Part VII - On The Buddhist Philosophy Of Mind

It would have been the greatest possible gain to our knowledge of the extent to which Buddhism had developed any clear psychological data for its ethics, had it occurred to the compilers of the Dhamma-Sangani to introduce an analysis of the other four skandhas parallel to that of the skandha of form. It is true that the whole work, except the book on rupam, is an inquiry into arupino dhamma, conceived for the most part as mental phenomena, but there is no separate treatment of them divided up as such. Some glimpses we obtain incidentally, most of which have been pointed out in the footnotes to the translation. And it may prove useful to summarize briefly such contribution as may lie therein to the psychology of Buddhism.

And, first, it is very difficult to say to what extent, if at all, such psychological matter as we find is distinctively and originally Buddhist, or how much was merely adopted from contemporary culture and incorporated with the Dharma. Into, this problem I do not here propose to inquire farther. If there be any originality, any new departure in the psychology scattered about the Nikayas, it is more likely to be in aspect and treatment than in new matter. Buddhism preached a doctrine of regenerate personality, to be sought after and developed by and out of the personal resources of the individual through a system of intellectual self-culture.

Thrown back upon himself, he developed introspection, the study of consciousness. But, again, his doctrine imposed on him the study of psychical states without the psyche. Nature without and nature within met, acted and reacted, and the result told on the organism in a natural, orderly, necessary way.^[1] But there was no one adjusting the machinery. ^[2] The Buddhist might have approved of Leibniz's amendment of Locke's "Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu" in the additional phrase "nisi ipse intellectus". But he would not thereby have exalted vinnanam, cittam, or mano to any hypostatic permanence as prior or as immanent. He would only admit the priority of intellect to particular sensations as a natural order, obtaining among the pheno- menal factors of any given act of cognition.

Psychological earnestness, then, and psychological inquiry into mental phenomena, coexisting apart from, and in opposition to, the usual assumption of a psychical entity: such are the only distinctively Buddhist features which may, in the absence of more positive evidence than we yet possess, be claimed in such analysis of mind as Appears in Buddhist ethics.

Of the results of this earnest spirit of inquiry into mental phenomena, in so far as they may be detached from ethical doctrine, and assigned their due place in the history of human ideas, it will be impossible, for several years, to prepare any adequate treatment. Much of the Abhi- dhamma Pitaka, and even some of the Sutta Pitaka, still remains unedited.

Of the former collection nothing has been translated with the exception of the attempt in this volume. And, since Buddhist psychology has an evolution to show covering nearly a thousand years, we have to await fresh materials from the yet unedited works of Buddhaghosa, the Buddhist Sanskrit texts, and such works as the Netti-pakarana, Professor Hardy's edition of which is now in the press. Meanwhile there is an increasing store of accessible material which might be sifted by the historical in- vestigator.

There are, for instance, in the Dhamma-Sangani several passages suggesting that Buddhist scholars, in con- templating the consciousness or personality as affected by phenomena considered as external, were keenly alive to the distinction between the happening of the expected and the happening of the unexpected, between instinctive reaction of the mind and the organism generally, on occasion of sense, and the deliberate confronting of external phenomena with a carefully adjusted intelligence.

Modern psychology has largely occupied itself with this distinction, and with the problems of consciousness and subconsciousness, of volition and of memory, involved in it. The subject of attention, involuntary and voluntary, figures prominently in the psychological literature of the last two decades. But it is not till the centuries of post-Aristotelian and of neo-Platonic thought that we see the distinction emerging in Western psychology contemporaneously with the develop- ment of the notion of consciousness.^[3]

In the history of Buddhist thought, too, the distinction does not appear to have become explicitly and consciously made till the age of, or previous to, the writing of the great Commentaries (fifth century). A corresponding explicitness in the notion of consciousness and self-consciousness, or at least in the use of some equivalent terms, has yet to be traced.^[4]

Buddhism is so emphatically a philosophy, both in theory and practice, of the conscious will, with all that this involves of attention and concentration, that we hardly look to find terms discriminating such notions from among other mental characteristics. We are reminded instead of Matthew Arnold's well-known remark that as, at Soli, no one spoke of solecisms, so in England we had to import the term Philistine.

