Time-series of ephemeral impressions: the Abhidharma-Buddhist view of conscious experience

Monima Chadha

Abstract In the absence of continuing selves or persons, Buddhist philosophers are under pressure to provide a systematic account of phenomenological and other features of conscious experience. Any such Buddhist account of experience, however, faces further problems because of another cardinal tenet of Buddhist revisionary metaphysics: the doctrine of impermanence, which during the Abhidharma period is transformed into the doctrine ofmomentariness. Settingaside theproblemsthat plague the Buddhist Abhidharma theory of experience because of lack of persons, I shall focus on problems that arise because of its allegiance to momentariness and explore some responses on behalf of the Abhidharma Buddhist philosophers. I address two challenges to the Buddhist view in this paper. The first, which I will call the “Phenomenological Challenge”, primarily concerns the temporal properties of what is represented in conscious experience. The second, which I will call the “Metaphysical Challenge”, concerns the temporal properties of conscious representation itself.

Keywords Abhidarma-Buddhism.Phenomenologyofexperience.Temporality. Momentariness.Consciousness

1 Introduction

The Buddhists’ revisionary “self-less” metaphysical scheme is profoundly counterintuitive,and the Buddhists are acutely aware of thisfact. Accordingly, Buddhistwritings are replete with attempts to explain phenomenological and other features of our experience of the world in the absence of selves or persons. A main aim of the Abhidharma-Buddhist Schools is to provide a systematic and phenomenologically informed account of experience by analysing conscious experience into its constituent mental and physical factors. Any such Buddhist account of experience, however, faces Phenom Cogn Sci DOI 10.1007/s11097-014-9354-2

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their extremely insightful and helpful comments. The paper has improved greatly because of their input. M. Chadha (*) Monash University, PO Box 11A, Wellington Road, Clayton, VIC 3800, Australia e-mail: [email protected] serious challenges because of the cardinal tenet of their revisionary metaphysics: the doctrine of impermanence, which is transformed into the doctrine of momentariness in the Abhidharma period (Ronkin 2010). Although much scholastic attention in the classical and contemporary Abhidharma literature has been

focussed on the issues of continuity and causation of mental states, there is not much discussion specifically about the constitution of conscious experiences. The Abhidharma are committed to what appears to be a deeply problematic claim: seemingly rich conscious experiences are made fully available in a moment. This claim demands an explanation. This paper, therefore, aims to redress this gap by explicating the tension caused by the doctrine of momentariness to the very constitution of conscious experience in Abhidharma and to offer a resolution of this tension. The conflict between momentariness and conscious experience has

been explored elsewhere in different contexts in contemporary phenomenology as well as in contemporary analytic metaphysics. The first, which I will call the “Phenomenological Challenge”, primarily concerns the temporal properties of what is represented in conscious experience. The second, which I will call the “Metaphysical Challenge”, concerns the temporal properties of conscious representation itself.1 A version of the Phenomenological Challenge has been raised by Zahavi (2012, p. 151) against the Buddhist denial of a persisting self as the principle of diachronic unity; specifically against Dreyfus’s(2011, p. 123) account that endorses synchronic unity but not diachronic unity. A version of the Metaphysical Challenge raised by Le Poidevin (2011) and McKinnon (2003) concerns

temporal properties of conscious representation: they believe that the temporal extent of a conscious state must necessarily exceed that of the present moment. Clearly, the targets and argumentative routes of the above contexts are different from my purposes here, which is to question the Abhidharma notion of conscious experiences in the light of their momentariness doctrine. It is obvious that the Phenomenological Challenge directly extends to my question, while the extension of the Metaphysical Challenge is perhaps debateable. The Abhidharma notion of conscious experience becomes a target for Metaphysical Challenge because of their commitment to the doctrine of momentariness: most mature Abhidharma Schools, e.g. Sautrāntikas, Theravāda and Yogacāra subscribed to this doctrine. The plan of

the paper is as follows. Section 1 explains Abhidharma analysis of conscious experience and the doctrine of momentariness. Abhidharma is best thought of as a plural tradition that has evolved over centuries in India after the death of Buddha. The Abhidharma Schools present Buddha’s teachings in technical terms that are carefully defined to ensure analytical exactitude (Ronkin 2010). They attempt to formulate a minimalist ‘dharma’ ontology that is sufficient to ground the Buddhist world-view and its therapeutic value. In doing so, these Abhidharma Schools present and defend various doctrines about the nature of ultimate reality, space, time and consciousness. As Dreyfus says, there is no one view that can qualify as “the Buddhist view of consciousness”. Buddhist philosophy contains a wealth of material that is relevant to the concept of consciousness and that of mind, and the best we can do is to

1 Versions of what I have called the Metaphysical and Phenomenological Challenges are longstanding issues in the phenomenology of time. I will present herea reconstructionof how theAbhidharma philosophersmight address these challenges. This is not, however, to suggest that by referring to Abhidharma ontology we have addressed these problems once and for all. Residual problems remain, as is to be expected, with the solutions proposed n this paper.

mine the Buddhist sources which contain rich information to show how it may be relevant to contemporary discussions of consciousness (Dreyfus 2011, p. 115). My focus will be the Sautrāntika view of consciousness proposed by Vasubandhu in Abhidharmakośa-bhāsya, which I believe contains critical philosophical insights relevant to contemporary concerns. Vasubandhu’s textAbhidharmakośa and his autocommentary Abhidharmakośa-bhāsya are traditionally understood as

presenting the Sarvāstivāda-Sautrāntika debate. On one reading, the text represents the Sarvāstivāda view and the commentary the (Vasubandhu’s own) Sautrāntika critique.2 This reading is however not universally accepted. Buddhist scholars struggle to disentangle the intertwining of Sarvāstivāda and Sautrāntika views in the text and the autocommentary to determine Vasubandhu’s own stance. What is clear though is that the Sautrāntika view of consciousness does not stand alone. It is inspired by the Sarvāstivāda view that precedes it and also benefits from the Yogacāra view (the logical conclusion of the Mahāyana Buddhist view) that

follows it. These antecedent and consequent relationships need to be properly fleshed out to appreciate the Sautrāntika theses and that task will be accomplished in Section 1. Sections2 and 3 discuss how the Sautrāntika view of consciousness is susceptible to the Phenomenological and the Metaphysical Challenges

respectively. The final Section will discuss how the Ābhidharmikas might address these challenges. A satisfactory response on behalf of the Ābhidharmikas will incorporate features of consciousness brought out by the later Yogacāra philosophers and some later representatives of the earlier Sarvāstivāda tradition. However, this is to be expected: Abhidharma is to be best understood as an evolving tradition: its most important protagonist, Vasubandhu, himself, studied in the Sarvāstivāda traditions, founded the Sautrāntika doctrine and later in his life became a Yogacārin.

