Chapter Four: The Eight Consciousnesses at Work—Structure and Mental Factors¶

What this chapter must do. The first three chapters established two things: the three natures are this school’s semantics, and the storehouse is the foundation of its mechanisms. This chapter examines the machine in operation, asking four questions in order. How do the eight consciousnesses divide their work? What conditions are needed for a consciousness to arise? How many functions can a single mental event carry? And how does consciousness know that it is cognizing? The fourth question lies closest to this book’s toolkit. Its verdict belongs to Chapter Eight; here we lay out all the premises of the argument.

Establishing the three transformations. The opening two verses of the Thirty Verses establish the framework of the entire text: ‘Through provisional talk of self and dharmas, / various characteristics unfold. / They depend on transformations of consciousness; / the transforming consciousnesses are only three: / maturation, mentation, / and consciousness that cognizes objects.’¹ Maturation is the eighth consciousness; mentation is the seventh; cognition of objects is the first six. This division into three does not follow sensory channels—that is an internal matter for the first six. It follows the duties carried by each level. The storehouse handles continuance and the receipt of perfuming; manas handles continuous self-reference; the first six handle present cognition of objects. The inventory of eight consciousnesses thus consists of three functional levels and one internal subdivision, not eight minds standing side by side.

The circumstances in which the first five consciousnesses and mental consciousness arise. The verses are quite specific about the operating conditions of the third transformation: ‘Based on the fundamental consciousness, / the five consciousnesses manifest according to conditions, / together or not together, / like waves based on water.’ For mental consciousness: ‘Mental consciousness constantly arises, / except in birth among the nonperceptive gods, / the two mindless attainments, / sleep, and fainting.’² The five consciousnesses appear according to conditions, one or several, with no fixed number. Mental consciousness is constantly manifest, interrupted only in five situations.

Read beside Essay Fourteen’s theory of cognitive processes, these two passages show an immediate difference. The southern tradition supplies a program of fixed length: a complete five-door cognitive process has seventeen consciousness-moments—adverting, a sensory consciousness, receiving, investigating, determining, seven javanas, and two registrations. The positions are fixed; a missing position establishes another type. Consciousness-only supplies a table of conditions: consciousness appears dependent on conditions, arises when they suffice, and has no preset number of simultaneous consciousnesses. One is a flowchart, the other a list of conditions. Both construct mechanisms at level E2, but in different forms. The southern tradition divides time into compartments and assigns positions; consciousness-only replaces positions with quotas of bases and conditions. We will use this difference again in this chapter’s third section.

Coexistent bases: what a consciousness needs to arise. Fascicle four of the commentary devotes a section to this, recording several positions in turn, refuting each, and closing with its own verdict. One position midway concludes: ‘Each of the first five active consciousnesses necessarily has two coexistent bases: the five material faculties and simultaneous mental consciousness. The sixth active consciousness necessarily always has one coexistent basis, the seventh consciousness; if it arises simultaneously with the five consciousnesses, it also takes them as a coexistent basis. The seventh active consciousness necessarily has only one coexistent basis, the eighth consciousness. Only the eighth consciousness, being constantly without alteration and able to establish itself, has no coexistent basis.’ The position the author finally adopts reads: ‘the five consciousnesses necessarily have four coexistent supports: the five material faculties and the sixth, seventh, and eighth consciousnesses’; ‘the sixth, mental consciousness has only two coexistent supports, the seventh and eighth consciousnesses’; ‘the seventh, manas, has only one coexistent support, the eighth consciousness’; ‘the ālaya consciousness likewise has only one coexistent support, the seventh consciousness’, with the self-assessment ‘stated thus, it fits reason and scripture admirably.’³ The two positions are set side by side below.

Both columns read as the same descending staircase: the closer to the foreground, the more bases; the closer to the bottom, the fewer. The two columns differ only in the bottom compartment: one position brings the eighth consciousness to zero, whereas the author's final position leaves it one basis, the seventh consciousness, so the staircase stops at one instead of reaching zero. The staircase itself is a structural declaration of the theory of consciousness. It expresses ‘who supports whom’ as countable quotas, rather than a general statement of interdependence; both positions write it this way, and the slope does not change with the bottom compartment.