But, whereas it is the Atthasalinl, written from the standpoint of a later elaboration of thought, that makes explicit what it holds to be the intention of the classic manual, the latter work lends itself without straining to such interpretation. I pass over Buddhaghosa's comments on the limitations and the movements of attention repro- duced below, pp. 198, n. 2, 200, n. 1, as derived very possibly from thought nearer to his own times. Again, with respect to the residual unspecified factors in good and bad thoughts — the "or-whatever-other-states"^[5] — among which the Commentator names, as a constant, manasikara, or attention — this specifying may be considered as later elaboration.

But when the Commentary refers the curious alternative emphasis in the description of the sensory act'^[6] to just this distinction between a percipient who is pre- pared or unprepared for the stimulus, it seems possible that he is indeed giving us the original interpretation.

Again, the remarkable distinction drawn, in the case of every type of good or of bad thoughts, "relating to the sensuous universe", i.e., to the average moral consciousness, between thoughts which are prompted by a conscious motive,^[7] and such as are not, seems to me to indicate a groping after the distinction between instinctive or spon- taneous intellection, on the one hand, and deliberate, purposive, or motivated thought on the other.

Taken in isolation, there is insufficient material here to establish this alternative state of mind as a dominant feature in Buddhist psychology. Taken in conjunction with the general mental attitude and intellectual culture involved in Buddhist ethical doctrine and continually in- culcated in the canonical books, and emphasized as it is by later writings, the position gains in significance. The doctrine of karma, inherited and adopted from earlier and contemporary thought, never made the Buddhist fatalistic. He recognised the tremendous vis a tergo expressed in our doggerel:

"For 'tis their nature to".

But he had unlimited faith in the saving power of nurture. He faced the grim realities of life with candour, and tolerated no mask. This honesty, to which we usually add a mistaken view of the course of thought and action he prescribed in consequence of the honesty, gains him the name of Pessimist. But the hope that was in him of what might be done to better nature through nurture, even in this present life, by human effort and goodwill, reveals him as a strong Optimist with an unshaken ideal of the joy springing from things made perfect. He even tried to "pitchfork nature" in one or two respects, though opposed to asceticism generally — simply to make the Joy more easily attainable by those who dared to "come out". And this regenerating nurture resolves itself, theoretically, into a power of discrimination ; practically, into an exercise of selection.

The individual learner, pervious by way of his "fivefold door" to an inflooding tide of impressions penetrating to the sixth door of the co-ordinating "mind", was to regulate the natural alertness of reception and per- ception by the special kind of attention termed yoniso manasikara, or thorough, attention, and by the clear- eyed insight referred to already as yathabhutam sammappannaya datthabbam, or the higher wisdom of regarding "things as in themselves they really are" — to adopt Matthew Arnold's term. The stream of phenomena, whether of social life, of nature, or of his own social and organic growth, was not so much to be ignored by him as to be marked, measured and classed according to the criteria of one who has chosen "to follow his own uttermost",^[8] and has recognised the power of that stream to imperil his enterprise, and its lack of power to give an equivalent satisfaction. ^[9]

The often-recurring subject of sati-sampajannam, or that "mindful and aware" attitude, which evokes satire in robust, if superficial, criticism, is the expansion and ethical application of this psychological state of prepared and pre-adjusted sense or voluntary attention.^[10] The student was not to be taken by surprise — "evil states of covetousness and repining flowing in over him dwelling unprepared" — until he had

" . . . The nobler mastery learned
Where inward vision over impulse reigns".^[11]

Then indeed he might dwell at ease, strong in his emancipation.

Step by step with his progress in the cultivation of attention, he was also practising himself in that faculty of selection which it were perhaps more accurate not to distinguish from attention. Alertness is never long, and, indeed, never strictly, attending to anything and everything at once. We are reminded of Condillac's definition of attention as only an "exclusive sensation". From the multitude of excitations flowing in upon us, one is, more or less frequently, selected,^[12] the rest being, for a time, either wholly excluded or perceived subconsciously. And this selective instinct, varying in strength, appears, not only in connexion with sense-impressions, but also in our more persisting tendencies and interests, as well as in a general disposition to concentration or to distraction.

