What is Consciousness?

 

One time the Buddha was living in the Jeta Grove in Anāthapiṇḍika's Park just outside Sāvatthī. [1] At that time a bhikkhu named Sāti was insisting that consciousness (viññāna; Sanskrit: vijñāna) is what 'wanders through the rounds of rebirth'. The Buddha's response to Sāti tells us much about his understanding of what consciousness is.

Asked what he thinks consciousness is, Sāti says:

Yvāyaṃ, bhante, vado vedeyyo tatra tatra kalyāṇapāpakānaṃ kammānaṃ vipākaṃ paṭisaṃvedetī’’ti

It is that, sir, which speaks and feels, that which experiences the good and bad consequences of actions.

It seems that Sāti may have been a Brahmin of the progressive kind as he is describing something like an ātman. He is suggesting that there is some persistent entity which experiences the fruit (vipāka) of action from life to life. That entity he is calling viññāṇa. His view appears to be that the Buddha may be using the a different word, viññāṇa instead of ātman, but that he teaches more or less the same thing as Yājñavalkya in the Bṛhadāranyaka Upaniṣad. The Buddha is not pleased with Sāti and upbraids him for misrepresenting his teaching. Then addressing the other bhikkhus the Buddha says:

‘‘Yaṃ yadeva, bhikkhave, paccayaṃ paṭicca uppajjati viññāṇaṃ, tena teneva viññāṇaṃtveva saṅkhyaṃ gacchati. Cakkhuñca paṭicca rūpe ca uppajjati viññāṇaṃ, cakkhuviññāṇaṃtveva saṅkhyaṃ gacchati;

Bhikkhus from whatever condition consciousness arises, it is called that kind of consciousness. Consciousness arising with the eye and form as condition, is called eye-consciousness.

And so on for each of the senses in turn: ear-consciousness, nose-consciousness, tongue-consciousness, body-consciousness, and mind-consciousness. This is just like, he says, the way that there is a difference between a forest fire, a grass fire, a gas fire, and a house fire (to paraphrase a little). Each is fire and requires fuel to be sustained, but one can distinguish differences depending on what fuel is being consumed. We leave out oxygen because the role of oxygen in burning was not understood in any detail and is left out of traditional fire metaphors.

In the case of mind-consciousness the word for mind is 'manas'. Words for mind and consciousness are used quite loosely and interchangeably in the texts, with variations over time, so it's sometimes difficult to pin down what is meant (c.f. mind, consciousness, gnosis, psyche, nous, cognition, subjectivity etc). Manas here is the function of the mind that processes input from the five physical senses; as well as memories, thoughts, associations, speculations and the like which are generated by the mind itself. These mental objects are collectively known as dhammā (plural). What a dhamma is understood to 'be', its ontological status, is vague and changes over time. We may take them to be units of experience.

Here then is the basic Buddhist definition of consciousness - viññāṇa. Consciousness is functional, and always consciousness of some object (note the early Buddhist model of reality allows for a subject and object at least conventionally), there is no subjective consciousness if there is no object of consciousness. This can be difficult to grasp - that consciousness itself is dependent on conditions. I would argue that in fact this is the main point of the Buddha's teaching on dependent origination - the consciousness itself is conditioned.

But what is viññāṇa? Well, this is very difficult to spell out in terms that would satisfy modern criteria for evidence - the nature of consciousness is one of the perennial philosophical questions. Many books have been written on the subject with each contradicting all of the others. I think it is best to adopt a pragmatic approach and say that the Buddha is not trying to provide an absolute definition of consciousness, not trying to set up a philosophical system, but that he is drawing attention to those aspects of consciousness which are important for understanding his method of practice. That is why he defines consciousness in the way that he does, because anything else is irrelevant to Buddhist practice.

Having explained this the Buddha asks:

bhūtamidanti, bhikkhave, passathāti?

'this has come to be', Bhikkhus, do you see?

He asks them whether they understand that 'this' depends on food 'āhāra', and ceases when the food ceases. Bhūta is the past-participle of √bhū 'to be' and so means 'become' - it refers to something that has come into existence. This in turn is linked to the idea of yathābhūta - often translated as "things as they are", but means something more like simply "as become", and is said by the tradition to be the content of the Buddha's vision. So the Buddha is trying to get to the heart of the matter.

