Sabba: the All

by Glenn Wallis

[Published in Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly, volume 7, number 2, Winter

2008: 78-79.]

Sabba is the Abraham Lincoln of the Pali lexicon. A word could hardly hail from more
humble origins or rise to such giddy heights. Sabba is homespun yet eloquent: it speaks
the matter-of-fact and it insinuates the sublime. Sabba realized is the Great Emancipator:
“Without directly knowing and fully recognizing sabba,” says the Buddha, “you will not
be able to eliminate distress (dukkha) (Saṃyuttanikāya, Sabbavagga 5).

Sabba means “all.” That’s all. It belongs to the lowly class of linguistic laborers
known as pronominal adjectives. That is, when it stands in for a noun or a noun phrase
(like “it” just substituted for “the word sabba”), it’s working as a pronoun; but, when it
further explains, or modifies, a subsequent word (like “subsequent” just did), then it is
clocking in as an adjective. All was lost in the flood. Of all lost things, I resemble you the
most.

All, alas, is never as simple as it appears, is it? As each of us knows, all is

everywhere. All is entire, whole, complete in itself. It is total and, well, all-encompassing.
"The whole,” as Aristotle reminds, “is something besides its parts … a unity”
(Metaphysics 8.5.1045a). And so Religion, from the Mekong to the Mississippi, gives us
the grandest Alls of all: the One, the Absolute, the Ever-Present and All-Knowing, the
Summum, the Sublime, the Cosmic Father, and the Universal Mother. All, by definition,
knows no bounds — particularly when it transmutes into a noun. The German word for
“universe” is “das All.”

But Gotama was a farmer, not an astronomer. Although he, too, posited an “all,”
what he had in mind was something closer to earth than dirt. Let’s listen in on the
Buddha’s succinct teaching on sabba.

I will teach you the all (sabba). Listen to what I say. What
is the all? The eye and forms, the ear and sounds, the nose
and scents, the tongue and tastes, the body and tactile
objects, the mind and thoughts. This is called the all.
Someone might say, “I reject this all, I will declare another
all.” But because that is simply a groundless assertion, such
a person, when asked about it, would not be able to explain,
and would, moreover, meet with distress. What is the
reason for that distress? Because that all is not within his or
her sensorium. (Saṃyuttanikāya, Sabbavagga 1.)

If we keep in mind that Gotama’s project as a teacher is to show us a way to overcome

dukkha, existential unease, then sabba becomes the answer to one of the most crucial
questions we can pose ourselves: where do I begin the project of knowing —directly,
immediately, for myself — the source of my dissatisfaction? To answer, as Gotama does,
“by recognizing sabba,” is to claim that the knowledge we require for gaining precious
insight into our unhappiness is literally right in front of our noses (and eyes, and ears, and
so on); the knowledge we require is, namely, full and present in the very act of
perception. In Gotama’s teaching, an act of perception involves (i) the givenness of the
world (forms, sounds, scents, etc.), (ii) sensory reception (the eye, the ear, etc.), and (iii)
response (passion, craving, grasping/dispassion, equanimity, unbinding, etc.). (For this
latter aspect, you can further explore Saṃyuttanikāya, Sabbavagga 5.) “The all,” sabba,
is Gotama’s way of referring to this starkest, barest, most stripped down, calculus of
human being: phenomena x reception /response = lived experience.

It is important to make clear that sabba is the sum total of our actual, rather than
imagined, fantasized, or otherwise deluded, reality. To “declare another all,” as the
Buddha’s imaginary interlocutor does, is “a groundless assertion” because it runs counter
to the way things are. Perhaps the Buddha had in mind the theists of his day, who insisted
that there exists a reality that stands outside the all: God (Brahma). Or perhaps he just had
the average person in mind, who persistently mistakes felt qualities for transcendent
realities (love, beauty). Asked to examine what is actually present in experience when
“God” or “love” is manifest to them, careful people will have to point to — recognize —
some admixture of sabba, such as bodily sensations and thoughts. In the Buddha’s
schema of sabba, “God” is a concept that gives rise to physical sensations (feelings,
emotions) that give rise to further thoughts that become forms of life, and so on and on.
(This proliferation is represented by x [times]in the above equation.)

Sabba is Gotama’s periodic table of elements. In its first instance, a phenomenon

— something, everything, anything you can name or imagine — is one of the following:
a visible form, a sound, a scent, a taste, a bodily sensation, or a thought. The Buddha says
that a person making a contrary assertion “when asked about it, would not be able to
explain,” and will thus “meet with distress.” The person’s incoherency and distress result
from a serious confusion about the basic categories of being.

Gotama’s project is to help us recognize a phenomenon at its most basic level —

to get clear about how and what things are before our proclivity towards delusion works
it magic. When we do so, an ease born of clarity settles in, and you know what it means
to “put down the burden” of the superfluous. (This reduction of complexity is represented
by the [divided by] in the above equation.) Release follows naturally from “directly
knowing and fully recognizing sabba.”