Buddhism, in its earnest and hopeful system of self-culture, set itself strenuously against a distrait habit of mind, calling it tatra-tatrabhinandini^[13] — "the there-and-there-dalliance", as it were of the butterfly. And it adopted and adapted that discipline in concentration (samadhi), both physical and psychical, both perceptual and conceptual, for which India is unsurpassed. But it appreciated the special practice of rapt absorbed concentrated thought called Dhyana or Jhana, not as an end in itself, but as a symbol and vehicle of that habit of selection and single-minded effort which governed "life according to the Higher Ideal". It did not hold with the robust creed, which gropes, it may be, after a yet stronger ideal :

"Greift nur hinein ins voile Menschenleben, Und wo Ihr's packt, da ist es interessant ?"

"Full life" of the actual sort, viewed from the Buddhist standpoint, was too much compact of Vanity Fair, shambles and cemetery, to be worth the plunge. It had, on the other hand, great faith in experimenting on nature by a judicious pruning of everything it judged might wreck or hinder the evolution of a life of finer, higher quality. If we, admitting this intention, look on the frequent injunctions respecting what "was to be put away" (pahatabbam )^[14] from the life of each disciple, whether by insight or by culture, whether by gentle or by forcible restraint,^[15] not as so much mere self-mortification and crippling of energy, but as expressions of selective culture for the better "forcing" of somewhat tender growths, we may, if we still would criticise, appraise more sympathetically.

If I have dwelt at some length on a side of Buddhist psychological ethics which is not thrown into obvious relief in our Manual, it was because I wished to connect that side with the specially characteristic feature in Buddhist psychology where it approximates to the trend of our own modern tradition. There, on the one hand, we have a philosophy manifestly looking deeper into the mental constitution than any other in the East, and giving especial heed to just those mental activities — attention and feeling, conation and choice — which seem most to imply a subject, or subjective unity ivho attends, feels, wills and chooses. And yet this same philosophy is emphatically one that attempts to "extrude the Ego". If, on the other hand, we leap over upwards of 2,000 years and consider one of the most notable contributions to our national psychology, we find that its two most salient features are a revival of the admission of an Ego or Subject of mental states, which had been practically extruded, and a theory of the ultimate nature of mental procedure set out entirely in terms of attention and feeling.^[16]

And yet the divergence between the two conclusions, widely removed though they are by time and space, is not so sharp as at first appears. The modern thinker, while he finds it more honest not to suppress the fact that all psychologists, not excepting Hume, do, implicitly or explicitly, assume the conception of "a mind" or conscious subject, is careful to "extrude" metaphysical dogma.

That everything mental is referred to a Self or Subject is, for him, a psychological conception which may be kept as free from the metaphysical conception of a soul, mind-atom, or mind-stuff as is that of the individual organism in biology. In much the same way the Buddhists were content to adopt the term attabhavo (self-hood or personality — for which Buddhaghosa half apologizes^[17]) — ajjhattikam (belonging to the self, subjective^[18]) and the like, as well as to speak of cittam, mano and vinnanam where we might say "mind".

It is true that by the two former terms they meant the totality of the five skandhas, that is to say, both mind and body, but this is not the case with the three last named. And if there was one thing which moved the Master to quit his wonted serenity and wield the lash of scorn and upbraiding, and his followers to use emphatic repudiation, it was just the reading into this convenient generalization of mind or personality that "metaphysical conception of a soul, mind-atom, or mind-stuff", which is put aside by the modern psychologist.

And I believe that the jealous way in which the Buddhists guarded their doctrine in this matter arose, not from the wish to assimilate mind to matter, or the whole personality to a machine, but from the too great danger that lay in the unchecked use of atta,^[19] ahankara, attabhavo, even as a mere psychological datum, in that it afforded a foothold to the prevailing animism. They were as Protestants in regard to the crucifix. They remembered with Ste. Beuve : "La sauvagerie est toujours la a deux pas, et, des qu'on lache pied, elle recommence".