2 Conscious experience in the Abhidharma-Sautrāntika traditions

The early Buddhist analysis of experience reveals that what we experience as a temporally extended, uninterrupted, flow of phenomena is, in fact, a rapidly occurring sequence of causally connected events eachwith its particular discrete object; much the same way a rapidly projected sequence of juxtaposed discrete images is perceived as a movie. Sentient experience is explained in terms of mental and physical processes

(skandhas3)thatariseandceaseinacausalsequence.Thedistinctivecontributionofthe Ābhidharmikas is that they reduce the time scale of sequential mental and physical processes and regard them as discrete momentary events (Ronkin 2005, pp. 66 –78). Vasubandhu believes that these discrete momentary events (dharmas) exist only for an instant or moment (kaṇa), where a moment is the limit of time. There are various opinions regarding the duration of a moment. Vasubandhu says that there are 64 moments in the time that it takes for a healthy man to snap his fingers (3.85b–c); othersevensaythatbillions ofmindmoments elapseinthe timeittakes for lightning to

2 Chapters1–8oftheAbhidharmakośa-bhāsyaaredividedintoverses.Iwillfollowtheusualpracticeofciting passages by giving verse numbers. Chapter 9 is in prose; I will cite passages using page numbers in Pruden’s English translation. 3 Skandhas are aggregates of dharmas (1.7a-b).

flash or eye to blink. These discrete momentary events or ‘dharmas’ are the only existents, and they alone are objects of knowledge. Abhidharma produces a complete account of reality in terms of this single category of ultimately real entities: the dharmas. It is important at this stage to note a further clarification about the kind of ultimate constituents or dharmas that are sought by the Ābhidharmika philosophers. Dreyfus notes that “… the Abhidharma analysis of the mental is a description of the complexity of the components of mental processes as they are phenomenologically available,not an analysisof the ontological basis ofmentalprocesses,a basis that isnot readily available to the kind of analysis central to its project” (2011, p. 119). Dharmas can be thus thought of as

the basic components of mental and physical processes, basic in the sense that they cannot be further analysed into more basic phenomenologically available components.4 The early Sarvāstivādins defend tri-temporal (past, present and future) existence of the momentary dharmas.5 They argue that as we are aware of past and future objects, these object do really exist, since consciousness is necessarily ‘of an object’. The Sarvāstivādins advocate a strict causal account of valid cognition in arguing that only a real object can be the cause of a cognition. Apart from being ontologically promiscuous, this account fails to make sense of the fundamental Abhidharma tenet: momentariness of all causally conditioned dharmas. Furthermore, it is difficult for the Sarvāstivādins to account for the

differences between past, present and future dharmas. In response to this, the Sarvāstivādins say that it is only the present dharmas that are causally efficacious, the past dharmas are no longer so and the future dharmas are yet to be efficacious. Thus the Sarvāstivādins save their Abhidharma commitment to the doctrineofmomentariness bylimitingefficacyonlytoa present dharma.However,this opensthemtoaveryseriouschallenge.Byseparatingtheefficacyofadharmafromthe dharma itself and regarding the former as a changing and the latter as an unchanging property, the Sarvāstivādins can, in introducing this substance-attribute

distinction, be held to be in violation of an important principle of Buddhist philosophy that denies any such distinction. The principle in turn is derived from the fundamental tenet of Buddhist philosophy that merelogical sums are unreal.6 The Sautrāntika School emerged from a series of critiques, including the Sarvāstivāda doctrine, above. In his critique, Vasubandhu rejects the distinction between substance and attributes (Pruden 1988, p. 1348). It is wrong to think of dharmas as substances, since substances are independent existents. However, according to the Buddhist doctrine of dependent origination (Pratītyasamutpāda) there are no independent existents; everything that exists is conditioned by its causes. Furthermore, dharmas are not universals, for Vasubandhu argues against the existence of universals (2.41a). Also, dharmas are not composite entities: they are simple, without spatial or temporal parts. Vasubandhu argues that medium-sized physical objects that we

4 Dreyfus notes an important qualification that these basic components must, at least indirectly, be phenomenologically available (2011, p. 118) in the sense that some of these may not be introspectable. They might, however, be available with appropriate mental training, as in mindfulness meditation. 5 The Sarvāstivādins acknowledgement of the existence of the past and future dharmas gives them extra ammunition to deal with the Phenomenological and Metaphysical Challenges raised in this paper. However, a reconstruction of such a response on behalf of the Sarvāstivāda philosophers and an evaluation of its success will take us too far afield from the task of this paper. 6 Thanks to an anonymous reviewer of this journal for clarifying this point.

