The History of Buddhist Thought c20.33

c20.33

Materialism never became a serious problem in India. The few systems known survive only in refutations of their opponents. Its growth seems to have been prevented by the very abundance of terms for the non-material aspect of the individual. The terms were there, thought (*citta*), mind (*mano*), consciousness (*viññāṇa*), and heart (*hadaya*). All these occur in a list of synonyms of mind, and naturally have different shades of meaning. The difficulty was rather to deal with the superabundance of terms, and in spite of the tendency to assume that for a separate word there must be a corresponding separate thing, it is to the credit of Buddhist psychology that it did not unduly multiply entities. But it did classify. That is perhaps the chief feature of Abhidhamma psychology, and it is a further proof of the identity of method in the different schools that these methods and classifications correspond.