Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c10.s3.4

c10.s3.4

The dispositions which ignorance produces can hardly be misunderstood; they must be interpreted in the same sense as the Saṃskāras of the Sāṃkhya system, in which ignorance creates impressions on the inner organ, which in a future life result in continued ignorance, while the attainment of the saving knowledge prevents the further growth of the seeds of future misery sown in the Saṃskāras or impressions of acts done in ignorance. This leads inevitably to the conclusion that ignorance generates acts which leave impressions on the individual, which result in determining his future existence. This accords well with the position of the dispositions as one of the aggregates of the individual, and with the doctrine that thought takes its stand on the dispositions to last and develop itself, and in so doing it renews them and brings them to fruition in act, word, or deed. Yet it is certain that, although the dispositions are classed as good, bad, or neutral, or in six classes according to the object which evokes them, the regular explanation of their occurrence in the chain is that they are the dispositions of the body, expiration and inspiration; of speech, initial and continued application, as the preliminary conditions of speech; and of thought, ideation or perception (saññā),¹ and feeling. To accept this view as valid is impossible; the creation of two such curious bodily complexes alone by ignorance is as amazing as the selection of two elements of thought which in the individual form aggregates side by side with the dispositions, while feeling appears in a position of its own in the chain. Nonetheless, the confusion is significant of the lack of skill of the interpreters of the Canon; the Tibetan translators of the chain have anticipated modern investigators in equating dispositions with action (karman), and the Sanskrit scholasticism agrees in this view.