boundary. “All dharmas are empty” is not a substitute for information, communication, or moral responsibility.
Finally, apply the deeper insight. No element in this event independently contains “rejection”: not the pixels, not the bodily contraction, not the unpleasant feeling, not the memory, and not even the friend’s silence considered apart from context. Yet the experience is not nonexistent. It arises through a dense network of conditions and can lead to harm or understanding.
Seen as illusion-like, the episode appears more solid than it is. Seen as dream-like, it can move the heart without possessing the essence projected upon it. Seen like the moon in water, “rejection” seems graspably located in a notification, but cannot be found there. Seen like a mirror image, the event depends on many conditions and perspectives without containing an independent self.
Freedom here is not forcing the pain to disappear. It is the loosening of the reflex: “This feeling is me; this story is certainly true; this relationship must secure my identity; therefore I must act now.” When appropriation relaxes, ethical response becomes more—not less—possible.
The same walkthrough applies at work. A manager’s brief comment is sound; hearing-consciousness is not yet humiliation; contact-born unpleasantness is not yet the judgment “My career is over”; recognition, memory, comparison, and volition construct a larger world. Some criticism is accurate and should be learned from. Some is careless or abusive and should be challenged. Insight into emptiness neither makes the manager infallible nor demands passive endurance. It helps one respond without turning a conditioned episode into a permanent self.
Why contemporary people need it
Contemporary life continually compresses processes into things. A ranking becomes “my worth.” A diagnosis becomes “who I am.” A political label becomes the complete substance of another person. A child’s difficult afternoon becomes “a bad child.” An algorithmically selected feed becomes “what the world is like.” “All dharmas” is an antidote to this compression because it trains both comprehensiveness and precision.
First, it widens attention. We usually notice the object we want or hate and overlook the faculty, consciousness, contact, feeling, recognition, volition, and conditions surrounding it. The Buddhist maps reveal an event as a system rather than a monolith.
Second, it leaves no privileged refuge for ego. One might accept that possessions are impermanent while secretly making “my consciousness,” “my spirituality,” “pure awareness,” or even “emptiness” into an eternal core. But “all” is uncompromising: material form, mental states, contemplative attainments, teachings, and categories themselves must be examined for self-nature.
Third, it joins wisdom to ethics. Since phenomena arise dependently, actions matter. Speech conditions trust; repeated attention conditions habits; institutions condition opportunities; bodily exhaustion conditions judgment. Emptiness does not erase causality. It removes the fantasy that causes and persons exist as isolated, unchangeable units. This allows accountability without metaphysical condemnation: harmful conduct must be stopped, while no person need be reduced to an eternally evil essence.
AI and algorithmic life provide a useful—but limited—comparison. A recommendation feed appears as a seamless “world,” although it depends on data selection, optimization targets, interface design, prior clicks, commercial incentives, and feedback loops. Seeing those conditions weakens the illusion that the feed transparently reveals reality. Likewise, Buddhist analysis asks us to inspect the conditions through which a lived world appears.
But the analogy is not identity. Buddhist teachings on consciousness, karma, suffering, and liberation are not proved by machine-learning systems. Nor has brain science settled the philosophical questions of consciousness, personhood, or subjective experience. Scientific models can illuminate correlations and mechanisms within particular domains; they should not be recruited as retroactive certificates for Buddhist doctrine.
Most importantly, the teaching changes the aim of knowledge. The goal is not to possess a perfect encyclopedia of every dharma. It is to know phenomena in a way that ends greed, hatred, delusion, and the suffering produced by appropriation. The liberated person still sees colors, distinguishes wholesome from harmful conduct, remembers appointments, and cares for others. What falls away is the demand that a phenomenon furnish a permanent self or be possessed as an independent reality.
Common misunderstandings and clarifications
1. “All dharmas” means only the Buddha’s doctrines.
No. 法 can mean teaching, but here its extension includes sensory objects, consciousnesses, contacts, feelings, material phenomena, mental factors, conditioned relations, path factors, and unconditioned dharmas. The Buddha’s teaching is among dharmas and is also the means by which dharmas are correctly understood.