The eighth consciousness’s compartment needs separate weighing, for the two positions diverge entirely there. The reason one position gives is ‘being constantly without alteration and able to establish itself.’ If the three Chinese characters 自能立, ‘can establish itself,’ are read as establishment through own-nature, Essay Eighteen’s adjudicating machinery must sound the alarm immediately. Yet the same treatise’s definitions for the eighth consciousness explicitly register the clause of awaiting multiple conditions among the six qualities of seeds, already quoted in Chapter Three. The storehouse itself also ‘constantly transforms like a rushing stream’ and ‘is abandoned at the arhat stage.’ Read together, ‘can establish itself’ concerns the particular item ‘coexistent basis’: it says this consciousness does not change with the changes of another manifest consciousness, which is different from ‘not awaiting conditions.’ The wording is indeed risky. This essay registers it as a risky sentence, following the treatment of ‘each nature abides in one time’ in the Zhaolun in Chapter Four of Essay Nineteen. A sentence is judged by the job it performs in its matrix, rather than by its literal wording alone. This is the essay’s second case of wording requiring a direct hearing in a detailed treatment; the first is the perfected in Chapter Two. That position is not the one the author adopts, but it is a form the commentary itself records as current at the time: the eighth consciousness reaches bottom, with nothing beneath it to support it; the weighing above concerns that position, not the author's verdict. The author declines it on the ground that it ‘has not understood the difference between a support and a basis’: the two words are first separated, anything relied upon being called a basis while only what is ‘determinate, has an object, and is principal’ counts as a support; the eighth consciousness is then made to rest on the seventh and the seventh on the eighth, the two ‘always turning together’ and ‘serving as bases for each other’, and the bottom compartment goes from zero to one. This is a patch applied where the structure reaches bottom. If the eighth consciousness had no support, the general rule that consciousness rests on consciousness would have to admit an exception at the lowest level; pairing it with the seventh preserves the rule, at the cost that the two lowest consciousnesses hold each other up and neither is any longer a foundation. The patch needs a second layer: scripture says there is no manas in three states, the arhat, the attainment of cessation, and the supramundane path, and if the eighth consciousness necessarily rests on the seventh it would have no support in those three states; so what those states lack is said to be only the obscured manas, ‘just as saying that four states have no ālaya does not mean there is no eighth consciousness.’ This essay does not rule on which position came first; it records only the order the commentary itself sets: the no-support position is stated first, then refuted in two stages, as ‘not yet fully reasoned’ and as ‘all unreasonable’, and the section closes with the self-assessment ‘stated thus, it fits reason and scripture admirably.’ Those words deserve a pause. The conclusion comes first: the eighth consciousness must have a support, because the rule admits no exception. The scriptural warrant comes after, and consists of two sentences only, that the storehouse consciousness ‘turns together with manas’ and ‘always rests on the defiled’; the first speaks only of turning together, and the second uses the very word ‘rest on’, which this position has just distinguished from ‘support’. What connects warrant to conclusion is the redrawing of that word boundary and the rereading of ‘no manas in three states’: two contrived angles. That such a detour is needed to make the fit shows that reason and scripture did not supply the conclusion directly; the self-assessment of an admirable fit is the admission.

Later teaching expanded this table into the nine conditions for the arising of consciousness: nine for eye-consciousness, eight for ear-consciousness, seven for nose-, tongue-, and body-consciousness, five for mental consciousness, three for manas, and four for the storehouse. This arrangement comes from the teaching tradition of the Verses on the Rules of the Eight Consciousnesses. It is a different stratum of material from the commentary’s own account of coexistent bases. The original work has not been checked for this volume.

Manas: turning self-grasping into a mechanism. The verses on the second transformation have three sections: its nature and characteristic; its afflictions; and its binding to realms and stages of abandonment. ‘Next, the second transforming consciousness / is called manas. / It operates on the basis of that and takes that as its object; / mentation is its nature and characteristic. / It is constantly accompanied by four afflictions: / self-delusion, self-view, / self-conceit, and self-love, / together with contact and the rest. / It is classed as obscured and ethically indeterminate, / bound according to where one is born. / In arhatship, the attainment of cessation, / and the supramundane path, it is absent.’⁴

The five Chinese characters 依彼转缘彼, ‘operates on the basis of that and takes that as its object,’ do double duty. Both occurrences of ‘that’ refer to the eighth consciousness: manas operates on the basis of the storehouse and also apprehends the storehouse as its object. This is among the most ingenious designs in the entire scheme of eight consciousnesses. It needs a constant sense of self but refuses to establish a constant self for it, so it has one consciousness misidentify another. The object of misidentification is a stream of continuity; the act of misidentification is also a stream of continuity. Neither end leaves a place for a substrate.