What, then, was their view of mind, as merely phenomenal, in relation to the riipa-skandha or non-mental part of the human individual? We have considered their doctrine of external phenomena impingeing on and modifying the internal or personal rupam by way of sense. Have we any clue to their theory of the propagation of the modifications, alleged in their statement^[20] to take place in relation to those factors of personality which were arupino , and not derived from material elements — the elements (dhatu's), namely, or skandhas of feeling, perception, syntheses and intellect ? How did they regard that process of co-ordination by which, taking sensuous experience as the more obvious starting-point in mental experience, sensations are classed and made to cohere into groups or percepts, and are revived as memories, and are further co-ordinated into concepts or abstract ideas ? And finally, and at back of all this, tcho feels, or attends, or wills ?

Now the Dhamma-Sangani does not place questions of this kind in the mouth of the catechist. In so far as it is psychological (not psycho-physical or ethical), it is so strictly phenomenological, that its treatment is restricted to the analysis of certain broadly defined states of mind, felt or inferred to have arisen in consequence of certain other mental states as conditions. There is no reference anywhere to a "subjective factor" or agent ivho has the cittam or thought, with all its associated factors of attention, feeling, conception and volition.

Even in the case of Jhana, where it is dealing with more active modes of regulated attention, involving a maximum of constructive thought with a minimum of receptive sense, the agent, as conscious subject, is kept in the background. The inflexion of the verb^[21] alone implies a given personal agent, and the Commentary even feels it incumbent to point him out. It is this psychologizing without a psyche that impressed me from the first, and seemed to bring the work, for all its remoteness in other respects, nearer to our own Experiential school of and since Locke, than anything we find in Greek traditions.

It is true that each of the four formless skandhas is defined or described, and this is done in connexion with the very first question of the book. But the answers are given, not in terms of respective function or of mutual relation, but of either synonyms, or of modes or constituent parts. For instance, feeling (vedana) is resolved into three modes,^[22] perception (sanna) is taken as practically self-evident and not really described at all,^[23] the syntheses (sankhara) are resolved into modes or factors, intellect (vinnanam) is described by synonyms.

Again, whereas the skandhas are enumerated in the order in which, I believe, they are unvaryingly met with, there is nothing, in text or Commentary, from which we can infer that this order corresponds to any theory of genetic procedure in an act of cognition. In other words, we are not shown that feeling calls up perception, or that the sankharas are a necessary link in the evolution of perception into conception or reasoning.^[24] If we can infer anything in the nature of causal succession at all, it is such that the order of the skandhas as enumerated is upset.

Thus, taking the first answer (and that is typical for the whole of Book I. when new ground is broken into) : a certain sense-impression evokes, through "contact", a complex state of mind or psychosis called a thought or cittam . Born of this contact and the "appropriate" cittam, now (i.e., in answer 3) called, in terms of its synonym, representative intellection (manovinnana dhatu), feeling, we are told, is engendered. Perception is called up likewise and, apparently, simultaneously. So is "thinking" (cetana) — of the sankhara-skandha.

And "associated with" the cittam come all the rest of the constituent dhammas, both sankharas, as well as specific modes^[25] or different aspects^[26] of the feeling and the thought already specified. In a word, we get contact evoking the fifth skandha, and, as the common co-ordinate resultant, the genesis or excitement of the other three. This is entirely in keeping with the many passages in the Nikayas, where the concussion of sense and object are said to result in vinnanam = cittam = the fifth skandha. "Eye", for instance, and "form", in mutual "contact", result in "visual cognition".

In the causal chain of that ancient formula, the Paticca-samuppada,^[27] on the other hand, we find quite another order of genesis, sankharas inducing cognition or thought, and contact alone inducing feeling. This mysterious old rune must not further complicate our problem. I merely allude to it as not in the least supporting the view that the order of statement, in the skandhas, implies order of happening.

