Consciousnesses of Tao

© Igor Morski

The last of the five aggregates introduced in the Abhidhamma tradition - which contains all the previous - is Consciousness (vijnana), detailed as follows:
 

Consciousnesses

Consciousness is the last of the aggregates, and it contains all of the others. (Indeed, each of the aggregates contains those that precede it in the list.) It is the mental experience that goes with the other four aggregates; technically it is the experience that comes from the contact of each sense organ with its object (together with the feeling, impulse, and habit that is aroused). Consciousness, as a technical term vijnana, always refers to the dualistic sense of experience in which there is an experiencer, an object experienced, and a relation (or relations) binding them together.

Let us tum for a moment to the systematic description of consciousness made by one of the Abhidharma schools.

Categories of Experiential Events Used in Mindfulness/Awareness

The Five Aggregates (skandhas)

1. Forms (rupa)

2. Feelings/sensations (vedana)

3. Perceptions (discernments)/impulses (samjna)

4. Dispositional formations (samskara)

5. Consciousnesses (vijnana)

The Twelve-fold Cycle of Dependent Origination (pratityasamutpada)

1. Ignorance (avidya)

2. Dispositional formations (the fourth aggregate)

3. Consciousness (the fifth aggregate)

4. The Psychophysical Complex (nama-rupa)

5. The Six Senses (sad-ayatana)

6. Contact (sparsa)

7. Feeling (the second aggregate)

8. Craving (trsna)

9. Grasping (upadana)

10. BeComing (bhava)

11. Birth (jati)

12. Decay and death (jara-marana)

The Processes of Mind (citta/caitta)

A. Consciousness (the fifth aggregate)

1. Visual consciousness

2. Auditory consciousness

3. Olfactory consciousness

4. Gustatory consciousness

5. Tactile consciousness

6. Mental consciousness

B. Mental factors (the fourth aggregate, here treated as including the second and third aggregates)

Five Ever-present Mental Factors:

1. Contact (the sixth motif in situational patterning)

2. Feeling (the second aggregate)

3. Perception/Discernment (the third aggregate)

4. Intention (cetana)

5. Attention (manas)

Five Object-ascertaining Factors:

1. Interest (chandra)

2. Intensified interest (adhimoksa)

3. Inspection/mindfulness (smrti)

4. Intense concentration (samadhi)

5. Insight/discrimative wisdom (prajna)

Eleven Positive Mental Factors:

1. Confidence-trust (sraddha)

2. Self-respect (hri)

3. Consideration for others (apatrapya)

4. Nonattachment (alobha)

5. Nonhatred (advesa)

6. Nondeludedness (amoha)

7. Diligence (virya)

8. Alertness (prasrabdhi)

9. Concern (apramadtl)

10. Equanimity (apeksa)

11. Nonviolence (ahimsa)

Six Basic Unwholesome Emotions

1. Attachment (raga)

2. Anger (pratigha)

3. Arrogance (mana)

4. Ignorance (the first motif of situational patterning)

5. Indecision (vicikitsa)

6. Opinionatedness (drsti)

Twenty Derivative Unwholesome Factors

1. Indignation (krodha)

2. Resentment (upanaha)

3. Slyness concealment (mraksa)

4. Spite (pradasa)

5. Jealousy (irsya)

6. Avarice (matsarya)

7. Deceit (maya)

8. Dishonesty (sathya)

9. Mental inflation (mada)

10. Malice (vihimsa)

11. Shamelessness (ahri)

12. Inconsideration for others (anapatrapya)

13. Gloominess/dullness (styana)

14. Restlessness (auddhatya)

15. Lack of trust (asraddhya)

16. Laziness (kausidya)

17. Unconcern (pramada)

18. Forgetfulness (musitasmritita)

19. Inattentiveness (viksepa)

20. Nondiscernment (asampraja)

Four Variable or Indeterminate Factors

1. Drowsiness (middha)

2. Worry (kaukrtya)

3. Reflection (vitarka)

4. Investigation/analysis (vicara)

The mental factors are the relations that bind the consciousness to its object, and at each moment a consciousness is dependent on its momentary mental factors (like the hand and its fingers). Note that the second, third, and fourth aggregates are included here as mental factors. Five of the mental factors are omnipresent; that is, in every moment of consciousness the mind is bound to its object by all five of these factors. There are contact between the mind and its object; a specific feeling tone of pleasantness, unpleasantness, or neutrality; a discernment of the object; an intention toward the object; and attention to the object. The rest of the factors, including all the dispositions that make up the fourth aggregate, are not always present. Some of these factors can be present together in a given moment (such as confidence and diligence), others are mutually exclusive (such as alertness and drowsiness). The combination of mental factors that are present make up the character-the color and taste-of a particular moment of consciousness.

Is this Abhidharma analysis of consciousness a system of intentionality along Husserlian lines? There are similarities in that there is no consciousness without an object of consciousness and a relation. (Mind [seems] in the Tibetan tradition is often defined as "that which projects itself to other.") But there are differences. Neither the objects of consciousness nor the mental factors are representations. Most important, consciousness (vijnana) is only one mode of knowing; prajna does not know by means of a subject/object relationship. We might call the simple experiential/psychological observation that conscious experience takes a subject/object form protointentionality. Husserl's theory is based not only on protointentionality but also on Brentano's notion of intentionality as subsequently elaborated by Husserl into a full-fledged representational theory.

The temporal relationship between a consciousness and its object was the subject of great dispute among the Abhidharma schools: some held that the occurrence of the object and of mind was simultaneous; others, that the object occurred first, followed in the succeeding moment by the mind (first a sight, then the seeing consciousness).

A third claim was that mind and object were simultaneous for sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch but that the thinking consciousness took as its object the preceding moment of thought. This dispute became integral to philosophical debates about what things actually existed. There were also disputes about which factors to include and how they were to be characterized.