An interesting facet to this phrase was pointed out to me some years ago by Professor Richard Gombrich in his Numata Lectures in 2006. The form of pronoun used here 'idam' is known as deictic, and refers to something present to the speaker. Professor Gombrich thought that the Buddha might have been pointing to something while talking - perhaps a fire. Is this the first recorded use of a visual aide during a presentation? The fire only burns while there is fuel, and when the fuel runs out the fire goes out. Fire in fact is one of the most important metaphors that the Buddha uses. [2] Consciousness is like fire because without fuel (an object) it does not continue. Fire spreads and can be seen almost to seek out new fuel, like consciousness seeks out new objects. Sometimes the Buddha also describes 'desire' (taṇha) as the fuel (upadāna) for becoming (bhava); and with the extinguishing (nibbāṇa) of desire comes liberation (vimokkha).

Now the first part of this text can be read as the Buddha proposing paṭicca-samuppāda as an alternative to rebirth, however later he appears to confirm his belief rebirth when he talks about the 'gandhabba' which descends into the womb at conception. Gandhabba used in this sense is unusual and I don't want to get bogged down trying to figure out precisely what it means. It appears to be an entity which ensures the continuity of kamma and vipaka (action and consequence) beyond death. [3] As soon as one proposes or accepts a theory of rebirth one runs into a deep philosophical problem: what can possibly survive death? How can anything be transferred from a dead person into an embryo separated in time and space? How do the consequences of my actions transcend my own death? Buddhism seems confused on this point, or at best ambiguous and ambivalent. The Pāli texts are clearly contradictory at times: sometimes putting forward a rather deterministic version in which the same person does in fact appear in life after life, as in the Jātaka stories; or in the texts where the Bhikkhus ask after the 'destination' of someone who has died; or when the Buddha recalls his millions upon millions rebirths when he awakens, suggesting that not only consciousness but more specifically memory persists! At other times, as in the first part of this sutta, the idea of anything which persists from moment to moment, let alone life to life, is ruled out - there is only arising in dependence on conditions. It's not clear whether any given text is meant as literal truth, or as pedagogical rhetoric making a broader point, although the idea that even in death one does not escape the consequences of ones actions is ubiquitous. I think this confusion in the early texts is often mirrored by confusion in the present about rebirth. The waters are muddied in our time by the popular Tibetan notion of reincarnating 'tulkus'. [4] The result is not very intellectually satisfying. So what are we to make of it?

The main thing seems to me to be that consciousness itself arises from causes (eye, and eye object for instance) and it is therefore impermanent. There is not a stream of consciousness, but a series of moments arising in dependence on contact between organ and object. The sense of continuity is an illusion. It is this very strong sense of continuity that leads us towards views which support our continued existence in the future, and this is what, I think, attracts us to the myth of rebirth. The Buddha asks us to forego such speculation and focus on what our mind is like in the here and now - to understand how our minds consume and are sustained by sensory input, like a fire consumes and is sustained by wood, or grass or whatever.

~~oOo~~

Notes

1. Mahātaṇhāsaṅkhaya Sutta. MN 38. PTS M i.259. Not translated on Access to Insight. Translated by Ñāṇamoli and Bodhi in The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, p.394 ff. All translations in this article are my own.
2. For more on the use of the metaphor of fire see: Jayarava Rave - Everything is on fire! and Playing with Fire.
3. Ñāṇamoli and Bodhi (p.1233-4, note 411.) point out that the Pāli commentary on this passage suggests that the gandhabba is "a being due to be reborn because of their kamma". The word in this sense occurs only in this sutta (elsewhere it is a kind of celestial musician, often mentioned along with yakkhas and nāgas). The bhikkhus suggest that we think of gandhabba as a "stream of consciousness" but this seems to me to repeat Sāti's error because it posits a continuity of consciousness of the same kind. My opinion is that the section on the gandhabba is a folk belief of the time, and contradicts the early part of the sutta. Trying to explain the mechanics of rebirth almost inevitably leads to contradiction (like time travel in a science fiction story).
4. The tulku system in my view is a primarily a political system. It is a unique system of governance in which precocious and promising youngsters are taken and rigorously educated for many years. They are then, if they have lived up to their promise and not all of them do, put in charge - not only spiritually, but politically. The tulku, crucially, inherits not only the charisma (in the Weberian sense) of his predecessor but all of his property and income. In Japan by contrast monks simply started having children and passing monastic property and resources to them. The Tibetans on the whole kept religious leaders celibate and therefore had to find a way of ensuring continuity. This has not entirely eliminated succession conflicts, and disputes over access to resources, but it must have smoothed things over to a great extent.

