Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c16.s3.14

c16.s3.14

The true theory, therefore, seems to be that the Sautrāntika doctrine, whether deliberately or not, takes effective cognizance of the difficulty, which the Canon ignores, of the nature of attention. In the anxiety to deny the existence of anything permanent, the Buddha in his response to Sāti² seems even to deny the existence of any such thing, by asserting that visual consciousness arises from the eye and the object; it is, of course, clear that no such doctrine was intended, for that would be in effect a materialism of which the spiritual is an epiphenomenon, but that the point of the Buddha’s rebuke is that the doctrine asserted by Sāti affirmed the persistence unaltered (anañña) of the consciousness (viññāṇa). The Buddha’s reply insists that, because of the dependence of the content of consciousness on the sense and the objects of sense, it is constantly changing. The Sautrāntika view fills the lacuna of explicit exposition of continuity by adopting a theory which enables it to appreciate the true sense of the Buddhist doctrine of perception.