normally regard as real like jars, heaps, streams, persons, etc., are composites or aggregates of dharmas. These composites, he argues, do not exist in the ultimate sense, they are real only with reference to conception (prajñapti-sat); only dharmas exist in the ultimate sense (paramartha-sat) (6.4). But, then, one may ask: what are these dharmas, these ultimate constituents of reality? The Sautrāntikas have very little to say on this. They claim that dharmas are of two kinds: conditioned and unconditioned.7 Among the conditioned dharmas, there are material (rūpa) and mental (citta, caitta, etc.) dharmas. Materialdharmas (rūpa)

are in space, but consciousness ‘not having a mass, is not situated in a place’ (1.43a–b). Contemporary Buddhist philosophers have proposedthat the bestway to understand a dharma is to think of it as ‘an elementary quality or event or condition’ (Goodman 2004, p. 393) or‘a thin property ’ (Ganeri 2001, p. 99); a‘trope’ as in contemporary analytic philosophy: e.g., the particular white of this wall rather than whiteness as such. Tropes, like physical objects, are particulars, as they are located in a particular time and space, though not necessarily so. They can be individuated as primitive particulars without spatio-temporal dimensions (Maurin 2013). They are unlike universals, in that they are not wholly present in each instance although they point to groups of identical things. However, in

some sense, they share features with universals, in that they are ‘ways objects are’. 8 Trope theorists believe that both particulars and universals can be understood as aggregates or sets of tropes. So, for example, we can think of Vasubandhu as an aggregate of Vasubandhu’s colour, Vasubandhu’s shape, Vasubandhu’s logical acumen, etc. and similarly we can think of intelligence as bundle of Vasubandhu’s intelligence, Asanga’s intelligence, Udayana’s intelligence, etc. Likewise, the Abhidharma would analyse the middle-sized mental and physical objects as aggregates of dharmas. Thus, we can think of dharmas as tropes that have temporal dimensions only. Such a trope-theoretic interpretation of dharmas has been used to reconstruct an Abhidharmaaccountofthephysical world(Goodman2004)

aswellasoftheconscious experience (Ganeri 2012) by an appeal to the notion of Humean supervenience (Lewis 1986, p. ix). Humean supervenience is the view that everything supervenes on spatiotemporal distribution of intrinsic properties. Weatherson (forthcoming) offers a useful picture to understand this thesis. Imagine that the world is like a giant video-monitor. The facts about a monitor’s appearance supervene, plausibly, on intrinsic qualities of the pixels, together with facts about the spatial arrangement of the pixels. However, I want to steer away from Humean supervenience in offering a reconstruction of conscious experiences for two reasons: a) dharmas are not necessarily physical, and for this reason b) they are also not necessarily spatial entities, (see, 1.43 a– b above). Thus,

Humean supervenience, which necessarily involves intrinsic properties instantiated at spatio-temporal points, is not suited to an Abhidharma analysis. My own reconstruction offered in the last section will use the notion of dharma-clusters, vertical causation and supervenience.

7 The unconditioned dharmas are constituents of meditative states and liberation and are thus beyond the scope of this paper. 8 Theideathatdharmas aretropes hasbeen suggestedinMarkSiderits(1997)and hasalsobeendeveloped by Ganeri (2001). Ganeri’s focus is on an interpretation of Dignāga.

For Buddhist epistemology generally, sensory perception is the paradigm of conscious experience. According to most Abhidharma schools, sensory perception is always intentional, and is brought about by an interaction among the sense faculties (e.g., eye), the corresponding type of consciousness (visual consciousness) and their appropriate sense objects (form, colour, etc.). On this view, the objects of experience are not unitary and stable particulars (like this table) but complex and ephemeral formations of basic momentary events (dharmas) arising within complex causal nexuses. A key thesis of Abhidharma philosophy of mind is that experience is constituted bypsychologically primitive processes that normallylie below the level of phenomenal consciousness. They hold that there are five

universal factors that accompany every conscious mental state, namely, contact (sparśa), attention (manasikāra), feeling (vedanā), ideation (sa jñā), and volition (cetanā). The role of these mental factors in conscious experience becomes obvious if we take into account the fact that the mere coming together of an object, sense faculty and its corresponding consciousness is not sufficient for a conscious experience to arise. The senses always process a steady stream of

sensory impressions; some clusters of these impressions become a concrete object conscious experience only when attention is directed toward specific regions of the perceptual field. Attention, thus, is necessary but not sufficient for conscious experience. Similar analysis can be offered for the role of remaining universal mental factors in conscious experience. Concrete objects of conscious experience are created by the interplay of these five mental factors. Ganeri explains this succinctly:

The great elegance and attraction of the [[[Abhidharma]]] theory lies in the fact that simultaneously it recognises the irreducibility of the phenomenal character of experience, it admits the joint contribution of sensation and conceptualisation in the constitution of experience, it acknowledges that experience is, as it were, saturated with affect, that appraisal is built into the fabric of experience, it maintains that every experience has, as a basic ingredient, a capacity or tendency to combine in various ways with various others, and it makes the attention intrinsic to experience (2012, p. 127).

The Sarvāstivādins and the Sautrāntikas also differ in their explanations of the relation of perception to its object. The Sarvāstivādins are direct realists in that they hold that perception directly apprehends external reality; there is no need for mediating representations. The external reality, however, does not contain (medium-sized) physical objects, but their sensible qualities. Dreyfus characterizes this view as phenomenalist realism (1997, p. 331). The Sautrāntika view that only present dharmas exist and that too only for an infinitesimal moment, on the other hand, makes it difficult to explain how perception can directly apprehend its object. According to this view, there is a tiny time-gap between the sense-object contact and the arising of sensory awareness; and since

everything exists for a moment, the object of the initial contact no longer exists; therefore, sensory awareness is of the representation of the object. Thus, they, instead, turn to what may be characterised as representational realism: objects are apprehended by perception indirectly through the mediation of aspects (ākāra) representative of the objects (Ronkin 2010). Dreyfus explains that according to the Sautrāntika and Yogacāra traditions, “[t]he object does not appear directly or nakedly to consciousness but through the phenomenal form (ākāra, rnam pa, literally ‘aspect’)

it gives rise to in the cognitive process, its manifestation within the field of consciousness. Awareness of the object is then the consciousness itself perceiving the phenomenal form or the manifestation of the object. The implication of this view is that consciousness is intrinsically self-aware” (2011, p. 120). The‘intrinsic selfawareness’ of cognition is further explicated by later Yogacāra philosophers Dignāga and Dharmakīrti through the doctrine of reflexive apperception of mental states (svasai vedana). This Sautrāntika view faces serious challenges, phenomenological and metaphysical. The Ābhidharmikas take the phenomenology of the experience as the primary data to be explained by the dharma metaphysics. Experiences are presented to us as having a temporal extension, e.g., hearing a melody, seeing an apple falling, etc. However, the dharma metaphysics permits only momentary existents in the present instant. Neither the object of experience nor the conscious state representing the experience is temporally extended; because nothing is. Adopting the representationalist stance gives the

Sautrāntika some additional resources to explain the phenomenology of conscious experiences by an appeal to more than what is given to the senses in the present infinitesimal moment. However, the account, inescapably, needs to deal with the phenomenological and metaphysical concerns discussed below in detail.