What we may more surely gather from the canon is that, as our own psychological thought has now conceived it,^[28] the, let us say, given individual "attends to or cognizes (vijanati) changes in the sensory continuum, and is, in consequence, either pleased or pained" (or has neutral feeling). And, further, in any and every degree of conscious or subconscious mood or disposition, he may be shown to be experiencing a number of "associated states", as enumerated. All this is in our Manual called a cittuppada — a genesis of thought.

Of thought or of thinking. There seems to be a breadth and looseness of implication about cittam fairly parallel to the popular vagueness of the English term. It is true that the Commentary does not sanction the interpretation of contact and all the rest (I refer to the type given in the first answer) as so many attributes of the thought which "has arisen". The sun rising, it says, is not different from its fiery glory, etc., arising. But the cittam arising is a mere expression to fix the occasion for the induction of the whole concrete psychosis, and connotes no more and no less than it does as a particular constituent of that complex.^[29]

This is a useful hint. On the other hand, when we consider the synonymous terms for cittam, given in answer 6, and compare the various characteristics of these terms scattered through the Commentary, we find a considerable wealth of content and an inclusion of process and product similar to that of our "thought". For example, "cittam means mental object or presentation (arammanam) ; that is to say, he thinks ; that is to say, he attends to a thought".^[30]

Hence my translation might well have run: When a good thought . . . has arisen . . , as the object of this or that sense, etc. Again, cittam is defined as a process of connecting (sandhanam) the last (things) as they keep arising in consciousness with that which preceded them.^[31] Further, it is a co-ordinating, relating, or synthesizing (sandahanam);^[32] and, again, it has the property of initiative action (pure carikam). For, when the sense-impression gets to the "door" of the senses, cittam confronts it before the rest of the mental congeries.^[33] The sensations are, by cittam, wrought up into that concrete stream of consciousness which they evoke.

Here we have cittam covering both thinking and thought or idea. When we turn to its synonym or quasi-synonym m a n o we find, so far as I can discover, that only activity, or else spring, source or nidus of activity, is the aspect taken. The faculty of ideation (manindriya m), for instance,^[34] while expressly declared to be an equivalent (vevacanam)of cittam, and, like it, to be that which attends or cognizes (vijanati), is also called a measuring the mental object — declared above to he cittam.^[35] In a later passage (ibid., 129), it is assigned the function of accepting, receiving, analogous, perhaps, to our technical expression "assimilating" (sampaticchanam).

In thus appraising or approving, it has all sensory objects for its field, as well as its more especial province of dhammas.^[36] These, when thus distinguished, I take to mean ideas, including images and general notions. And it is probably only in order to distinguish between mind in this abstract functioning and mind as cognition in its most comprehensive sense that we see the two terms held apart in the sentence : "Cittam cognizes the dhammas which are the objects of mano, just as it cognizes the visual forms, etc., which are the objects of the senses".^[37]

When cittam is thus occupied with the abstract functioning of mano^[38] — when, that is, we are reflecting on past experience, in memory or ratiocination — then the more specific term is, I gather, not cittam, but manovinnanam (corresponding to cakkhuvinnanam, etc.). This, in the Commentarial psychology, certainly stands for a further stage, a higher "power" of intellection, for "representative cognition", its specific activity being distinguished as judging or deciding (santiranam), and as fixing or determining (votthappanam).

The affix d h a t u, whether appended to mano or to manoviniianam, probably stands for a slight distinction in asjiect of the intellectual process. It may be intended to indicate either of these two stages as an irreducible element, a psychological ultimate, an activity regarded as its own spring or source or basis. Adopted from without by Buddhism, it seems to have been jealously guarded from noumenal implications by the orthodox. Buddhaghosa, indeed, seems to substitute the warning against its abuse for the reason why it had come to be used. According to him, the various lists of dhammas (e.g., in the first answer), when considered under the aspect of phenomena, of "emptiness", of non-essence, may be grouped as together forming two classes of dhatu .^[39] Moreover, each special sense can be so considered (cakkhu-dhatu, etc. ; see pp. 214, 215), and so may each kind of sense-object. For, with respect to sense, or the apprehension of form, they are so many phenomenal ultimates— the two terms, so to speak, in each sensory relation.

