Into the Jaws of Yama, Lord of Death: Buddhism, Bioethics, and Death

3. Understanding the Nature of Consciousness

Chapter 3  Understanding the Nature of Consciousness When Buddhists approach the topics of death and ethical decision making, their primary focus is not the body or soul, but consciousness . Consciousness is central to human experience, because it is the means by which we know the world around us. There are many different Buddhist philosophical perspectives, but generally speaking, existing things belong to three mutually exclusive categories: matter, consciousness, and “non-associated factors” (things that are neither matter nor consciousness, like undifferentiated space). Phenomena— the things around us—exist insofar as they are objects of knowledge, established by valid cognition. The Buddha taught a path to liberation for all sentient beings, meaning beings with consciousness: human beings, animals, and many other life forms. All sentient beings are involved in the wheel of birth and death known as cyclic existence (saμsåra). Since the beginning of time (or beginningless time, as the Buddhists put it), countless beings have been migrating from one state of existence to another in accordance with the law of cause and effect or, as some texts put it, “at the mercy of karma and delusion.” Sentient beings continue to take birth again and again, sometimes in blissful states of existence and sometimes in truly miserable states of existence, depending on their previous actions. The goal for Buddhists is to free themselves from this repetitive, seemingly endless cycle of rebirths, that is, to achieve liberation . The key to gaining liberation from the cycle of rebirth is to purify the mind of all afflictions, such as greed, attachment, anger, hatred, and ignorance, and thereby avoid creating unwholesome deeds. 31 32 Into the Jaws of Yama, Lord of Death To understand how living beings become caught up in cyclic existence and how they can become free from it, an understanding of the nature and functioning of consciousness is therefore essential. By consciousness, Buddhists simply mean knowing or awareness . Consciousness is not a solid or enduring entity, but simply an impermanent stream or continuity of conscious moments. Each moment of consciousness gives rise to a subsequent moment of consciousness , in accordance with the law of cause and effect. These conscious events—mental or sensory—continue from moment to moment like a string of pearls, each moment giving rise to the next. Even during sleep, the continuum of consciousness is present in a subtle form. At each moment of each lifetime, conscious awareness is the process through which sentient beings experience happiness, unhappiness , and many other emotions and perceptions. Consciousness is just one of the elements that comprise the human being, but it is the most important one, because it is the central processing center for all experiences. At the moment of death, consciousness is also present and is critical in the process of taking another rebirth. The last moment of awareness in one lifetime acts as the cause of the next moment of awareness, which is the first moment of the next state of existence. Understanding the nature of consciousness is thus crucial for understanding the process of dying and rebirth. In the Buddhist schema, there are six different types of consciousness . The five sense consciousnesses arise in dependence on the sense faculties or powers (indriya) and mental consciousness arises in dependence on the mental faculty or power. When one of the five sense faculties (eye, ear, nose, tongue, or body) comes into contact with its respective sense object, a moment of sense consciousness (visual, auditory , olfactory, gustatory, tactile, or mental) comes into being. When the mental faculty comes into contact with a thought or mental image, a moment of mental consciousness comes into being. The continually changing series of conscious mental events constitutes the mental continuum. Sense experience—seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching—is subsequently processed through the mental faculty, which labels, distinguishes, and acts on it. The duration of each moment of consciousness is brief, perhaps one-seventy-fifth of a second, a theory supported by recent findings in experimental psychology. In addition to the six types of primary consciousness, the texts describe more than fifty mental factors. The terms “consciousness” (jñåna), awareness (buddhi), and knowing (saμvedana) are used synonymously. These terms are generally preferred to the term “mind,” which may connote something more Understanding the Nature of Consciousness 33 solid or enduring. The term consciousness is also used to denote the mental continuum—a sequence of impermanent, dependently arising moments of awareness (citta...