3 The phenomenological challenge

Zahavi (pp. 150–151) argues that recent discussions of the Abhidharma view, for example those by Dreyfus (2011, pp. 120–123), lack coherence. Dreyfus suggests a reading of the Abhidharma account of subjectivity that recognises that our experiences are intrinsically self-aware, while at the same time denying that this subjectivity can be interpreted as a persisting self. It must be noted that Dreyfus’ discussion is focussed mainly on a Yogacāra inspired view of consciousness rather than a Sautrāntika inspired view, which is the focus of our discussion here. Dreyfus ignores the question whether the Yogacāra view entails a form of idealism or not. His concerns are different, being limited to “cognitive and phenomenological considerations, which are not always usefully connected to

metaphysical or ontological questions” (2011, p. 116). In effect, Dreyfus is ignoring the major point that differentiates the Sautrāntika and Yogacāra views: the former’s representative realism versus the latter’s idealism. As far as cognitive and phenomenologicaldoctrines are concerned,the Sautrāntika and Yogacāra views agree with each other. What is important for my purposes here is the fact that the Yogacāra inherited the doctrine of momentariness, whose doctrine is at the root of the problems with the Sautrāntika account of conscious experience. Therefore, insofar as Zahavi’s criticism applies to the Abhidharma-Yogacāra view, it

also affects the Sautrāntika view discussed in the last section. Dreyfus’ interpretation of the Sautrāntika-Yogacāra doctrine allows for synchronic unity of experiences: self-specified experiences that at any given moment are reflexively transparent to the momentary conscious state itself. However, he denies diachronic unity since there is no temporally extended and persisting self:

This [[[Buddhist]]] response rests on the distinction between two senses of who we are: the subject, or, rather subjectivity, that is, the continuum of momentary

mental states with their first-personal self-givenness, which are central to being a person …, and the self, which is an illusory reification of subjectivity as being a boundedagent enduringthrough time, rather thana complexflowoffleetingselfspecified experiences. Hence, the perceptions, thoughts, and memories that arise within the continuum of my mind are not impersonal. They are clearly mine in the sense of there being no possible doubt about who is the subject of these

experiences. But this does not entail that there is an act-transcendent pole of identity, an entity that endures before and after the moment of experience, in relation to which I can establish that these experiences are mine, for all that there is a succession of self-aware subjective states (2011, pp. 130–131). Zahavi’s challenge to this position, what I call a version of the Phenomenological Challenge, is motivated by Husserl’s claim that “…the perception of succession and change is impossible if perception only provided us with access to a momentary or now-slice of the object and if the stream of consciousness itself was a

series of unconnected points of experiencing, like a line of pearls” (Zahavi 2012, p. 151). There are two distinct targets here: our consciousness of temporally extended objects and our awareness of our own conscious states. Husserl maintains that our phenomenology makes clear that we are directly experiencing succession and change, rather than remembering or imagining it. Regarding the first, Husserl asks: how is it possible for ustobeconscious

ofobjectswithtemporalextension,e.g., melodies which unfoldover time? He answers this by advocating on the width of presence: the basic unit of temporality is not a knife-edge present—a moment as the Sautrāntikas would say— rather, it is a field in which the now, not-now and not-yet-now are given in a horizontal gestalt. Just like time, consciousness itself, according to Husserl, has a temporal structure which is spelt out using the semi-technical triad: protention-primal

impression-retention. A primal impression is narrowly directed towards the contemporaneous now-slice of the object. However, it is an abstraction never directly given in experience, but extracted from within a past (retention) and a future oriented (protention) temporal context. The primal impression is always embedded in the temporal context of a retentional aspect, which provides a consciousness of the justelapsed slice of the object, and a protentional aspect, which in some way intends the slice of the object about to occur. At any given moment this triad is present as a unified whole. Regarding the second, Husserl claims that retention, e.g., in hearing the past notes of a melody, is not accomplished by literal re-presentation of the notes, but by retention ofmyjust-past

experienceofthemelody.The so-called present consciousness retains not just the just-past tones but also the just-past phase of consciousness. The point can similarly be extended to protention: the so-called present consciousness protends (intends in the future) not just the just-future tones, but also the just-future phase of consciousness. These retentional and protentional processes do not merely permit us to experience a temporally extended object; they also constitute the identity of an object in a manifold of temporal phases and provide us with non-observational, pre-reflective, temporal consciousness (Zahavi 2012, p. 152). According to Husserl, consciousness is not in need of any transcendent principle of unification, a reflective metacognition or a synthesizing ego, because consciousness is self-unifying. The principles that constitute experience provide the glue for the unity of consciousness. The central point of Zahavi is summed up well by him:

For him [[[Wikipedia:Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl|Husserl]]] …even the analysis of something as synchronic as a present experience would have to include a consideration of temporality, since every experience is a temporally extended lived presence. For the very same reason, we should reject Dreyfus’ attempt to make a clear cut distinction between synchronic unity and diachronic unity. You cannot have synchronic unity without some kind of diachronic unity (if ever so short-lived). To claim otherwise is to miss the fundamental temporal character of consciousness (2012, pp. 153–154). Tosumup:thegeneral upshotofthePhenomenologicalChallengeisthatthecontent of a minimal experience must have some temporal thickness; it cannot be the knifeedge present. If Zahavi and Hussrel are right, then phenomenological analysis of experience spells serious trouble for the Abhidharma (at least the Sautrāntika) account of conscious experience.9 However, before I address a Buddhist response to these concerns, I will discuss the Metaphysical Challenge first.

