Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c9.s3.2

c9.s3.2

As we have seen it is difficult to form any precise picture of the nature of consciousness as it appeared to early Buddhism; that it was an ‘intermittent series of psychic throbs associated with a living organism beating out their coming to know through one brief span of life’ is a conjecture² based on the instruction of Sāti alone, and doubtless misrepresents that text. No other passage in the Canon even suggests that thought is to be treated as an intermittent series of thought-flashes or of mental electrification of the organism. We are, in fact, in the presence of primitive ideas, and to interpret them in the terms of modern psychology is fundamentally to misrepresent, though doubtless largely to improve, the doctrine of the Canon.