Morality

Morality as Lubricant, Not Punishment

In the Pali Canon, the Buddha explains morality in terms of how it aids meditation and practice rather than as a way to manage personal karma so that future lives are more likely to be pleasant. His message is primarily to use morality because it benefits in this life, not to avoid later punishment or to secure future rewards.
While the Buddha does invoke karma to explain why beings find themselves in better or worse circumstances, this explanation is rarely used as admonition or praise for actions in past lives. Instead, morality is integrated into the path as a practical condition for clarity and freedom here and now.

Morality in the Suttas

In the Nikāyas, morality (sīla) is instrumental and functional. Its primary roles are:

• removing remorse that arises from moral indiscretions
• calming verbal and bodily disturbances associated with immorality
• supporting samādhi by that reduction in disturbance
• using disciplined restraint to weaken self‑construction thinking 

Liberation is achieved through present‑moment causal clarity, not through moral accounting that tallies up good and bad karma. While the Buddha does mention karmic results, they are rarely used to motivate practice, and he does not present karma as a mechanism that by itself frees the mind.

The Abhidharma Changes the Framework

The Abhidharma shifts the weighting, which in turn alters the moral frame. While the suttas emphasise present‑moment function, the Abhidharma gives greater weight to future lives as part of moral practice.
Actions (kamma‑patha) are treated as discrete units classified as wholesome, unwholesome, or neutral, with fixed valence and results. Ethical quality is intrinsic to the mental event (citta and cetasikas) that produces it, rather than dependent on context, intention‑flow, or lived experience.
This transforms morality into a systematised and ritualised activity, rather than a purely functional condition for liberation. Even though Abhidharma authors deny divine judgment, the way they structure karma makes it feel like moral retribution. Its impersonality feels judgmental.

The Suttas’ “removal of remorse → joy → samādhi” sequence is displaced

The suttas’ most psychologically precise account of morality’s function is typified in AN 11.1. “What disturbs the mind now?”—becomes secondary to the Abhidharma’s “What will this produce later?”
Its karmic residue (kamma‑santāna), stored potentialities (bīja), resultants (vipāka‑citta), and other mechanisms may be philosophically sophisticated, but the result is a shift toward a devotional orientation. This shift may not be intentional, but it produces an unmistakable moralisation not found in the suttas.

Although Abhidharma authors explicitly deny any higher authority or intervening agent, the traditions shaped by Abhidharma nevertheless result in widespread devotional practices aimed at influencing karmic outcomes—through merit transfer, ritual acts, and appeals to awakened beings.

If intervention were genuinely impossible, such practices would have no intelligible function. Their persistence suggests a structural implication within the system itself: by fixing moral valence and outcomes while abstracting agency into impersonal mechanisms, the Abhidharma framework generates pressure for an appeal mechanism that its philosophy officially disavows.

Devotion emerges not from doctrine, but as a compensatory response to moral consequences that feel judgmental even though they posit no judge.

Systematisation Requires Stabilised Valence

Once they have built a total explanatory system, ethical valence cries out to be stabilised or the system is threatened with collapse.

The suttas avoid this by staying pragmatic and context‑sensitive. By systematising the Buddha’s pragmatic account of ethical restraint, the Abhidharma reinterprets morality primarily through karmic causation. This reorients the emphasis from morality’s immediate psychological and liberative function—central in the suttas—toward a framework of moral accounting that later supports devotional and punitive interpretations.

This devotional/punitive turn is fully realised later, in commentaries, cosmological elaborations, and merit‑transfer cultures. Abhidharma supplied the grammar that made that turn possible. Without Abhidharma, that move would have been far harder to justify.