Indo-European Writing

Aśoka (6th) Pillar fragment
Brāhmī inscription
formerly at Meerut. Mid-3rd century BCE.
(?u)pagamane sememokhyamate
(bhi)sitename iyaṃdhaṃmali(pi) li*

© British Museum (my photo)

When I recently blogged about Indo-European languages one of my friends asked what is quite an obvious question: what about writing? So I'm going to outline the development of writing as it is relevant to Buddhist India. India is very linguistically diverse - there are three distinct language families, including Indo-European, plus a number of languages not related to any known language - known as 'isolates'.

Most modern scripts can trace their origins to Mesopotamia. A surprising number trace their roots to the writing developed in India - in fact almost every country that saw Buddhist missionary activity, excepting China, has seen some influence from the India scripts on their writing systems. That said writing came relatively late to India, and even then was not used for religious texts for many centuries.

The earliest evidence of writing anywhere in the world is from around 3500 BCE in present day Iraq. The Sumerians left caches of clay tablets at sites along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. This earliest writing, similar in some ways to the earliest Chinese writing (ca 1400 BCE), involves pictures which represent concepts. However it was with the invention of cuneiform that something like writing as we know began. The earliest examples of cuneiform combine signs for concepts with signs for sounds (as do Egyptian hieroglyphs). A variety of cuneiform continued to be used in the middle-east until the last century before the common era. However in the same region speakers of Semitic languages began to represent their language using only signs for sounds - i.e. to use a true alphabet - around 2000 BCE.

The Achaemenid empire (ca 550 - 350 BCE) founded in Persia adopted a form of Semitic writing, often called Aramaic after the language it encoded, for administrative purposes. It represented a significant improvement on cuneiform - it could be written (and read) more quickly and easily, and on a much greater variety of materials. Now it so happens that the Achaemenids invaded India and controlled, or at least had a powerful influence, up to the western bank of the Indus River - about half of what is now Pakistan. In fact the Buddha lived during this period and there is some evidence of Persian influence in the Pāli Canon - which I have discussed previously in this blog. The Achaemenids were toppled by Alexander of Macedonia, and in India at least the power vacuum was filled by the Mauryan Dynasty of which Asoka is the stand out figure.

Certainly by the time that King Asoka ruled India (mid 3rd century BCE) there was a well developed form of writing: the Brāhmī Lipi or Writing of God which he used on his rock pillars and edicts. Brāhmī is said to show signs of influence from Aramaic. Another script, Kharoṣṭhī, was less widely used in India proper, but was the main script in Gandhāra and parts of central Asia for some centuries. We can say with some confidence that Kharoṣṭhī was based on Aramaic as it retained many features of the Semitic script. It is possible that Kharoṣṭhī influenced the development of Brāhmī , but it is difficult to say because the earliest known examples of Brāhmī are already a fully fledged script and the direction of development subsequently is determined by the nature of Indian languages.

We can say that all forms of written language in India, as well as Tibet, Burma, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia are descendants of Asoka's Brāhmī. In India there was a very distinct north/south divide which I think was caused by writing materials, but may have been influence by the geographical spread of Indo-European languages (north) and Dravidian languages (south). The North favoured birch bark and wood to write on, while in the South the material of choice was the leaf of the talipot palm. The palm leaf is ribbed which lead to the development of the more rounded shapes of Southern writing (which then influenced Sinhala, Burmese etc). Note that technically Sinhala is a North Indian language, part of the Indo-European family, and not related to Tamil or other Dravidian languages, but it is written in a southern style script and palm leaves were the medium of choice until relatively recently. Similarly Burmese, though written with a Brāhmī derived script is part of the Tibeto-Burman family which has a relationship with the plethora of Chinese languages.

