Mundane Sense Sphere Beautiful Cittas

The beau­ti­ful cit­tas include all whole­some cit­tas, as well as those resul­tant and func­tion­al cit­tas that have beau­ti­ful cetasikas. This com­pris­es the 24 sense sphere cit­tas described below and all form sphere cit­tas, all form­less sphere cit­tas and all supra­mun­dane cittas.

Mun­dane sense sphere beau­ti­ful cit­tas are divid­ed into three groups: whole­some, resul­tant and func­tion­al. The lat­ter two groups are nei­ther kam­mi­cal­ly whole­some nor unwhole­some, but kam­mi­cal­ly inde­ter­mi­nate. Each group is divid­ed into eight cit­tas through the sim­ple per­mu­ta­tion of three vari­able fac­tors: whether the accom­pa­ny­ing feel­ing is pleas­ant or neu­tral; whether the cit­ta is accom­pa­nied by knowl­edge; and whether the cit­ta is prompt­ed or unprompted.

The word knowl­edge refers to the men­tal fac­tor wis­dom, which also includes the root non-delu­sion. The four whole­some cit­tas, asso­ci­at­ed with knowl­edge, pos­sess all three whole­some roots; the four cit­tas dis­as­so­ci­at­ed from knowl­edge pos­sess only non-greed and non-hatred – the third root, non-delu­sion, is lacking.

Prompt­ing can occur due to actions or words by anoth­er or due to per­son­al con­sid­er­a­tions. If one spon­ta­neous­ly per­forms a good deed, the cit­ta can arise with­out being prompted.

These eight types of cit­tas are called whole­some because they inhib­it impu­ri­ties and pro­duce whole­some results. They arise when­ev­er one per­forms whole­some bod­i­ly or ver­bal deeds, and when one pro­duces whole­some states of mind relat­ed to the sense sphere.

As there are eight types of sense sphere whole­some cit­tas, there are also eight cor­re­spond­ing types of sense sphere result­ing cit­tas. These eight cit­tas are kam­mic effects of their respec­tive whole­some coun­ter­part. Both the root­ed resul­tants above and the root­less whole­some resul­tants (described else­where) are results of the same eight whole­some cit­tas, but the two sets have dif­fer­ent qual­i­ties and functions.

The eight types of whole­some cit­tas do not arise in ara­hants who have tran­scend­ed the cycles of kam­ma. Instead eight types of cit­tas arise, which are exact coun­ter­parts of the whole­some ones. These are called func­tion­al cit­tas because they sim­ply per­form their func­tions with­out leav­ing any kam­mic deposit. Since an ara­hant has erad­i­cat­ed the caus­es of rebirth, his good actions can­not gen­er­ate future results.