Identity and Experience_Hamilton_1996

28 Identity and Experience
with ignorance or knowledge, this difference might be because according
to Buddhist teachings liberation comes about by means of the cognitive
faculties of which manodliitu is in some way the sense. As such it is directly
involved in the process of liberation in a way the other senses are not.
The way in which manodhiitu functions as the sense which is associated
with the cognitive faculties is suggested elsewhere. We read that manodhiitu
functions as a 'collator' (patisarana) for the five mutually distinct senses
(pafic' indrzyiinz) and experiences or realises the scope of their activity.ls7
Patisarana, the word I have translated as 'collator', more literally means
'refuge', 'shelter' or 'help'.138 I. B. Horner translates it as 'repository'.13g In
my opinion the context demands something more like 'collator', and, as
we shall see when its function is explained in more detail, this is not
incompatible with the more literal meanings: the other five senses are
directed through it, as it were, and in acting as the collator of the data fed
in by them it is both a repository for those data and also assists them in
rendering those data comprehensible.
Mrs C. A. E Rhys Davids discusses this passage in her Buddhist P~chology.
She assigns to manodhiitu the role of co-ordinator, and refers to it as the
sensus communis, a description which has also been used by subsequent
scholars.lq Mrs Rhys Davids was no doubt drawing on the meaning given
to the 'internal sense' referred to as sensus communis by Thomas Aquinas.I4l
Accordingly, she suggests that manodhztu as sensus communis is the subjective
correlative of dhammii, which it recognises as the objective mundus sensibilis.
What this seems to me to mean is that manodhiitu serves as a special
filtering and collating 'sense' which is the subjective side in our relation to
the objective world, all of which is referred to collectively as dhammii.
Dhamma as counterpart to manodhiitu is a pluralistic representation of the
world, which has a certain inherent rationality, and manodhztu is the
receiver of these phenomena in general (without any initial specification as
to sound, visible objects, odour, and so on): and it is able to act as their
collator, rendering them cognisable for the cognitive faculties. 14= This is a
necessary process since we receive data from different sensory objects
simultaneously. The perception of a person, for example, might involve
sight, hearing, smell and touch. The sense of sight, however, cannot itself
distinguish colour from sound, odour and touch: we need something to
synthesise all the sense impressions.143 So, Mrs Rhys Davids writes, through
manodhiitu as sensus communis, "we get a simulated unity and simultaneity of
impressions, which are really single and successive, if exceedingly and most
delicately swift".144 Manodhiitu can also be considered a sense in that it
'senses' the 'sensibility' of phenomena (dhammq. 14= Rather than 'ideas',
'mental objects' and so on, dhammi according to this explanation of its
meaning might therefore be translated as 'sensory phenomena', which
covers the sa?psiin'c world in its entirety as experienced by us through our
senses. 146