The History of Buddhist Thought c26.17

c26.17

The general position is like that of the Mādhyamika school. All is void, all is *māyā*, there is no self either in the individual or in objects, nothing can be asserted or denied about individual things, and there are three yānas, but only for the sake of rousing the ignorant. But while the Mādhyamikas start from the standpoint of logic, and show the impossibility of making any statement free from contradictions, the *Laṅkāvatāra* has a psychological basis. It assumes the psychological analysis of earlier Buddhism, the skandhas, sense organs, and senses. As through each sense a particular kind of consciousness, i.e. state of awareness, arises, we get six consciousnesses, eye-, ear-, nose-, tongue-, touch-, and mind-consciousness. But besides these a seventh is distinguished, *manas*, mind itself. This, says Dr. Masuda, is self-consciousness. That is no doubt one aspect of it, but it seems to have claimed recognition for the same reason that Aristotle distinguished a common sense. Each of the six consciousnesses acts through only one sense, but there is a faculty, the *sensus communis*, which can distinguish and compare the data of each sense. Professor Suzuki says that mind-consciousness is the mind which remembers, judges, imagines, wills, etc., but *manas* is the deeply-seated consciousness in the soul which ignorantly clings to the ego-conception and reality of an external world.