The ingenuity must be recorded, and so must its provenance. The move establishing the seventh consciousness has the same form as Chapter Three’s establishment of the storehouse: point to a function no one performs, check the existing roster, and add a member. The later fourfold distinction makes the job description especially plain. The compartment ‘constant and discerning’ has no occupant: the sixth is discerning but not constant; the eighth is constant but not discerning; the first five lack both. So one that is constant and discerning is added. Once the member has been added, a label is posted on the same page: obscured and ethically indeterminate; absent in three states. Add a thing at a gap in the explanation, then declare the added thing not to be a thing. This is the second appearance of this two-part package in the essay. It is the same gesture by which the Sarvāstivādins added acquisition and the life faculty for continuation in Essay Fifteen. Its quality must still be checked at Chapter Three’s two levels. The label works at the level of claims; at the functional level, the new employee again occupies a post of constant discerning and constant operation. A direct criticism from the side of liberation theory has already been registered in Chapter Two of Part II of the Yogācāra essay in Volume II. Each addition has a real explanatory target; the problem is the direction. Every step goes toward a deeper basis, rather than a more testable mechanism. This chapter records only the form and does not repeat that case.

The four afflictions are this section’s focus: self-delusion, self-view, self-conceit, and self-love. The commentary clearly says that these four are ‘constant companions.’ The reading can be stated in one sentence: self-grasping is made into a mechanism. What constantly mentates never ceases wrongly to sign the storehouse’s continuity as ‘self.’ The four afflictions here are the machine’s factory settings, not four moral charges. Essay Thirteen analyzed how conceit takes root in the appropriated aggregates; there, ‘I am’ is a latent illusion. Here the same thing is written as a structural diagram. Grasping at a self is recast from one mistake after another into a background process that is always running. Recasting affliction from moral into structural language is one of consciousness-only psychology’s actual contributions to Buddhist philosophy. The account of practice changes with it: what must be dealt with changes from individual bad thoughts into a machine needing transformation. Chapter Six takes this up. The price of the recasting must also be posted on the same page. ‘Machine,’ ‘process,’ and ‘factory settings,’ together with the verses’ own ‘constant companions’ and constant discerning, all use the grammar of permanent fixtures. Recasting intermittent bad thoughts as an apparatus that is always running shifts the weight shed by moral language onto ontological language. The gain from giving error a structure and the tendency toward partial reification are two sides of the same move, running in the same direction as the addition of a member above. This book’s own nouns of paraphrase are on this slope too and require the same qualification: talk of machines and the like is a convenience of E2 reformulation and must not be read as E3.

The compartment ‘obscured and ethically indeterminate’ deserves separate discussion. ‘Obscured’ means obstructing the noble path; ‘ethically indeterminate’ means not producing a maturation-result. Manas does not create karma, yet blocks the way. Two functions of affliction are registered separately here: one governs moral consequences, the other consequences for liberation, and they can be separated. Essay Fourteen’s four compartments are wholesome, unwholesome, resultant, and functional; none has this position. To express the same thing, the southern tradition can only approximate it by combining the groups ‘universal to all unwholesome consciousness’ and ‘ethically indeterminate.’ Consciousness-only opens this extra compartment specifically for its unusual resident, manas.

