The History of Buddhist Thought c26.24

c26.24

There is a list of five categories (*dharma*) which elucidate the main features of the system. (1) *Nāma* name, (2) *nimitta* mark, (3) *vikalpa* false imagination or positing (discrimination), (4) *samyagjñāna* right knowledge, (5) *tathatā* suchness, reality. They are brought into relation with the three kinds of self-existence (*svabhāva*). Names and marks are entirely unreal, they lead to attributing reality or self-existence to unrealities, an entirely wrong and wrongly imagined (*parikalpita*) construction of experience. This is *parikalpita svabhāva*. Vikalpa may be of the relatively true, as when a thing is thought of as related to certain conditions, when the self-existence is *paratantra*, dependent on another.¹ Right knowledge, knowledge free from names, marks, and conditions, is knowledge of *tathatā*, suchness, absolute reality. Such existence is *pariniṣpanna*, perfected. Another important term is *vāsanā*, literally "perfuming". It is something which remains like a perfume after an action has been done. One form of it is memory, but it is wider than that. Habits result from it, and Suzuki translates it "habit-energy", which he explains as "a kind of supersensuous energy mysteriously emanating from every thought, every feeling, or every deed one has done or does, which lives latently in the store-house called ālaya-vijñāna".² It is the truth that "what we have been makes us what we are", but it involves another aspect than that crystallized in the doctrine of karma. The escape from it, as all Buddhism asserts, is right knowledge, the attaining of Nirvāṇa, and that, as explained here, is "the getting rid of the mind-consciousness which wrongly imagines", i.e. which makes a false construction of experience and imagines or posits an external world. It is also said to be "the realm of attaining to the inner self by means of noble knowledge, free from the false notions of permanency and annihilation, existence and non-existence".³