Despite the atmosphere of debate that surrounded some issues, there was unanimous agreement on the more experientially direct claim that each of the senses (eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind) had a different consciousness - that is, at each moment of experience there was a different experiencer as well as a different object of experience. And of course there was agreement that no actual self was to be found in consciousness, either in the experiencer, the object of experience, or the mental factors binding them together.

In our habitual and unreflective state, of course, we impute continuity of consciousness to all our experience-so much so that consciousness always occurs in a "realm," an apparently cohering total environment with its own complete logic (of aggression, poverty, etc. ). But this apparent totality and continuity of consciousness masks the discontinuity of momentary consciousnesses related to one another by cause and effect. A traditional metaphor for this illusory continuity is the lighting of one candle with a second candle, a third candle from that one, and so on-the flame is passed from one candle to the next without any material basis being passed on. Taking this sequence as a real continuity, however, we cling tenaciously to this consciousness and are terrorized by the possibility of its termination in death. Yet when mindfulness/awareness reveals the disunity of this experience-a sight, a sound, a thought, another thought, and so on-it becomes obvious that consciousness as such cannot be taken as that self we so treasure and for which we are now searching.

We seem unable to find a self anywhere in each aggregate when we take them one by one. Perhaps, then, all the aggregates combine in some way to form. the self. Is the self the same as the totality of the aggregates? This idea would be quite attractive if only we knew how to make it work. Each aggregate taken singly is transitory and impermanent; how, then, are we to combine them into something lasting and coherent? Perhaps the self is an emergent property of the aggregates? In fact, many people when pressed to define the self (perhaps in a psychology class) will use the concept of an emergent as a solution. Indeed, given the contemporary scientific interest in the emergent and self-organizing properties of certain complex aggregates, this idea is even plausible. At this point, however, the idea is of no help. Such a self-organizing or synergistic mechanism is not evident in experience. More important, it is not the abstract idea of an emergent self that we cling to so fiercely as our ego; we cling to a "real" ego-self.

When we recognize that no such real self is given to us in our experience, we may swing to the opposite extreme, which is to say that the self must be radically different from the aggregates. In the Western tradition, this move is best exemplified in the Cartesian and Kantian claim that the observed regularity or pattern of experience requires that there be an agent or mover behind the pattern. For Descartes, this mover was the res cogitans, the thinking substance.

Kant was more subtle and precise. In his Critique of Pure Reason, he wrote, "Consciousness of self according to the determinations of our state in inner perception is merely empirical, and always changing. No fixed and abiding self can present itself in this flux of inner appearances. . . . [Thus] there must be a condition which precedes all experience, and which makes experience itself possible .... This pure original unchangeable consciousness I shall name transcendental apperception." Apperception basically means awareness, especially awareness of the process of cognition. Kant saw quite clearly that there was nothing given in this experience of awareness that corresponded to the self, and so he argued that there must be a consciousness that is transcendental, that precedes all experience and makes that experience possible. Kant also thought that this transcendental awareness is responsible for our sense of unity and identity through time, thus his full term for the transcendental ground of the everyday self was "the transcendental unity of apperception."

Kant's analysis is brilliant, but it only heightens the predicament. We are told that there really is a self, but we can never know it. Furthermore, this self hardly answers to our emotional convictions: it is not me or my self; it is just the idea of a self in general, of some impersonal agent or mover behind experience. It is pure, original, and unchangeable; I am impure and transitory. How could such a radically different self have any relation with my experience? How could it be the condition or ground of all of my experiences and yet remain untouched by those experiences? If there truly is such a self, it can be relevant to experience only by partaking of the world's fabric of dependency, but to do so would obviously violate its pristine, absolute condition.

We may present the difference between the Kantian and the mindfulness/ awareness views of self in the form of a diagram

In both the Kantian and the mind fulness/awareness traditions, there is, as we have seen, a recognition of the absence of a substantial self in the momentariness of experience (figure 4.1). The Kantian move avoids confronting the puzzle of our tendency to believe in a self in the face of this momentariness by positing a pure, original , and unchangeable consciousness as a ground - the transcendental ego (figure 4.2). In the mind fullness/awareness tradition , the attitude is to hold the puzzle of this momentariness vividly in mind by considering that the grasping toward a self could occur within any given moment of experience (figure 4.3).

At this point the reader will probably become rather irritated and say, "Fine, the self isn't really a lasting and coherent thing; it is just the continuity of the stream of experience. It is a process and not a thing. What's the big deal?" But remember, we have been looking for a self that answers to our emotional/reactional convictions. At this immediate experiential level, we do not feel as if the self is merely the stream of experience. Indeed, even to call it a stream reveals our grasping after some sense of solidity, for this metaphor implies that experience flows continuously. But when we subject this continuity to analysis, we seem able to find only discontinuous moments of feeling, perception, motivation, and awareness. We could, of course, redefine the self in all sorts of ways to get around these problems, perhaps even by following contemporary analytic philosophers who use quite sophisticated logical techniques, such as possible world semantics, but none of these new accounts would in any way explain our basic reactional behavior and everyday tendencies.

The point is not whether we can redefine the self in some way that makes us comfortable or intellectually satisfied, nor is it to determine whether there really is an absolute self that is nonetheless inaccessible to us. The point is rather to develop mindfulness of and insight into our situation as we experience it here and now. As Tsultrim Gyamtso remarks, "Buddhism is not telling anyone that he should believe that he has a self or that he does not have a self. It is saying that when one looks at the way one suffers and the way one thinks and responds emotionally to life, it is as if one believed there were a self that was lasting, single and independent and yet on closer analysis no such self can be found. In other words, the aggregates (skandhas) are empty of a self."