‘In arhatship, the attainment of cessation, and the supramundane path, it is absent’ gives three states of abandonment. Manas can be cut off and is therefore not a permanent dharma. This sentence and the storehouse’s ‘abandoned at the arhat stage’ are often read together as one defense: for whatever they establish as operating constantly, the legislators write a termination clause on the same page. Termination condition or escape route: both readings must be recorded. A rule for distinguishing them can be established: see whether a clause works within the system’s near reach and whether, when it falls due, it delivers abandonment of the whole item or only the name. On this measure, the two defenses differ in quality. Two of manas’s three states occur during the causal path. The attainment of cessation and the supramundane path are both states actually registered in the account of practice, so the clause has work within near reach. At the arhat stage, too, what is cut off is the entire mode of operation. For the storehouse’s abandonment, however, we must read the commentary’s own detailed rules. It first asks: ‘This consciousness has constantly transformed like a stream since beginninglessness; at what stage is it finally abandoned?’ The answer is the arhat stage, but the meaning of abandonment is immediately narrowed: ‘Because it thereby permanently loses the name ālaya, this is called abandonment; it does not mean abandoning the whole underlying eighth consciousness. Otherwise an arhat would have no consciousness to hold seeds and would at once enter nirvāṇa without remainder.’⁵ What is abandoned is the name and the function of being grasped as a store. The consciousness itself remains in office, precisely because the seed-holding post cannot be vacant. The same fascicle also says generally that different names are established for the eighth consciousness according to their meanings, and ‘these names apply at every stage.’⁵ The verse says abandonment; the commentary’s detailed rules say abandonment of the name. The former reads as a termination condition; the latter reveals an escape route. This is another instance of Chapter Three’s grading of clauses. Manas’s absence in three states lies closer to functional delivery; the storehouse’s abandonment operates partly in naming. Chapter Eight’s verdict is adjusted accordingly.

The fourfold distinction concerning constant discerning mentation—the seventh is constant and discerning, the sixth discerning but not constant, the first five neither constant nor discerning, and the eighth constant but not discerning—is a later commentarial arrangement of the verses. The original Commentary on the Establishment of Consciousness-Only has not been directly checked and is listed for future treatment.

Mental factors: definitions before inventories. This section deliberately shares its heading with Chapter Two of Essay Fourteen. Both traditions proceed in the same way: first establish ‘what counts as associated with consciousness,’ then supply an inventory.

The consciousness-only definition occurs in fascicle five: ‘They always arise dependent on consciousness, are associated with consciousness, and belong to consciousness; hence they are called mental factors, just as things belonging to me are named mine.’⁶ Three conditions and one analogy. The division of work between chief consciousness and mental factors follows immediately: ‘Consciousness takes only the general characteristic of its object; mental factors also take its particular characteristics, helping accomplish the work of consciousness, and so receive the name mental factors. They are like a painter and apprentice, making the outline and filling in the colors.’⁶ The painter drafts, the apprentice colors; the draft is the general characteristic, the colors the particulars. The analogy must be read precisely: it describes a division of work between two ways of taking characteristics within the same event, not consciousness arising first and mental factors arriving later.

The six groups and their criteria are established in the same passage: ‘There are five universal factors, also five object-specific factors, eleven wholesome factors, six afflictions, twenty secondary afflictions, and four indeterminate factors. These six groups together make fifty-one.’ The reasons follow group by group: ‘Because they are necessarily found in every consciousness. Because they can arise in relation to particular objects. Because they can arise only in wholesome consciousness. Because their nature belongs to the root afflictions. Because their nature is solely an outflow of affliction. Because they are indeterminate with respect to the wholesome, defiled, and so forth.’⁷ The six groups are six ranges drawn by six criteria, not six drawers: universality of occurrence, specificity of object, affiliation of nature, and position in the genealogy of afflictions.

The commentary also gives a finer measure, the four universalities: ‘Further, the four universalities distinguish five kinds of difference: universality of nature, plane, time, and co-occurrence. Among the five, the universal factors possess all four universalities. The object-specific possess only the first and second. The wholesome possess only one, universality of plane. The defiled possess none of the four. The indeterminate possess only one, universality of nature.’⁷ Universality of nature means spanning wholesome, unwholesome, and ethically indeterminate states; universality of plane, spanning the three realms and nine planes; universality of time, being constant and uninterrupted; universality of co-occurrence, the five arising together with one another. Applied together, the four criteria measure the boundaries of the six groups.

The filled cells in Figure 4-3 do not decrease in every successive row. The universal, object-specific, wholesome, affliction, secondary affliction, and indeterminate rows contain four, two, one, zero, zero, and one filled cells, respectively. The statement below the matrix that they decrease from top to bottom should not be read as a decrease in every row.