How far d h a t u corresponds to vatthu — how far the one is a psychological, the other a physical conception^[40] of source or base — is not easily determined. But it is interesting to note that the Commentator only alludes to a basis of thought (cittassa vatthu), that is, to the heart (hadaya-vatthu), when the catechizing is in terms ofmano-dhatu.^[41] His only comment on "heart", when it is included in the description of cittam (answer [6]), is to say that, whereas it stands for cittam, it simply represents the inwardness (intimity) of thought.^[42]

But in the subsequent comment he has a remark of great interest, namely, that the "heart-basis" is the place whither all the "door-objects" come, and where they are assimilated, or received into unity. In this matter the Buddhist philosophy carries on the old Upanishad lore about the heart, just as Aristotle elaborated the dictum of Empedokles, that perception and reasoning were carried on in "the blood round the heart".

It is possible that this ancient and widely-received tradition of the heart (rather than the brain, for instance) as the seat of the soul or the mind is latent in the question put by Mahakotthito, a member of the Order, to Sariputta, the leading apostle: ^[43]

"Inasmuch as these five indriyas (senses) are, in province and in gratification, mutually independent, what process of reference is there,^[44] and who is it that is gratified by them in common ?"

So apparently thinks Dr. Neumann, who renders Sariputta' s answer — "The mind (ma no)" — by Herz. This association must, however, not be pressed. For in another version of this dialogue more recently edited, Gotama himself being the person consulted, his interlocutor goes on to ask:

What is the patisaranam of mano
— of recollection (sati)
— of emancipation
— of Nirvana?^[45]

So that the meaning of the first question may simply be that as emancipation looks to, or makes for Nirvana, and recollection or mindfulness for emancipation, and ideation or thinking refers or looks to memory,^[46] so sensation depends on thinking, on mental construction (to become effective as knowledge).

It is, indeed, far more likely that Buddhist teaching made little of and passed lightly over this question of a physical basis of thought or mind. It was too closely involved with the animistic point of view — how closely we may see, for instance, in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. "When King Milinda puts a similar question respecting the subject of sensations,^[47] he does so from so obviously animistic a standpoint that the sage, instead of discussing mano, or heart, with him, argues against any one central subjective factor whatever, and resolves the process of cognition into a number of "connate" activities.

The method itself of ranking mental activity as though it were a sixth kind of sense seems to point in the same direction, and reminds us of Hume's contention, that when he tried to "catch himself" he always "tumbled on some particular perception". Indeed it was, in words attributed to Gotama himself, the lesser blunder in the average man to call "this four-elementish body" his soul than to identify the self with "what is called cittam, that is, mano, that is, vinnanam". For whereas the body was a collocation that might hold together for many years, "mind, by day and by night is ever arising as one thing, ceasing as another!"^[48]

Impermanence of conscious phenomena was one of the two grounds of the Buddhist attack. So far it was on all fours with Hume. The other ground was the presence of law, or necessary sequence in mental procedure. The Soul was conceived as an entity, not only above cliange, an absolute constant, but also as an entirely free agent. Both grounds, be it noted, are laid down on psychological evidence — on the testimony of consciousness. And both grounds were put forward by Gotama in his very first sermon. ^[49]

The standard formula for the latter only is reproduced in our Manual.^[50] And it is interesting to see the same argument clothed in fresh dress in the dialogue with Milinda referred to above. The point made is this : that if any one of the skandhas could be identified with a self or soul, it would, as not subject to the conditions of phenomena, act through any other faculty it chose. It would be a principle, not only of the nature of what ive should call will, but also of genuine free will.^[51] Soul and Free Will, for the Buddhist, stand or fall together. But, he said, what we actually find is no such free agency. We only find certain organs (doors), with definite functions, natural sequence, the line of least resistance and association.^[52] Hence we conclude there is no transcendent "knower" about us.

Here I must leave the Buddhist philosophy of mind and theory of intellection. We are only at the threshold of its problems, and it is hence not strange if we find them as bafiling as, let us say, our own confused usage of many psychological terms — feeling, will, mind — about which we ourselves greatly differ, would prove to an inquiring Buddhist. If I have not attempted to go into the crux of the sankhara-skandha, it is because neither the Manual nor its Commentary brings us any nearer to a satisfactory hypothesis.

