The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s8.115

v2.c40.s8.115

Nor is any progress made in the analysis of consciousness. It is true⁴ that in place of the occasional remarks of the Upaniṣads we find in the Buddhist texts interminable repetitions of the same facts regarding all the senses which are, therefore, more definitely recognized than in some portions of the Upaniṣads, but any real progress in defining sense perception remains to be pointed out. On the contrary, we have the old view which makes no clear distinction if any at all between the organ and the sensation, and as late as the Milindapañha, as we have seen, sensation is expressed in terms of mere material contact. The position of mind, Mano, remains precisely what it was in the Upaniṣads: it is wholly erroneous⁵ to compare it with the *sensus communis* of Aristotle, whose two special functions,⁶ that of self-consciousness and of consciousness of the common sensibles, by no means correspond with those of Mano, which is rather in origin a power without which the senses would in effect not perceive at all, and which in a more effective psychology might have been developed into the psychical representative of sensation conveyed through the physiological apparatus.⁷ Even the position of touch as in some sense the most fundamental of the senses which is claimed for the Dhammasaṅgaṇi can hardly be accepted as in any way a really scientific theory, as it is only enunciated in company with an extraordinarily unintelligible doctrine of the position of what is somewhat hypothetically interpreted as the cohesive element.⁸ The primitive nature of the process of consciousness as conceived in the Nikāyas is obvious from the stereotyped account of the origin of knowledge.¹ Through the eye and visible form arises visual consciousness : the collision of the two factors is contact : conditioned by contact arises feeling : what one feels one perceives : what one perceives one thinks about : what one thinks about one is obsessed withal. The crudeness and valuelessness of the theory is obvious at once from the very fact that it is wholly impossible to understand what precise sense was attributed to the several terms, for the explanations of the scholiast are in all likelihood nothing but the interpretations of later generations of thinkers, who had to do their best to make the most out of the tradition of the text. The Buddhists too remain with the Upaniṣads on the basis of the dwelling of the soul or its equivalent in the heart,² which is thus brought into the theory of sensation. What is indeed of interest is not the development of doctrine in the Nikāyas, which give us only a few changes in terminology such as the metaphor of the doors of the senses,³ but the extraordinary persistence in Buddhism of the psychology of the Upaniṣads.