Madhyamaka - Origins and Development - Abhidharma

Abhidharma

The Madhyamaka school has been perhaps simplistically regarded as a reaction against the development of the Abhidharma, especially the Sarvāstivādin. In the Abhidharma, dharmas are characterized by defining traits (lakṣaṇa) or own-existence (svabhāva), whose ontological status is not dependent upon concepts.The problem with the Abidharma is not that things are 'independently existent' (a position that most Abhidharma schools would not accept), but rather (from a Madhyamaka perspective) that they are independent from notions. For the Madhyamaka, dharmas are notionally dependent, and further more, their notional dependence entails existential dependence and hence lack of ultimate, true existence.
The relationship between Madhyamaka and Abhidharma is complex; Abhidharmic analysis figures prominently in most Madhyamaka treatises, and authoritative commentators like Candrakīrti emphasize that Abhidharmic categories function as a viable (and favored) system of conventional truths - they are more refined than ordinary categories, and they are not dependent on either the extreme of eternalism or on the extreme view of the discontinuity of karma, as the non-Buddhist categories of the time did. It may be therefore important to understand that Madhyamaka constitutes a continuation of the Abhidharma type of analysis, extending the range of dependent arising to entail (and focus upon) notional dependence. The dependent arising of concepts based on other concepts, rather than the true arising of really existent causes and effects, becomes here the matrix of any possible convention.