 The Theravāda rejected the Sarvāstivāda ontological model, claiming that dhammas exist only in the present. But the Theravāda Abhidhamma shares with the Sarvāstivāda the same principles of dhamma analysis as a categorial theory that individuates sentient experience. Here, too, the taxonomic function of sabhāva gave rise to ontological connotations of existence in the characterization of dhammas. As the final units of Abhidhamma analysis, dhammas are reckoned the ultimate constituents of experience. “There is nothing else, whether a being, or an entity, or a man or a person,” a famous Pali commentarial excerpt proclaims (Dhs-a  155).[12]  While this statement is meant to refute the rival Pudgalavāda position of the reality of the person by insisting that there is no being or person apart from dhammas, there emerges the idea that the phenomenal world is, at bottom, a world of dhammas: that within the confines of sentient experience there is no other actuality apart from dhammas and that what constitutes any given dhamma as a discrete, individualized particular is its intrinsic nature. The Theravāda elaborates on the concept of sabhāva in juxtaposition to its theory of momentariness, and it acquires the sense of what underlies a dhamma’s endurance moment and as a point of reference to the moments of origination and cessation. Before a dhamma eventuates it does not yet obtain an intrinsic nature and when it ceases it is denuded of this intrinsic nature. As a present occurrence, though, while possessing its intrinsic nature, it exists as an ultimate reality and its intrinsic nature is evidence of its actual existence as such (Dhs-a 45; Vism VIII 234, XV 15). One commentarial passage even goes so far as naming this instant “the acquisition of a self” (Vism-mhṭ I 343).