The verses themselves give the complete list of fifty-one mental factors, transcribed here for reference. The five universal factors are contact, attention, feeling, perception, and volition. The five object-specific factors are ‘desire, resolution, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom.’ The eleven wholesome factors are ‘confidence, moral shame, moral dread, the three roots beginning with nongreed, diligence, tranquility, heedfulness, equanimity of formations, and harmlessness.’ The six afflictions are ‘greed, hatred, delusion, conceit, doubt, and wrong views.’ The twenty secondary afflictions are ‘anger, resentment, concealment, vexation, envy, avarice, deceit, dissimulation and harmfulness, vanity, shamelessness and moral fearlessness, restlessness and torpor, lack of confidence and laziness, heedlessness and forgetfulness, distraction, and incorrect awareness.’ The four indeterminate factors are ‘remorse, sleep, initial application, and sustained application.’⁸ The twenty secondary afflictions are further divided into three grades by how widely they occur. The commentary itself explains: ‘These twenty have three classes. The ten beginning with anger arise individually and are called minor secondary afflictions. The two beginning with shamelessness pervade the unwholesome and are called intermediate secondary afflictions. The eight beginning with restlessness pervade defiled consciousness and are called major secondary afflictions.’⁹

A cell-by-cell comparison with the southern tradition’s fifty-two. Chapter Two of Essay Fourteen supplied another inventory: fifty-two mental factors in four groups—seven universal to all consciousness, six occasional, fourteen unwholesome, and twenty-five beautiful. The two inventories differ by only one in total, yet their groupings are entirely different, providing a suitable comparison across traditions. First align the groups.

There are four substantive differences, to be examined in turn.

First, whether one-pointedness is universal to all consciousness. The southern tradition lists it among the seven factors universal to all consciousness, holding that every consciousness, however weak, carries a moment’s concentration. Consciousness-only lists concentration among the object-specific factors, holding that it arises only when there is concentration. These are opposite answers, not different degrees of subdivision. Each side has its reason. For the southern tradition, consciousness must have an object, and taking one object is already one-pointedness. The consciousness-only reason is written into the criterion for the object-specific: arising in relation to particular objects. Since concentration can fail to arise, it should not occupy a universal position. This book does not decide for them. It marks a direct conflict rare in the study of inventories, occurring in the most basic compartment.

Second, where the life faculty belongs. The southern tradition establishes it as a mental factor, arising and ceasing together with consciousness. Consciousness-only does not count it as a mental factor, assigning it instead to formations dissociated from consciousness. This item appeared in Chapter Four of Essay Fifteen: the life faculty, acquisition, nonmanifest matter, and group homogeneity form a family of formal entities created by the Sarvāstivādins for ‘continuation,’ whose quality Essay Fifteen assessed. The same functional item is registered as a mental function in the southern tradition and as a formal entity by the Sarvāstivādins. Consciousness-only retains the Sarvāstivādin placement, while in Chapter Eight it replaces the entire family with seeds and habitual impressions. Three traditions, three solutions: the difficulty left by Essay Fifteen now has a third answer, and the most economical one.

Third, the subdivision of tranquility. Consciousness-only has one item, ‘tranquility,’ in the wholesome group. Among the southern tradition’s nineteen universally beautiful factors, the corresponding items are six properties each on the bodily and mental sides: tranquility, lightness, malleability, adaptability, proficiency, and rectitude—twelve in total. One item versus twelve: there is no substantive difference of content, but a difference of format. The southern tradition first establishes a division into bodily and mental, then multiplies it by six properties; once the compartments are laid out, all must be filled. Essay Fourteen’s observation receives confirmation across traditions here: format determines the length of an inventory; content determines the number of patterns of distribution.

Fourth, the classification of sleep and remorse by nature. The southern tradition places sleep, torpor, and remorse among its fourteen unwholesome factors. Consciousness-only places sleep and remorse among the indeterminate, explicitly saying they ‘are indeterminate with respect to the wholesome, defiled, and so forth.’ It also gives its reason: sleep may be wholesome or defiled, and so may remorse. Regretting a wrong deed is wholesome; regretting a wholesome deed is defiled. Here the disagreement is open to reasoned discussion, unlike the first point, where the two sides hold opposite poles.

One further case has the same names at different levels and deserves a note. Shamelessness and moral fearlessness are intermediate secondary afflictions in consciousness-only, with the criterion ‘pervading the unwholesome.’ In the southern tradition they are two of the factors universal to all unwholesome consciousness, with the same criterion. The same judgment becomes a middle-rank category on one side and enters the top group directly on the other. Differences of this kind carry no doctrinal content. They reflect the hierarchical habits of the two systems of cataloging and must be stripped away before comparison.