4 The metaphysical challenge

Unlike the Phenomenological Challenge, the Metaphysical Challenge is not directly aimed at a Buddhist or Abhidharma account of conscious experience. It is instead directedattheoriesoftime: McKinnon (2003) aimsatpresentism, whereas Le Poidevin (2011) presents it as a challenge for A-Theories of time, which treat presentness as not beinga matter ofperspective.Whatisimportant,however,for our purposeshere, isthat this challenge is premised on the claim that conscious states are non-instantaneous. The examples which motivate the Metaphysical Challenge are ordinary experiences of temporally unextended objects like feeling the hardness of the chair you are sitting on, hearing a door bang as someone leaves the room, sensing an itch in your toe right now, having the thought that all these experiences are co-conscious right at this very moment. An appeal to the phenomenology of one’s present experience offers good reasons to argue that its having non-zero duration is an essential aspect of one’s experience. We can strengthen this claim by appeal to evidence from the “hard” sciences such as neuroscience and neurophysiology. Le Poidevin and McKinnon argue

9 A similar worry which draws its inspiration from James’s slogan that a succession of awareness is not an awareness of succession has been raised by Dainton (2000) and Tye (2003). The thought is that instantaneous experiences cannot account for the phenomenology of the experience of succession. Dainton puts the point thus: We are constantly aware of phenomenal contents undergoing passage, there is constant flow and

continualrenewalofcontent.Thisexperiencedpassageisbothcontinuousandhomogeneous…Ifexperiences were packaged into discrete units this would not be the case (2000, p. 129). Dainton offers the phenomenologically primitive relation of diachronic co-consciousness as the glue for theunity of consciousness.Itis hard to understand this ‘suigeneris’,‘unanalysable’,basicexperientialrelation because Dainton does not do much more than characterise it in negative terms. Co-consciousness is not itself an experience, nor does it depend on further experiences (except those it relates) or any other sort of awareness.Diachronic co-consciousness,it seems, is meant to providethe phenomenological glue thatconfers phenomenal unity and continuity but, as far as I understand, it adds no

explanatory value to the phenomenological account offered by Husserl. The pre-reflective consciousness that accompanies every experience provides is the common factor that binds together all of one’s experiences over a reasonable breadth of time, positing the relation of co-consciousness overandabove such a consciousnessismultiplying relations without necessity.

that instanteous experiences are impossible because of constraints on thresholds for stimulus detection (conscious sensation) and for conscious perception. In what follows it is useful to think of conscious sensations as the raw registration of some conscious event within a particular sense faculty and conscious perception as more complicated process which requires recognitional capacities and other conceptual abilities and is articulable as a judgement. The term

‘conscious experience’ will be used to cover both conscious sensations and perceptions. The simple model requires that a minimum level of energy impinge on some sense-organ triggering a neural process that results in conscious perception. The neural processes happen at suchhigh-speedthat subjectively they seem virtually instantaneous. Experimental evidence, however, reveals otherwise. A much researched and experimentally confirmed hypothesis called the “global neuronal workspace model” for conscious access imposes a temporal granularity on neural states in a stream of consciousness. This framework postulates that, at any given time, many modular cerebral networks are active in parallel and process information in an unconscious manner. Information becomes conscious when the neural population that

represents it is mobilized by top-down attentional amplification into a brain-scale state of coherent activity that involves many neurons distributed throughout the brain. The long-distance connectivity of these “workspace neurons”, when they are active for some minimum duration, makes the information available to a variety of processes including perceptual categorization, long-term memorization, evaluation, and intentional action. This global availability of information through the workspace is what we subjectively experience as a conscious state. Dehaene and Naccache say:

This [implementation of the workspace model] …suggests the existence of two thresholds in human information processing, one that corresponds to the minimal stimulus duration needed to cause any differentiated neural activity at all, and another, the ‘consciousness threshold’, which corresponds to the significantly longer duration needed for such a neural representation to be mobilized in the workspace through a self-sustained long-distance loop. Stimuli that fall in between those two thresholds cause transient changes in neuronal firing and can propagate through multiple circuits (subliminal processing), but cannot take part in a conscious state (2001, p. 19).

Empiricalevidenceshowsthatthethresholdforconscioussensationisdifferentfrom the threshold for conscious perception. Pockett (2002, 2003) suggests that stimuli can produce conscious sensations in as little as 50–80 msec, while complicated judgements regarding the data may require as much as 500 msec. This is in line with previous studies. In an earlier study Efron (1967) estimated that a minimum of 60–70 msec of neural processing time is required for simple auditory and visual stimuli reaching the brain to result in any kind of experience. Regarding the threshold for conscious perception, a study published in Nature (Thorpe et al.

1996) reports that human visual system takes about 150 ms after stimulus onset to process a complex natural image (to decide whether a previously unseen photograph of a natural scene, flashed on for just 20 ms, contains an animal). A more recent study (Sekar et al. 2013) suggests that it takes somewhat longer: the earliest response signal peak that correlated well with stimulus perception was observed at around 240 ms after stimulus presentation; of the other response signal peaks, the one around 100 ms showed no significant

correlation with stimulus perception, while the later one at around 290 ms showed only a moderate correlation with stimulus perception. This seems to provide evidence to suggest that all conscious states are themselves temporally extended. But if conscious states are temporally extended the Sautrāntika view is in trouble. According to the Sautrāntika view everything, including all conscious experiences, is composed of complex causal interaction among numerous momentary dharmas. This, however, does not entail that the resulting composite conscious experience made up of those dharmas must also be momentary. But the Sautrāntika

are also committed to the view that only present dharmas have causal efficacy. This, as we saw, is the reason why they were motivated by the ‘time-lag’ argument to reject direct realism in favour of representationalism. If we accept that all causally efficacious dharmas that compose a conscious experience must be co-temporally present in the infinitesimally short moment (as Abhidhharma-Sautrāntika do) and that the Sautrāntika moment is shorter than the threshold for conscious sensation, let alone a conscious perception (as the brain scientists tell us), then we are led to conclude that the Sautrāntika view lacks the