For future discussion, however, the frequent enumerations of that skandha's content, varying with every changing mood, should prove pertinent. In every direction there is very much to be done. And each addition to the texts edited brings new light. Nor can philosophic interest fail in the long-run to accumulate about a system of thought which at that early time of day took up a task requiring such vigour and audacity — the task, namely, of opposing the prevailing metaphysic, not because problems of mind did not appeal to the founders of that system, but because further analysis of mind seemed to reveal a realm of law-governed phenomenal sequence for which the ready hypothesis of an unconditioned permanent Self super grammaticam was too cheap a solution.

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

Cf. Mil. 57-61.

[2]:

Sum. 194

[3]:

Cf. Siebeck, op. cit., ii., pp. 200, 353, 388.

[4]:

In the Maha Nidana Sutta Gotama discourses on sihi conscire by way of nama-rupa. See in Grimblot's "Sept Suttas", p. 255.

[5]:

See below p. 5, n. 1 ; also Asl, pp. 168, 250, etc. The definition given of manasikara in the "ye-va-panaka" passage of the Commentary (p. 133) is difficult to grasp fully, partly because, here and there, the reading seems doubtful in accuracy, partly because of the terms of the later Buddhist psychology employed, which it would first be necessary to discuss. But I gather that manasikara may be set going in the first, middle, or last stage of an act of cognition — i,e., on the arammanam or initial presentation, the vithi (or avajjanam), and the javanam ; that in this connexion it is concerned with the first of the three ; that it involves memory, association of the presentation with [mental] "associates", and con- fronting the presentation. And that it is a constructive and directing activity of mind, being compared to a charioteer.

[6]:

Below, p. 176, nn. 1, 2.

[7]:

Cf. below, p. 34, n. 1. The thoughts which are not called sasankh arena are by the 'Cy. ruled as being a-sankharena, though not explicitly said to be so (Asl. 71).

[8]:

Settham upanamam udeti . . . attano uttarim bhajetha (A. i. 126).

[9]:

Cf. M. i. 85-90 on kamanam assadan ca adinavan ca nissaranam ca . . . yathabhutam pajanitva.

[10]:

See below on guarding the door of the senses, pp. 350-353. Also note on D. i. 70 in "Dialogues of the Buddha", p. 81.

[11]:

George Eliot, "Brother and Sister".

[12]:

Cf. Hoffding's criticism of Condillac in "Outlines of Psychology" (London, 1891), p. 120.

[13]:

M. i. 299.

[14]:

See, e.g., below, p. 256 et seq.

[15]:

Cf. the Sabbasava Sutta and passim, M. i., especially the Vitakkasanthana Sutta.

[16]:

I refer to Professor Ward's "Psychology", Ency. Brit., 9th ed.

[17]:

See below, p. 175, n. 1.

[18]:

 Ibi., p. 207, n. 1.

[19]:

Svayam (this one) is nearly always substituted for atta as a nominative, the latter term usually appearing in oblique cases.

[20]:

See answers in §§ 600, 604, etc.

[21]:

Bhaveti, viharati (cultivates, abides); p. 43 et seq.

[22]:

See pp. 3-9, 27-29.

[23]:

It is on the other hand described with some fulness in the Cy. See my note s.v.

[24]:

Cf. the argument by Dr. Neumann, "Buddhistische Anthologie", xxiii, xxiv. If I have rendered sankhara by "syntheses", it is not because I see any coincidence between the Buddhist notion and the Kantian Synthesis der Wahrneh- mungen. Still less am I persuaded that Unterscheidungen is a virtually equivalent term. Like the "confections" of Professor Ehys Davids and the "Gestaltwigen" of Professor Oldenberg, I use syntheses simply as, more or less, an etymological equivalent, and wait for more light. I may here add that I have used intellection and cognition interchangeably as comprehending the whole process of knowing, or coming to know.

[25]:

E.g., ease.

[26]:

 E.g., the "faculties" of mind (ideation) and of pleasure.