The comparison can be summed up in one sentence. The cores of the two inventories overlap extensively: contact, feeling, perception, volition, attention, desire, resolution, mindfulness, concentration, wisdom, confidence, moral shame, moral dread, nongreed, nonhatred, and energy are shared, and most can be traced to the scriptural passage defining ‘mentality,’ quoted in Essay Fourteen. Differences concentrate in three places: the boundary of the universal group, the affiliation of formal entities, and the stratification of compartments for moral nature. The complete cell-by-cell table is left for a detailed treatment and listed here for future work.

Four aspects: how consciousness knows it is cognizing. This section is the chapter’s focus and supplies the premises for Chapter Eight’s verdict that ‘the self-cognition aspect is safe within the boundary.’

The starting point is a reassignment of jobs after the removal of external objects. If consciousness does not apprehend an external object, where does its object come from? Fascicle two of the commentary gives a two-aspect account: ‘When contaminated consciousness itself arises, it always appears as though it had the characteristics of object and apprehender’; ‘the appearance resembling an object is called the object-aspect, and the appearance resembling an apprehender is called the subject-aspect.’¹⁰ Two objections establish the necessity of the two aspects: ‘If consciousness and mental factors lacked an object-characteristic, they could not apprehend their own objects’; ‘if consciousness and mental factors lacked an apprehender-characteristic, they could not apprehend, like space and the like.’¹⁰ Without an object-characteristic there is no object to apprehend; without an apprehender-characteristic they are like space. Both characteristics must therefore be present.

The comparison immediately following is especially revealing. The commentary sets two positions side by side: ‘Those who hold that an object of apprehension exists apart from consciousness say that the external object is the object, the object-aspect is the mode of cognition, and the subject-aspect is the underlying thing’; ‘those who understand that there is no object of apprehension apart from consciousness say that the object-aspect is the object, the subject-aspect is the mode of cognition, and the consciousness itself on which object- and subject-aspects depend is the underlying thing, namely the self-cognition aspect.’¹⁰ There are the same three jobs—object, mode of cognition, and underlying thing. The realist about external objects assigns them to the external object, object-aspect, and subject-aspect; consciousness-only assigns them to the object-aspect, subject-aspect, and consciousness itself. The four aspects result from redistributing the remaining duties after the external object’s post is abolished; they are not an extra functional level produced from nowhere. Seeing this restores the four-aspect theory from a mysterious introspective psychology to a reassignment of jobs.

The evidence for three aspects is a verse from Dignāga’s Compendium of Valid Cognition: ‘The object-resembling aspect is what is cognized; / the apprehending aspect and self-cognition / are the means of cognition and its result. / These three do not differ in their constitution.’¹¹ Valid cognition is three in one: object, means, and result. For an act of cognition to be established, there must be what is cognized, what cognizes, and the result obtained; none can be missing. The self-cognition aspect occupies the result position.

The four-aspect account adds another level through a standard argument for stopping a regress: ‘If this did not exist, who would verify the third? Since they are alike as aspects of consciousness, all should be verified. Moreover, the self-cognition aspect would have no result, whereas every means of cognition must have a result. The subject-aspect cannot be the third’s result, because the subject-aspect is sometimes classed as nonvalid cognition. Hence the subject-aspect does not verify the third, since what verifies consciousness itself must be direct perception.’¹² The self-cognition aspect needs a result; the subject-aspect cannot supply it, because it sometimes falls under nonvalid cognition. What verifies consciousness itself must be direct perception, so a fourth aspect is established separately. A concluding sentence states the entire circuit: ‘The third and fourth are both classed as direct perception. Thus consciousness and mental factors are composed of four aspects, possessing object and apprehender, without the fault of an infinite regress, neither identical nor separate. The principle of consciousness-only is established.’¹²

The commentary itself explains why it stops at the fourth: ‘The fourth, verification of self-cognition, apprehends only the third, not the second, because doing so would serve no purpose.’¹² The fourth does not apprehend the second because it would be useless. The third and fourth apprehend each other, closing the circuit; hence ‘no fault of an infinite regress.’

Attribution follows this book’s established practice. The commentary presents these four levels through ‘one view holds’ and two forms of ‘those who,’ without naming anyone throughout. Chinese Buddhist commentaries later assigned the one-, two-, three-, and four-aspect positions to Sthiramati, Nanda, Dignāga, and Dharmapāla. This is classificatory language of the East Asian commentarial tradition. Chapter Three of Essay Six in Part I already imposed the chronological restriction, and this essay follows it: reproduce the argument’s structure, but identify the personal names as commentarial attributions, not the Indian theorists’ own labels. The direct text of Sthiramati’s line, the Commentary on the Thirty Verses on Consciousness-Only, has not been directly checked and is listed for future treatment.

