Matter & its origins
A rock, a river, your body — the Abhidhamma analyses them all into the same elements. What sets a being apart from a stone is not different stuff, but what produces it: the four origins of matter.
The four origins
Produced by past kamma. It builds the parts only a living being has.
Living beings only — the sense organs, sex, the life-faculty, and the heart-base.
Produced by consciousness — the body answering to the mind.
Living beings only — gestures, speech, and the body’s responsiveness to mood.
Produced by temperature — the fire element, heat and cold. The one origin that acts everywhere.
All matter — and the SOLE source of inorganic things: rocks, water, wind, and their sounds.
Produced by the nutritive essence in food — it sustains and renews.
Living beings (and plants, which also take nutriment).
Organic → inorganic
Tap down the spectrum: the fewer origins involved, the less "alive" — until only temperature remains.
Pure temperature-born matter, with the earth element (solidity) dominant. No mind, no kamma, no senses.
Also temperature-born — here the water element (cohesion) dominates instead of solidity.
Even the sound is temperature-born. Only speech is mind-born — wind and rivers just make “temperature noise”.
Alive in a botanical sense — temperature- AND nutriment-born — but with no mind and no kamma-born life-faculty. Doctrinally closer to a rock than to an animal.
The only kind of matter produced by all four origins — including kamma (sense organs, life-faculty) and mind. This is what makes it a being, not a thing.