resources to adequately support conscious states: a serious shortcoming. The Sautrāntika philosopher might respond by saying that our conscious experience of blue consists in a sequence of momentary proto-conscious dharmas that lie just below the threshold of conscious awareness.Justasthere ismyexperience ofbeing inthe process of typing this paragraph, there is an experience of being in the process of having an experience of blue. A certain number of these momentary proto-conscious dharmas must occur in a sequence for us to have a conscious experience of blue and the brain scientists can tell us just how many of these are

likely to constitute our conscious experience of blue. There is still, however, a problem with this response. The Sautrāntika should not agree that our conscious experience of blue is a series of momentary proto-conscious dharmas. For according to the Sautrāntika view, only present moment constituents are real. Being spread out over time, a series of such constituents isa fiction and thus unreal. While the eliminationof such thingsas persons and paragraphs is quite acceptable to the Buddhist, the elimination of conscious experiences should not be. If conscious experiences are eliminated, then the principle Abhidharma project to give an account of conscious experience is jettisoned: phenomenological data are explained away, rather than explained. In view of all this, the Metaphysical challenge can be more precisely spelt out in terms of the following three theses, which form an inconsistent triad:10:

1. Everything that is temporally extended is unreal. 2. Conscious experiences are real. 3. Conscious experiences are temporally extended. While most philosophers reject 1, the Sautrāntika philosopher must accept 1 and 2 andreject 3.The challengewillbetoreject3 inaway thatdoesnot ignorethescientific evidence which seems to support the view that conscious experiences are temporally extended. 10 I thank an anonymous reviewer of this journal for suggesting this formulation of the Metaphysical Challenge.

5 The development of mature Abhidharma view of consciousness

In this concluding section, I will explore a solution to both the above Challenges by combining resources made available by later Abhidharma-Yogācāra philosophers and the general notions of supervenience and representationalism. In particular, I will refer to Asa ga, a noted Yogācāra philosopher and the author of Abhidharmasamuccaya and at least the compiler of Yogācārabhūmi. I will also be relying on the work of Sa ghabhadra, a later representative of the Sarvāstivāda tradition well known for his trenchant criticism of Vasubandhu’s doctrine. The aim is to show that the Abhidharma account of consciousness is neither incoherent as Zahavi suggests, nor empirically unviable as McKinnon and Le Poidevin may lead us to believe. The canonical Abhidharma account of mind reduces it to

fundamental atoms constituted by six kinds of conscious experiences (vijñānas). Five of these correspond to the five sense organs (sight, touch, hearing, smell and taste) and the sixth is a mental cognition (mano-vijñāna). Asa ga, the Yogācārin, added two more to this list: the basic or storehouse consciousness (ālaya-vijñāna) and afflictive mentation or egoconsciousness (kliś a-manas). The first is a, constant and neutral, baseline consciousness that serves as a repository of all basic habits, tendencies and karmic latencies accumulated by the individual. The doctrine of basic consciousness is, in large part, an attempt to show that there is mental continuity within a lifetime and across lifetimes despite the dharmaontologyin which there isnoenduringsubstance.11 The secondcan be thought of as an innate sense of self arising from the apprehension of basic consciousness as being a self (Dreyfus and Thompson 2007, p. 97). This self, however,

isnotanontologicalrealityfor Buddhists:itismerelya conceptualfabricationresulting from the (mis)apprehension of basic consciousness. Basic consciousness is absolutely essential to explain the full bodied Abhidharma-Yogācāra notion of conscious experience. For my purposes here, it is sufficient to present a philosophical reconstruction of this notion, rather than a historically accurate rendering or an exhaustive account of the literature. Basic consciousness is introduced as the “mind with all the seeds”. Ordinary perceptions (e.g., seeing, hearing, etc.) depend on basic consciousness in that it provides the substratum for the sense faculties and also fuels them (Waldron 2003, p. 95). In turn, basic consciousness is fuelled and seeded by the objects of ordinary perceptions and reflection. There is, therefore, a two-way dynamic between basic consciousness and ordinary perceptions: basic consciousness insofar as it contains

seedsorpredispositions producesconsciousstates(sometimesin associationwithsense faculties and their objects), say of seeing a mango, which, in turn, accumulates further seeds, say the desire for a mango, into it. Thus the Yogācāra presents a dynamic model of the mind, wherein conscious perceptions and other mental dispositions are tied

11 The posit of ‘ālaya-vijñāna’ (1987, pp. 12, 18) introduced primarily in what Schmithausen (1987, pp. 12, 18) calls the ‘initial passage’ in the Basic Section of the Yogācārabhūmi. In the initial passage basic consciousness is described as a kind of unmanifest consciousness that persists within the material sensefaculties during the highest meditative state (‘nirodha samāpatti’, literally translated as the ‘attainment of extinction’, signifying the extinction of perception and feeling). The later sections of the Yogācārabhūmi also offer other proofs for the existence of ālaya-vijñāna some of which aim to provide a fix for the problem of kammic continuity. However, itisimportant to notethatālaya-vijñānaisone of a number of fixesproposedto deal with this problem.

togetherina continuous feedbackcycle (Waldron2003, pp. 96–97).Furthermore,basic consciousness is postulated as encompassing the entire life of an individual as it is connected to our sense of embodiment and described as pervading the entire body. It is the background awareness of more than just the material body; it also includes the awareness of the predispositions (cognitive and affective conditionings persisting from the past) and one’s immediate environment (i.e. the

surrounding world). As Dreyfus puts it, “[T]he basic consciousness is the baseline of consciousness, the passive level out of which the more active and manifest forms of awareness arise in accordance with the implicit preferential patterns that structure emotionally and cognitively this most basic level of awareness” (2011, p. 144). Basic consciousness is, like everything else in the Abhidharma universe, a series of moments; it arises from moment to moment in dependence on conditions similar to those that give rise to ordinarymanifestconsciousperceptions.However,thisbackgroundawarenessissubtle yet continuous. To fix ideas, it is