Brāhmī underwent continuous development in the North and diversified into local geographical variants. But because dynasties based in the North-east - particularly the Mauryans and then the Guptas (3rd - 6th centuries) - were dominant they tended to influence the development of writing more. The Brāhmī variant commonly used by the Guptas was by that time a distinct script. The Nalanda University was in the Gupta heartland and the Gupta script was important in the spread Buddhist texts. Later it would give rise to the Siddhamatṛkā or just Siddhaṃ script which was commonly used to write the Tantras. It is still in use today for writing mantras in China and Japan. The Gupta script, or something very like it was used as the basis for Tibetan writing, which also continued to develop independently and diversify. Siddhaṃ evolved into Devanāgarī, which is the most common script for Sanskrit in the present - though it is written using the Tamil script in South India for instance.

There are several ways of represent sounds using signs. The English alphabet attempts to convey individual sounds that combine into syllables or phonemes. This is a very efficient way of representing spoken sounds - with just 26 letters we manage to convey the 25 single consonant sounds, and 23 vowel sounds that are used in 'standard' English (as represented by the Oxford English Dictionary) and an extensive repertoire of combination of them in words and sentences. Another method is to represent speech as a series of syllables. One can either represent all possible syllables by individual signs which is only practicable if there are a small number of syllables - the Japanese Kana alphabets are good examples of this approach. An intermediate option is available where consonants and initial vowels have distinct signs and these are modified to show medial and final vowels. The latter is typical of Indian writing.

There are several distinct features shared by all Indic scripts which I will demonstrate using Devanāgarī. Initial vowels have distinct signs - 14 in Sanskrit - but medial and final vowels, and the absence of a vowel (which happens at the end of words and in conjuncts) are indicated with diacritic marks. Consonants are assumed to be followed by the short 'a' vowel unless otherwise specified. क is ka not k. Examples of vowel diacritics are: kā ke kai ki kī ko kau kṛ = का के कै कि की को कौ कृ. Vowels may also be absent, nasalised or aspirated (the technical terms being virāma, anusvāra, visarga), so g, gaṃ, and gaḥ = ग् गं गः . Indic, like English, allows for a variety of combinations of consonants without intervening vowels. These are either written as a vertical stack as in ṣ + ṭha > ṣṭha = ष् + ठ > ष्ठ; or as a horizontal combination with the initial consonant as a "ligature": t + pa > tpa = त् + प > त्प. As many as four consonants can be combined in this way e.g. strya स्त्र्य. Special variations occur with 'r' viz pra = प् + र > प्र, and rta = र् + त > र्त; ś can also undergo a special change e.g. śva = श् + व > श्व; cf śya = श्य; and some conjuncts have distinct signs jña ज्ञ and kṣa क्ष. Writing Sanskrit this way is considerably more complex than writing English.

Buddhist texts in Indic languages are preserved in a plethora of scripts: Brāhmī in many varieties, the Gupta script again in many varieties, Siddhaṃ with some variation over time (and major variants in China and Japan), Kharoṣṭḥī, Devanāgarī, several Tibetan scripts, Sinhala, Burmese, Thai etc. Each of these scripts records texts in an equally wide variety of Indian languages and dialects; and of course many texts are now known only in translation in Chinese, Tibetan or any of a dozen other languages - making the history of Buddhist texts quite complex. All this is remarkable given centuries of resistance to the use of writing for the purpose of writing sacred texts in the early days of Buddhism.

A scholar of Buddhism must often know several languages and associated scripts in order to read the relevant manuscripts. The standard of handwriting in ancient times was often quite poor, and the attention to copying of texts wavered causing scribal errors, which means that no two manuscripts are ever the same. Deciphering such manuscripts requires imagination and powers of deduction as well language skills. As such we owe a great deal to those people down the ages with the aptitude and motivation to take on the difficult task of learning these, often dead, languages and scripts, in order to study and translate the texts for us. Having dipped into their world I am in awe of them.

Note

* The bottom line of the Brāhmī inscription pictured is a fragment of a longer stock phrase:

saḍuvīsativābhisitena me iyaṃ dhaṃma lipi likhāpita
when I [Asoka] had been consecrated twenty-six years I ordered this inscription of the dhamma to be engraved

- c.f. the 1st pillar in A. L. Basham The Wonder that was India, 1967, 2001, p.395. There is now some doubt as to whether Asoka meant the Buddhadhamma or his own dhamma [see Aśoka, Pāli and some red herrings].