[27]:

Given below on p. 348 [1336].

[28]:

Professor Ward, op. cit.

[29]:

Asl. 113. I gather, however, that the adjective ceta- sikam had a wider and a narrower denotation. In the former it meant 'not bodily,' as on p. 6. In the latter it served to distinguish three of the incorporeal skandhas from the fourth, i.e. cittam, as on pp. 265, 318 — citta cetasika dhamma. Or are we to take the Commentator's use of kayikam here to refer to those three skandhas, as is often the case (p. 43, n. 3)? Hardly, since this makes the two meanings of cetasikam self-contradictory.

[30]:

Ibid. 63.

[31]:

AsL, pp. 112, 113.

[32]:

Cf. the characteristic — samvidahanam — of cetana in my note, p. 8.

[33]:

The figure of the city-guardian, given in Mil. 62, is quoted by the Cy.

[34]:

See below, p. 18, and Asl. 123.

[35]:

It is at the same time said to result in (establishing) fact or conformity (tathabhavo), and to succeed sense- perception as such, p. 2, n. 3.

[36]:

See p. 2, n. 3.

[37]:

AsL, p 112.

[38]:

Cf. the expression suddha-manodvaro in my note, p. 3. And on what follows, cf. pp. 129, 132, nn.

[39]:

Viz., manoviniiana-dhatu and dhamma-dhatu see Asl. 153, and below, p. 26, n. 2. The term ' element ' is similarly used in our own psychology.

[40]:

Cf. below, pp. 214, 215, with 209-211.

[41]:

Asl. 264 ; below, p. 129, fn.

[42]:

Asl. 140: "Heart = thought (Hadayan ti cittam). In the passage — "I will either tear out your mind or break your heart" — the heart in the breast is spoken of. In the passage (M. i. 32) — "Methinks he planes with a heart that knows heart" (like an expert) — the mind is meant. In the passage" — "The vakkam is the heart" - the basis of heart is meant. But here cittam is spoken of as heart in the sense of inwardness (abbhantaram)".

It is interest- ing to note that, in enumerating the rupaskandha in the Visuddhi Magga, Buddhaghosa's sole departure from con- formity with the Dhamma-Sangani is the inclusion of hadaya-vatthu after "vitality",

The other term, 'that which is clear' (pandaram), is an ethical metaphor. The mind is said to be naturally pure, but defiled by incoming corruptions. (Cf. A. i., p. 10.)

[43]:

M. i. 295.

[44]:

Kim patisaranam. The word is a crux, and may bear more than one meaning. Cf, Yinaya Texts (S. B. E. xvii.), ii., p. B64, n. ; * Dialogues of the Buddha,' i., p. 122, n. Dr. Neumann renders it by Hort, following Childers.

It is worthy of note that, in connexion with the heresy of identifying the self with the physical organism generally (below, p. 259), the Cy. makes no allusion to heart, or other part of the rupam, in connexion with views (2) or (4). These apparently resembled Augustine's belief: the soul is wholly present both in the entire body and in each part of it. With regard to view (3), is it possible that Plotinus heard it at Alexandria, or on his Eastern trip? For he, too, held that the body was "in the soul", permeated by it as air is by fire (Enn. iv.). Buddhaghosa's illustrative metaphor is "as a flower being" in "its own perfume". I regret that space fails me to reproduce his analysis of these twenty soul-hypotheses.

[45]:

S. v., p. 218. In the replies mano is referred to sati, sati to vimutti, and this to Nirvana.

[46]:

Cf, the interesting inquiry into the various modes of association in remembering ^ given in Mil., pp. 78, 79, and 77, 78.

[47]:

Mil. 54. He calls it vedagu (knower), and, when cross-examined, abbhantare jivo (the living principle within).

[48]:

S. ii., pp. 94-96.

[49]:

Vin. i. 14; = M. i. 138, 300; S. iii. 66; cf. iv. 34.

[50]:

P. 257 et seq.

[51]:

Cf. the writer's article on the Vedalla Suttas, J. R. A. S., April, 1894.

[52]:

Mil., loc. cit.