useful to think of proprioception which makes us continuously, though nebulously, aware of our bodies in relation to the surrounding world. Like proprioception, this basic consciousness goes unnoticed as it is always present in the background. Although basic consciousness arises continuously in a stream of moments, the Yogācārabhūmi explicitly warns us that it would be a mistake to regard it as a single unity (ekatva). The introduction of basic consciousness also marks a major departure from the traditional Buddhist model of conscious awareness, according to which, ordinary perceptions occur sequentially depending on nothing more than

the contact between the sense faculty and its object. Since the awareness of the embodied mind and the surrounding world is always present, it must occur simultaneouslywith other ordinaryperceptions which,as we have noted above,inturn, depend on and are supported by basic consciousness. Once this ‘single awareness at each moment’ requirement is abandoned, the Yogācārins accepted multiple awarenesses, and indeed that all six kinds of manifest awarenesses, and countless many subtle ones in the background, could be simultaneously present. Basic consciousness is best thought of as background awareness—subtle but indistinct and

continuous perception—of cognitive and emotional factors and bodily states that provides a rich inventory of proto-cognitive and proto-affective dharmas as support for any conscious state. My interest here is to see whether the inclusion of basic consciousness in the Buddhist model of the mind can help us respond to challenges discussed above. Basic consciousness makes available a lot more mental dharmas co-temporal with current sensory inputs and conscious sensations in order to constitute a conscious experience. The dharmas (tropes) are not identical to the conscious perceptions, although the perceptions, like everything else,

are ‘made up’ of momentary dharmas. The notion of being ‘made up of’ can be captured by supervenience relation between the tropes and the conscious experiences constituted of them. Sa ghabhadra notes that each dharma is potentially able to have two causal operations: one for bringing about the next momentary dharma in its series and another which transcends the series to bring about effects by combining with other co-temporal dharmas of other parallel series. Williams (1981, p.246)helpfully labelsthese as ‘horizontal’ within-the-series causality and ‘vertical’transcending-the-series causality, respectively.Forexample,amomentary dharma of auditory power horizontally produces the next moment of auditory power and might, depending on the presence of other universal mental factors (e.g., attention,

etc.) vertically produce an auditory perception. Ganerisuggests that itis best to think of dharmas themselves as proto-intentional (proto-cognitive and proto-affective) processes that combine to constitute conscious experiences (2012, p. 130). The AbhidharmaYogācāra relationship between mental dharmas and conscious experience is described as one of joint-occurring (sahabhu) and enveloping (anu-pari-vartante) which is best cashed out in terms of supervenience. However, it is important to note that dharmas or tropes are only logically, and not temporally, prior to the conscious experience: only present dharmas are real, they alone can be constituents of a conscious experience. Consider a present conscious experience of a mango. The dharmas that constitute colour, shape, firmness, etc. are

simultaneously provided by visual consciousness. But there are countless many other mango-relevant dharmas available in the storehouse or basic consciousness (ālaya-vijñāna) that have been stored on account of previous encounters with mangoes. The conscious experience of a mango does not arise in the first momentofsensory contact with the mango,but the sensory contact setsoff a chain of horizontal and vertical processes which might, depending on the availability of other universal mental factors, result in the production of the conscious experience of the mango. The visual presentation of mango gives rise to sensible qualities that constitute colour, texture, smell, etc. These dharmas horizontally cause contiguous colour, texture, smell, etc., dharmas in the next moment. At the same time these momentary dharmas vertically cause processes in the basic consciousness, which activate stored mango-relevant dharmas. These activations

produce new dharmas that come together with the requisite five universal mental factors resulting in the production of the conscious perceptione of a mango in that unique moment when all the relevant proto-conscious dharmas are co-present. The conscious experience thus supervenes on the arrangement of locally present dharmas. To summarise: A conscious experience is triggered by parallel horizontal series of precisely when sufficient dharmas are vertically present in a knife-edge moment, courtesy of the storehouse consciousness which provides a rich repository of dharmas that have time-broadening content, e.g., a memory impression of a mango. Itisimportanttonotethatthenotionsofsupervenience(together withhorizontaland vertical causation) and representationalism are available to and made use by the Buddhist philosophers before the Yogācāra, but that alone cannot help them avoid the Phenomenological and Metaphysical Challenges. But once we combine these

notions with the innovative ideas of basic and ego consciousnesses we have more ammunition at hand to respond to these concerns. This is not just because basic consciousness makes available countlessly many more dharmas than are manifestly available in ordinary awareness, but, also and more importantly, because it is a storehouse for proto-conscious impressions. To be accurate, basic consciousness is a constantly evolving series of causal consequents of the proto-conscious

impressions which are seeded in it by the ordinary manifest awarenesses from the mediate and immediate past. Conscious experience can thus be seen as supervening on cotemporally available proto-conscious impressions. This analysis of conscious experiences as supervening on dharma-clusters of copresent momentary proto-conscious dharmas with the assistance of the Yogācāra notions of basic consciousness and ego-consciousness can deal with the Phenomenological Challenge. On the phenomenological account favoured by Husserl and Zahavi, the conscious experience of a temporally extended object is explained by the so-called

primalimpressioncarryingthe burdenofthe just-past impressionand pregnantwiththe just-future impression yet to appear. On the phenomenological account favoured by Abhidharma-Yogācāraphilosophersthejust-pastandthejust-futureimpressionsarecotemporally available in the present moment by virtue of the support of the basic consciousness and other mental factors. The momentary dharmas present in the basic consciousness are vehicles that at any given time carry content which has

genuine nonillusory width, courtesy of the just-past and the just-future impressions. So, in a sense, my solution concedes some ground to the view championed by Zahavi in his response to Dreyfus that there can be no synchronic unity without some diachronic unity (if ever so short-lived). However, in drawing the distinction between the vehicles and the content of conscious experiences the solution salvages the mature Abhidharma thesis that the only the present momentary dharmas (vehicles) are real. But can this account be extended to explain the unity of extended objects and the unity of the subject: the stream of consciousness itself? Here the Abhidharma-Yogācāra view departs sharply from Husserl.The Yogācāraclaim thatthe attribution of diachronic unity to objects and subjects

