The eight consciousnesses are Buddhism’s answer to one of the hardest questions mankind has ever asked. I find the field of neuroscience totally fascinating too, because it challenges that very same question from the opposite direction: how, or through what mechanism, is consciousness produced? This is also known as the hard problem of consciousness. Neuroscientists have, from a mechanical perspective, dissected and probed the brain in many, many ways — identifying all the parts, big and small, and how they interact with one another. But to no avail. There is no answer to the big question, or at least no agreement, and not even a general consensus, within the scientific community, as to how consciousness arises.
If we compare a neuroscientist to a motor mechanic, we get an amazing understanding of how all the nuts, bolts, and parts of a motor work — but we still don’t know why they do what they do. Today we will explore the how and why of the Buddhist theory of consciousness — the eight consciousnesses and the five skandhas.
🔬 THE SCIENCE
Philosopher David Chalmers named this the hard problem of consciousness in 1995 — the gap between explaining what the brain does and explaining why any of it is accompanied by subjective experience at all. Modern neuroscience has proposed candidate answers, including Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory, which argues consciousness corresponds to how much information a system integrates. No theory has yet closed the gap. Buddhism approached the same question from the inside, 2,500 years earlier.
The Radio Analogy
Buddhism has, for the last 2,500 years, also tried to answer this question — but from a very different perspective. Buddhists began their understanding of consciousness by searching and studying it from within, from an inner mental perspective. Aided by Eastern philosophical training and through the practice of meditation, a practitioner is guided along a gentle path of looking deeper and deeper within one’s most secret place: the seat of our consciousness, our true being.
It seems to me the obvious solution is not to ignore the fact that these two opposites — neuroscience and Buddhism — are asking the very same question, but investigating it from completely different perspectives. What could they learn from each other, and how might this benefit mankind? Could there be a middle way, a consensus of consciousness, to be found through cooperation?
To begin understanding the inner perspective of how the Buddhadharma explains consciousness, we need two sets of ideas: the eight consciousnesses and the five skandhas. We begin with the radio example. Many Buddhist lamas have likened the brain to a radio — a mechanical device that receives signals from our sense organs, the gates of our perception. We are all familiar with them: sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. Yes, there are other senses, like balance and intuition, but let’s stick to the obvious ones for simplicity. In this example, the brain acts as a radio receiving signals from several different stations at once.
The Eight Consciousnesses
In Buddhist terms, the stations are called the eight consciousnesses. They are: 1) visual (or eye) consciousness, 2) auditory (or ear) consciousness, 3) olfactory (or nose) consciousness, 4) gustatory (or tongue) consciousness, 5) tactile (or body) consciousness, and 6) mental (or mind) consciousness. The seventh and eighth consciousnesses work differently, and we’ll come to them once we’ve seen the first six in action.
The five skandhas — sometimes translated simply as ‘mind’ — are: 1) form, 2) feeling or sensation, 3) discrimination or perception, 4) mental formations, and 5) consciousness. If the eight consciousnesses are the radio’s stations, the five skandhas are what happens in the split second after a station is tuned in.
The Five Skandhas — Walking Through a Rose
Ready to see how all this fits together? Let’s tune into the visual station on the radio and take a look around. Oh, look — what’s that? We have a form. The eyes sense something — say, a rose — and send the information to the sixth consciousness, the mind consciousness. Here is where things get interesting.
The mind consciousness has received the first skandha, form, from the eyes. We can think of the mind as building the picture, the mental fabrication, from the information the senses supply. Once that mental fabrication has formed, a feeling or sensation arises — good, bad, or neutral. This is the second skandha. The discriminating, or perception, skandha then registers, recognises, and labels the object. Then the fourth skandha, mental formation, has us act — taking a closer look, running away, or simply moving on — based on all the information our sense consciousnesses provide. We are now in the fifth skandha: consciousness of the rose.
Where the Trouble Begins — The Seventh Consciousness
This state gives rise to the seventh consciousness — the defiled mental consciousness, better described as emotion. ‘Oh, what a beautiful rose, I want it,’ we say, and now we are fully aware, fully conscious, of the rose. This is where all the trouble begins. You all know what I mean here.
The Alaya — Foundation Consciousness
After the stimulus ends, or is no longer the focus of the mind’s attention, the experience is stored in the eighth consciousness — the all-encompassing foundation consciousness. This is most like what we would call our subconscious, and in Buddhism it is called the Alaya.
This is also where karma is planted as seed. Every reaction the seventh consciousness has to the rose — the wanting, the aversion, the indifference — leaves an imprint in the Alaya, and those imprints ripen later as tendencies, as the grooves our future perceptions tend to fall into without our noticing.
A Personal Note
When I first sat with this teaching, what struck me wasn’t the list of eight and five — it was noticing, in real time, how fast the seventh consciousness moves. The rose is barely formed in awareness before ‘I want it’ has already arrived. Meditation doesn’t stop that movement. What it does, slowly, is buy you a half-second of space between the rose and the wanting — enough space to see the reaction arising rather than simply being it. That half-second is, I think, the entire practice in miniature.
Was that easy to follow, and does it compare to your everyday experience?
Remember: Mind doesn’t mind, matter doesn’t matter! Mind is Boss.
Further Reading
Sources
• Chalmers, D. J. (1995). ‘Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness.’ Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 200–219.
• Tononi, G. Integrated Information Theory
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