Examining the four aspects in the form of the theorem. Stopping a regress is a common technique. Chapter Five of Essay Eighteen treated a problem of the same form: if the theorem is to apply to itself without destroying itself, the stopping point must be specified clearly. The clause is this: stopping the regress is permissible, provided the stopping point is not established as a new domain of objects. The four-aspect theory’s stopping point is self-cognition ‘wholly classed as direct perception,’ and the commentary gives it the wording ‘neither identical nor separate.’ It is neither identical to nor separate from the subject-aspect and is not established as a thing apart from it. Read according to this wording, the self-cognition aspect is a clause of cognition’s self-evidence: an act of cognition that is opaque to itself would not count as cognition. It is not an observer seated inside.

Chapter Three of Essay Nineteen drew a boundary for the self-cognition aspect: admit it within ordinary conventions and use it as a component of a mechanism. This chapter’s reexamination upholds that boundary on the evidence of the two wordings above. The reading that crosses the boundary must be identified at the same time. If the self-cognition aspect is read as an internal witness constantly present, it immediately acquires D2’s first condition, standing without dependence on anything else, and falls within the scope of application under the rules. Candrakīrti’s criticism in Section Four of Chapter Five of Essay Five in Part I targets precisely this reading across the boundary; it does not reach the commentary’s own wording. The substance of the two sides’ dispute has the same form as Chapter Seven’s adjudication of emptiness versus existence: it concerns the level at which the same term is used, rather than two claims on the same level.

Three kinds of cognition and three kinds of objects. The three kinds of cognition have a basis in the commentary. Fascicle two says the subject-aspect is ‘valid or nonvalid, direct perception or inference,’ while self-cognition and verification of self-cognition ‘are both classed as direct perception.’¹² The reading in one sentence: kinds of cognition are bound to aspect-positions; which kind an aspect can produce is determined by its position in the circuit, rather than by content. This is a formal feature of consciousness-only epistemology and a point of connection with Dignāga’s theory of valid cognition.

The three kinds of objects—objects with their own character, images alone, and objects carrying a basis—come from a verse transmitted by Xuanzang and recorded in Kuiji’s Essential Points of the Establishment of Consciousness-Only. The original work has not been checked for this volume; the entry remains provisional. If the material for this entry becomes available, this section could be combined with the objects of the eighth consciousness—seeds, the body with its faculties, and the receptacle world—and manas’s object—the eighth consciousness apprehended as a self—to make a complete table of objects: the storehouse’s transformations belong to objects with their own character, manas’s object belongs to objects carrying a basis, and images alone are the exclusive products of mental consciousness. The framework of the table is in place; it can be filled when the material arrives.

This chapter’s verdict: three items for Chapter Eight. First, the inventories of eight consciousnesses and mental factors are judged to be a classificatory undertaking at level E2, by the same criterion as Essay Fourteen’s inventories. The commentary defines each item in the format of the two terms ‘nature’ and ‘function,’ stating what it does and obstructs, rather than what independently constituted thing it is. This book uniformly reads what is defined through function as designation. Second, the three Chinese characters 自能立, ‘can establish itself,’ in the descending table of coexistent bases are registered as an opening in the wording and treated as a risky sentence, for the reasons given above. Third, the four aspects are judged safe within the boundary, on the evidence of the regress-stopping wording ‘neither identical nor separate’ and ‘both classed as direct perception.’ Reifying readings enter the scope of application under the rules.

The chapter’s deferred topics are listed together for future expansion: the nine conditions for the arising of consciousness, in the tradition of the Verses on the Rules of the Eight Consciousnesses; the three kinds of objects, in Kuiji’s Essential Points of the Establishment of Consciousness-Only; the fourfold distinction of constant discerning mentation, in the Commentary on the Establishment of Consciousness-Only; a consciousness-only counterpart to the table associating eighty-nine consciousnesses with fifty-two mental factors, complete cell by cell; and the source text of the one-aspect theory in Sthiramati’s Commentary on the Thirty Verses on Consciousness-Only.

References¶