(persisting selves) that go beyond the content borne by the momentary dharmas is an illusion. This illusion is a product of the ego-consciousness on account of its misapprehension of basic consciousness as a continuing stable entity rather than an ever renewing stream of discrete momentary impressions. The misapprehension arises because the nature of basic consciousness as a subtle but continuous awareness of awareness of one’s body, cognitive predispositions and the immediate environment. As we said earlier, the text warns us, this continuing, though ever changing, basic consciousness should not be treated as a single unified thing. The point is that we mistake what isstrictlyspeakingastreamofawarenesses asasingleawareness because of continuous and indistinct, subtle awareness of the stream of awarenesses. The principles that constitute conscious sensations and perceptions do not need to glue together temporally contiguous impressions into a diachronically unified stream of experience that accounts for unity of objects and subjects. Rather, according to the Abhidharma-Yogācāra, conscious

sensations and perceptions are constituted by supervening on the local distribution of co-temporal dharmas made available by the sense faculties, basic consciousness and other mental factors. The reflexivity of conscious states accounts for the synchronic unity of self-aware subjective states at a time. But note that, there is no veridical awareness of succession; there is only a succession of awarenesses. Diachronic unity of successive awareness is only anillusion, a conceptual fabrication of the ego-consciousness. This addresses the Phenomenological Challenge. In regard to the Metaphysical Challenge, an easy option for the

AbhidharmaYogācāra philosopher would be to deny physicalism. This would make the empirical bases alluded to Le Poidevin and McKinnon irrelevant to the Abhidharma theory of consciousness. However, I don’t think that these ancient Buddhists would (or should) have taken that route. Abhidharma philosophers do not endorse mind-body reductionism nor do they claim consciousness to be a physical/material phenomenon. However, their vehement rejection of the soul substance reveals

their naturalistic inclinations and sets them apart from some of their Hindu contemporaries in the Indian classical philosophical tradition. Therefore, they cannot ignore the Metaphysical Challenge that conscious states are temporally extended. To address the Metaphysical Challenge the Abhidharma-Yogācāra philosopher must resist the thesis (3 above) that conscious experiences are temporally extended while accepting the scientific evidence that seems

to support it. The Abhidharma-Yogācāra philosopher describes (or rather re-describes) every conscious state as a momentary event carved out of a network of temporally extended processes. This network can be appropriately described as multiple series of successive combinations of momentary dharmas. The content of some of the momentary dharmas in the vertical series has temporal width, courtesy of the memory impressions in the storehouse consciousness. However, it must be emphasised vehicles ordharmas that carry content are momentary. Consider again our conscious perception of a mango.Suppose that the visualperceptionof mango happens at a certain timet5 in a sequence of moments t1 –tn. In the moments prior to t5 (i.e., t1–t4) there is no visual

experienceofmango.Supposefurtherthatthistimelagisabout150–200ms.However, through t1–t4 there was a mass of proto-conscious dharmas that comprised the causal network of parallel horizontal series that gave rise to the right sort of arrangement of dharmas ‘vertically’ for the ‘mango-perception’ at t5. At a prior moment say t2 (50– 80 ms) there was a sensory registration of a mango shaped stimulus. The initial sensory registration and the later visual perception are the result of vertical causal relations between interacting dharmas from distinct horizontal series. This is in line with the empirical science: it allows for a time-lag between the presentation of the stimulus, the sensory registration and later the conscious perception of the object. Hence the Abhidharma can potentially explain the empirical data without accepting 3 above. The Abhidharma-Yogācāra picture that emerges is this: we need to think of mind as a two-dimensional matrix of

parallel but interacting series of momentary protoconscious dharmas (made available by the sense faculties, basic consciousness and other mental factors). At some moments in this complex network of parallel sequences conscious experiences (visualise these as vertical spikes in the complex network) suddenly appear when the necessary and sufficient dharmas that constitute a given conscious experience are simultaneously available at a single moment. Thus conscious

experiencesarecarvedoutofcomplexnetworkofproto-consciousmentaldharmasthat are part of countless mutually interacting series of such proto-conscious moments. The conscious experience of the mango is triggered by sense-object contact but the conscious sensation of mango-shape sensation, and mango-colour sensation, let alone the well-formed, and perhaps articulable, conscious perception of a mango arises after the sensory contact. The representationalism endorsed by the

Abhidhrama Sautrāntika and the later Yogācāra philosophers is motivated by the claim that there is a time-lag between the sense-object contact and the conscious experience. Like all other senseimpressions these representations of the object, strictly speaking, causal consequents of the representations are present in the ever-evolving basic consciousness. We can explain that the conscious sensations and perceptions are directly causally related to the initial

contact,providedthereisa causalnetworkandadequate timelag between the initial contact and the resultant conscious sensations and perceptions. The necessary andsufficientproto-consciousdharmasmight beproducedindifferenthorizontalseries but they must come together co-temporally at a given moment to produce a conscious experience. In line with the empirical science, the Buddhist can claim that conscious sensations take about 50–80 msec to be registered, whereas conscious perception may require as long as about a quarter of a second. This explains how a seemingly rich conscious experience is fully available at a moment. It is very likely that that the conscious experiences are few and far between compared to the mass of protoconscious information available in the multitude of sequences unfolding in time. All

this fits in nicely with the global neuronal workspace model, which supports the view that the neural basis of conscious access is a sudden self-amplifying process leading to a global brain-scale pattern of activity. There is no continuum of perception, associated with a gradual change in the intensity of brain activation, the model predicts a sharp non-linear transition between non-conscious and conscious processing (Sergent and Dehaene 2004). Sekar et al. (2013) cited earlier also report that the threshold around 240 ms is consistent with the hypothesis that conscious visual access is relatively sharply demarcated. According

to this picture our ordinary manifest conscious experiences may be triggered by sense-object contact, but the conscious experiences, in the moment that they arise and cease, supervene on proto-conscious mental dharmas presently available in the vertical series, firmly grounded in the basic consciousness. The acute reader will note that this view is but a short step from idealism, and indeed some later Yogācāra philosophers embraced idealism, but it is a step that I do not wish to endorse. This completes my response to the Metaphysical Challenge on behalf of the AbhidharmaYogācāra philosophers.12

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