Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c9.s3.13

c9.s3.13

The last aggregate is Viññāṇa, and, as it is credited with appreciation of feeling as well as perceptive power, it is clear that, even in this collection of terms, it is practically is wide enough to include both perception and feeling. This is admitted in a dialogue in the Majjhima,¹ and no defence of the failure to revise the fivefold division seems possible, unless we accept the hint of Buddhaghosa which suggests that the breaking of intellect into four aggregates was intended to emphasize the doctrine of non-ego. But in their account of Viññāṇa the early teachers do develop a more elaborate psychology of perception than is found in the Upaniṣads, which were concentrated on fundamental philosophical issues and not on empirical psychology. But we must not exaggerate their defects as compared with the Canon.² The senses had already been distinguished and enumerated as five, although those of smell, taste, and touch are subordinated in consequence to that of sight, and touch in particular is not accorded its due importance. But the idea of a central unity, with its abode in the heart, by which sense-impressions are co-ordinated and comprehended, is enunciated, and it is possible that the question of the comparative activity of sense or sense-object had raised interest. In Buddhism, if we find more interest in the object than in the subject, the value of psychological investigation was marred by the love of symmetry which involves the determination to fit each sense into the same mould, in place of allowing each its appropriate distinctions.