2. It means only things in the external universe.
No. Mental objects, mind-consciousness, feeling, recognition, volition, attachment, wisdom, and meditative qualities are included. Conversely, it is also wrong to shrink all dharmas into private mental contents. The early sense-field analysis distinctly includes faculties, objects, consciousness, contact, and feeling.
3. “All dharmas” is one fixed list.
No. The six sense systems, twelve sense bases, eighteen elements, four establishments of mindfulness, Prajñāpāramitā pairs, and Yogācāra’s five classes answer different analytical or practical questions. These maps overlap without being interchangeable. A map for locating experienced contact is not identical to a map classifying mental and material factors.
4. All dharmas are empty, so nothing exists.
This confuses absence of intrinsic existence with sheer nonexistence. A flame depends on fuel and oxygen; precisely because it is conditioned, it can burn. An insult is not an independent substance, yet it can wound. Emptiness denies self-grounding, not appearance, causal efficacy, or conventional truth.
5. “Like a dream” means consequences do not matter.
A dream can produce terror while it lasts; an illusion can redirect behavior; a reflected image can mislead someone who misunderstands it. The comparisons disclose a mismatch between appearance and assumed mode of existence. They do not cancel karma, compassion, or responsibility.
6. “All dharmas are Buddha-dharma” makes good and evil equivalent.
The scope of wisdom is universal; ethical value is not flattened. The same traditions explicitly distinguish wholesome from unwholesome, contaminated from uncontaminated, and worldly from supramundane. Hatred can be empty of self-nature and still be a cause of suffering that must be abandoned.
7. Unconditioned dharmas are eternal objects somewhere outside experience.
“Unconditioned” must not be reduced to “extremely durable.” Nor should it automatically be imagined as a cosmic substance. The *Mahāprajñāpāramitā Śāstra* emphasizes that conditioned and unconditioned are understood in relation, and subjects both categories to emptiness. The distinction serves the path, but neither side should be reified.
8. “All dharmas are mind” means my personal thoughts create the universe.
That is an unwarranted leap. Buddhist discussions of mind, cognition, and appearance differ among traditions, and Chan sayings are often practical interventions rather than compact metaphysical systems. At minimum, they expose how grasping and discrimination construct the world as personally threatening or desirable. They do not license solipsism without further argument.
9. If all dharmas are inexpressible, study is useless.
Language is conventionally indispensable. The scriptures classify, distinguish, question, and teach at great length. “Inexpressible” warns that a word is not an intrinsic essence and that realization cannot be replaced by verbal possession. A map can guide walking without becoming the terrain.
10. Nonattachment means becoming indifferent to all dharmas.
Nonattachment is not numbness. If an experience is no longer organized around defending “me” and securing “mine,” one can often perceive another person’s suffering more accurately. The bodhisattva does not withdraw from conventional dharmas; the bodhisattva practices generosity, discipline, patience, energy, meditation, and wisdom while seeing giver, recipient, and gift as dependently established.
11. The goal is to escape all phenomena.
The path is subtler. The early discourses speak of not clinging to all dharmas and reaching their “far shore.” Prajñāpāramitā refuses to establish a separate, graspable realm outside them. Liberation is not the acquisition of one final object beyond the totality. It is the ending of ignorance and appropriation in relation to whatever appears.
The deepest force of 一切法 lies in that word “all.” Nothing is excluded from careful observation, ethical discernment, dependent arising, or the examination of emptiness. The body is included, but is not a self. Thought is included, but is not a sovereign thinker. Suffering is included, but is not an immutable fate. The path is included, but is not a possession. Even emptiness is included, and therefore cannot become the last refuge of grasping.
When the field is known in this way, ordinary life is not pushed aside in pursuit of awakening. A train ride, an unanswered message, a difficult conversation, bodily pain, affection, grief, and the wish to be free all become sites of discernment. “All dharmas” names the complete field of bondage—but, seen without appropriation, that very field is where release becomes possible.