Identity and Experience_Hamilton_1996

The Viiiiiinakkhandha 95
uedani and saiiiii in the cognitive process is unequivocally stated by
Sariputta, and we have already seen an example of how all three work
together in the arising of a feeling. Its inseparability from pan"n"implies that
wisdom has to be conscious: you have to know what you know. This is
compatible with the fact that the term san"iii was used to refer to liberating
insight: we saw above that insight has to be identified. Here we see that it
has to be known.
I suggest that this passage is giving us a picture of the way the cognitive
process works and the contribution it makes to, and its involvement with,
the development of the wisdom that is an indispensable prerequisite for
proceeding to liberating insight. We have the three mental khandhas of
vedani, saiin"i and uin"n"i~ working together, each contributing to the process:
uedani as affective cognition, sa4iii as discriminatory or identificatory
cognition, and viiiiiiina as consciousness of each and every part of the
process as a whole. The absence of the samkhirakkhandha here will not surprise
us since we have seen that it is the source of volitions, which are to be
neutralised completely if wisdom is to be attained. EZZina, the khandha
which provides awareness, represents the very basis of all knowledge, and
while the highest levels that constitute liberating insight may be
qualitatively and inconceivably different knowledge from mundane cogni-.
tions, one is nevertheless conscious of it in some way: this much is evident
from the Buddha's accounts of his own experience of Enlightenment.65
4. I'in"n"@a as providing continuity
I have suggested that one of the reasons why vin"iiiip tends to have connotations
of permanence is because our subjective experience of being
conscious is that it is constant. When awake we do not experience discontinuity
between different moments of awareness: the process appears to us to
be a continuous one. I referred to the analogy of the monkey moving
through the forest, constantly changing his grasp from branch to branch.
Though this illustrates the impermanence of viiin"iy, it also suggests how it
represents continuity. For the monkey, the experience is of travelling. In the
same way, our experience is that our consciousness has continuity. Even
when we wake after being asleep, our consciousness seems to us to continue
as it did before we slept. The same is true after other periods of being
'unconscious', such as having an operation or even being in a coma. It even
appears to function at times when one is not 'normally' conscious. People
relate that while asleep they are aware of dreams, or that they have had
awareness while in a coma, and even severely mentally ill people have some
sort of awareness of their surroundings. With respect to continued sapiric
existence as a whole, I have already stated that it is volition of various
different kinds which provide the 'fuel' for this, as also discussed fully in
chapter IV. This 'fuel' is a complex of factors which causes our continued