Chapter 4: The Eight Consciousnesses at Work¶

The inventory of the eight consciousnesses and their division of labour goes in one paragraph. The ālaya lies at the bottom, as maturation and as the holder of the seeds, established in the last chapter. The first five consciousnesses face the five kinds of object one apiece, and mental consciousness ranges over them all; these six can on the whole be read across into commonsense psychology. The genuinely new component is the seventh consciousness, manas: it faces no outer object but only the inner store, taking the ālaya perpetually for its object. The three levels divide their labour, in the Triṃśikā, as three transformations: the transformation that is maturation, the transformation that is deliberation, and the transformation that discerns objects — the storehouse, the keeper that holds it fast, and the front counter, each with its own office.

The legislating of manas is what this chapter is worth reading for. The verses run: "Next is the second transformation; this consciousness is named manas. It turns in dependence upon that and takes that for its object, and deliberation is its nature and its character." And directly after: "It is always accompanied by four defilements, namely delusion about self and view of self, together with conceit of self and love of self."¹ The reading: this is the mechanization of grasping at a self. The constant and close deliberator is at no moment not mis-signing the ālaya's continuum as an "I"; and the four defilements are not a moral indictment but the factory settings of this machine. Part 13 analysed how the view of self takes root at the aggregates subject to appropriation; here the same thing has been drawn as a structural diagram. Grasping at a self is not an error committed once, it is a background process that is always running. Rewriting the defilements from the vocabulary of morals into that of structure is one of the real contributions of consciousness-only psychology to Buddhist philosophy, and the theory of practice is rewritten along with it: what has to be dealt with is not one bad thought after another but a machine that must be transformed. Chapter 6 takes that over.

The list-science of the mental factors is touched on in passing, the detailed table being entered on the outline under the skeleton clause. This school posits fifty-one mental factors and the Theravāda fifty-two; Part 14's method of tabling one list against the other applies here. The two lists agree in the main, and where they diverge is in the splitting and the lumping; the division into the universal factors and the object-specific factors is isomorphic on the two sides, and the differences gather in the indeterminate and the miscellaneous classes. Factors of the same name are not necessarily the same in substance, and factors of different names are not necessarily different in substance; collating them cell by cell is work for a full treatment, and a treatment in brief records one sentence only. The format determines how long the list is; content determines how many distinct distributions it contains. That observation, laid down in Part 14, holds across the transmissions.

The several masters on the doctrine of the four parts; the adjudication of the three kinds of object, the three instruments of knowledge and the three moral natures; the nine conditions for the arising of a consciousness — all these items are entered on the outline and not opened out. The skeleton stands, and the items can be thickened later.

References¶