Sacred Texts: Buddhism

Buddhism in Translations - § 28. Consciousness.

Henry Clarke WarrenPali Canon TranslationsTheravada Buddhism

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This is a passage from the *Milindapañha* (Questions of King Milinda), a Pali Buddhist text structured as a dialogue between the monk Nāgasena and the Greek king Milinda, supplemented by Abhidhamma scholastic commentary. The central argument is that consciousness is not a unified faculty but a dependent, relational process: it arises specifically in response to sense contact, and is named after the sense organ and object that produce it (eye-consciousness, ear-consciousness, and so on through six sense bases including mind). Nāgasena illustrates this with a city watchman stationed at a crossroads who observes arrivals from all directions — consciousness is the act of registering what presents itself, nothing more. A second analogy compares consciousness to fire, which takes its name from its fuel (log-fire, grass-fire), reinforcing that consciousness has no independent existence apart from its conditions. The passage then shifts into technical Abhidhamma taxonomy, classifying the six consciousnesses into thirty-two worldly fruition-types differentiated by whether their karmic cause is meritorious or demeritorious, with mind-consciousness alone subdivided into many subtypes covering realms of sensual pleasure, form, and formlessness. Notably, supramundane (nibbāna-oriented) consciousnesses are explicitly excluded from this schema on the grounds that they are irrelevant to the mechanics of rebirth.

Buddhism in Translations - § 28. Consciousness.

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