What Consciousness Actually Takes as Its Object

Ouyi Zhixu (蕅益智旭, 1599–1655) opens his own commentary by parsing the title itself: "觀" is the observing wisdom — the sixth consciousness together with its correct-discernment mental factors, brought to bear through correct teaching and correct reasoning; "所緣緣" is the object observed. Every act of mind, he notes, arises through four conditions (四緣) — the causal condition, the equal-immediate-antecedent condition, the condition of the objective support, and the dominant condition — and this treatise isolates only the third, and within that, only the case of the five sense-consciousnesses specifically, because it is exactly there that ordinary people and non-Buddhist and Hīnayāna schools mistake the five sense-fields for something real outside the mind, giving rise to grasping and rejecting, and so to greed, hatred, and delusion. Ouyi calls the treatise, memorably, "the sword that cuts the two attachments to self and to dharmas, the axe that severs afflictive false thought."

Ouyi's own outline of the treatise's structure maps closely onto how this page is divided: the treatise falls into two great halves — refuting the external attachment (this page's first four sections) and establishing the correct meaning (the last two) — with the first half further split into refuting these two initial positions, refuting further derivative positions, and a concluding summary.

Ouyi casts the verse as a formal syllogism in the Buddhist logical style: thesis — the atoms this opponent posits, granted to be a condition for the five sense-consciousnesses, are certainly not their objective support; reason — because no aspect of an atom is ever obtained within those consciousnesses; example — just as with the eye-faculty and the rest. His gloss on the example is the sharpest part of the argument: the five physical sense faculties do give rise to the five sense-consciousnesses, but only as a dominant condition (增上緣), the fourth and loosest of the four conditions a moment of mind depends on — never as the objective support. "Never mind," Ouyi adds, "that no atom outside consciousness can be found in the first place — even granting, for argument's sake, that atoms are real and capable of generating consciousness, at most they could serve as a dominant condition. How could they possibly be claimed as the objective support?"

Ouyi sharpens the "second moon" simile with a technical distinction central to Buddhist epistemology: the illusory second moon seen by a pressed or disordered eye is never actually an object of direct perception (現量) by eye-consciousness itself — it is an object of mental consciousness's own mistaken cognition (非量, invalid cognition), constructed on top of what the eye genuinely sees. Because it belongs to that mistaken, secondary layer rather than to direct sense-perception, it was never capable of generating eye-consciousness in the first place. The same holds, he argues, for any "combined appearance" atoms are said to jointly produce: like the second moon, it has no reality of its own apart from what genuinely exists (the individual atoms), and so — however vividly consciousness bears its aspect — it cannot be what generates that consciousness. This same simile recurs verbatim in the Cheng Weishi Lun's own account of the objective support (see its fascicle 1).

Ouyi divides this whole section, in his own outline, into refuting the aggregation-characteristic itself and then refuting a further, more specific claim about the aggregated state — and subdivides that second refutation again into an argument from what perception ought to look like, and an argument from whether atoms themselves could differ in shape. That three-part structure is exactly the shape of this page's own three verses. For the first verse, Ouyi restates the syllogism with a slightly wider example than the bare "hardness" of the Chinese: the aggregation-characteristic, he says, is no different in kind from the characteristics of hardness and wetness (堅濕) traditionally used to define the great elements — real properties of atoms, perhaps, but still merely properties of atoms, never something consciousness bears the aspect of.

For the pot-and-bowl argument, Ouyi supplies the concrete case the verse compresses: imagine a pot and a bowl of exactly the same weight, say one catty each — since weight tracks number of atoms, both objects are built from the same count of atoms, and so, on the opponent's own view, the perception of each ought to be identical, which plainly it is not. And for the final verse's claim that shape belongs only to the conventional, Ouyi's image is memorable: smash a pot and a bowl to powder at the same moment, and the perception "pot" or "bowl" vanishes entirely, nor could anyone then sort out which grain of dust had belonged to which vessel. Color survives that same grinding-down; shape does not — proof, for Ouyi as for Dignāga, that shape was never a real property of the atoms to begin with.

Ouyi's gloss on "inner form, appearing as if it were external" locates the whole illusion in a single, specific mistake: sentient beings, not understanding that mind itself has no "outside" at all, wrongly take the four great elements to be their own body's defining characteristic, and wrongly suppose that mind sits somewhere inside that body looking out. Once that double mistake is in place, the form that one's own consciousness has manifested from within naturally seems to appear outside it. Nothing about this, Ouyi stresses, requires the world "out there" to actually contain anything — it only requires a habitual misreading of where mind's own activity is taking place. This is the treatise's hinge, and exactly the point where it hands off to the Cheng Weishi Lun's own developed theory of 相分 and 見分, the perceived and perceiving aspects of a single act of cognition, elaborated at length elsewhere on this site. The immediate objection Dignāga raises against himself — how can cause and effect be simultaneous, within one and the same consciousness? — is exactly the question the treatise's final two verses exist to answer.

Ouyi restates the logicians' principle behind simultaneous causation in its classical form: when one thing and another are so bound that "where one exists, the other exists; where one is absent, the other is absent" (有則俱有，無則俱無), a genuine cause-and-effect relation can hold between them even though they arise at exactly the same moment — the ordinary assumption that a cause must precede its effect in time turns out not to be essential to causation itself. On the closing verse, Ouyi is explicit that "functional capacity" (功能) names something specifically within the eighth consciousness, the ripening consciousness: it is this capacity, upon maturing, that generates the five inner forms within the manifest sense-consciousnesses — themselves then called "a result resembling its cause" — while those five inner forms, in turn, draw forth further faculty-function within the ripening consciousness, in the beginningless reciprocal loop the verse describes.

On the closing question of whether faculty and object, as two forms, are "the same as" or "different from" consciousness, Ouyi appeals directly to the perceived-aspect/perceiving-aspect/self-witnessing-aspect framework developed at length in the Cheng Weishi Lun (see its translation notes): since both the perceived and perceiving aspects are never separate from the self-witnessing aspect (自證分) that grounds them, they may be called "one"; yet since perceived is not perceiving, they may equally be called "different" — and since neither answer is finally adequate, the treatise's own last line leaves the question to be "stated as one prefers." The closing verse itself is quoted directly, and by name, in the Cheng Weishi Lun's own discussion of what the five physical sense faculties are (see its fascicle 4) — a rare case of one text on this site citing another verbatim — and the translation above is kept consistent with that citation. The "logicians" (因明者) Dignāga invokes here are practitioners of the same discipline of Buddhist logic, hetuvidyā, that Dignāga himself later systematized in his own Nyāyamukha, also translated on this site.