Identity and Experience_Hamilton_1996

The Riipakkhandha 29
In accord with understanding dhammi as all sensory phenomena,
Geiger, in his Pali Dhamma, interprets dhammi as the "empirical world".'47
In the light of this, a point needs to be clarified about the mandha Samyutta
passage first cited above in which the existence of manas and dhammi were
referred to after the arising of the five senses. Woodward's translation of
this passage is that manas and dhammi are the result of the manifestation of
the five senses.'48 In my opinion this is not. what the passage means. It
refers to manas and dhammii separately because they have a unique role in
the cognitive process as data collator and raw data respectively. The raw
data, dhamma, may be the empirical world as experienced through our
senses, but that is not to say that the empirical world itself arises because of
sensory activity.
It is not uncommon in the Sutta Pitaka for the word dhammii to mean
more than just sensory phenomena. In the tilakkha?~ formula, for example
(which is discussed in chapter IV), &ammi has the universal meaning of all
phenomena of whatever nature. Such a meaning would obviously include
more than Geiger's 'empirical world'. Another understanding of dhammii is
that it refers to phenomena which are 'knowable', though as such one
cannot either claim or deny their universality. Carter, for example, states
that dhammi are phenomena that "can be grasped, known by the 'mindorgan'
(manas). . . are themselves without substance but cooperate in a
changing but orderly co-production in such a manner that they can be
noted, thought out, and mastered, so to speak - internal psychic and
external physical patterned processes, as knowa able^'."'^^
I agree with Carter's suggestion that dhammii as the object of manodhitu
are knowable phenomena. But his statement needs, in my opinion, two
qualifications. First, there is no evidence that the manodhiitu has what we
would call the mental faculties of grasping and knowing. In its capacity as
sensus communis, it receives dhammi as incoming raw data at the preliminary
stage of the cognitive process. Grasping and knowing both take place at
subsequent stages of the cognitive process as functions of the various
mental faculties. We saw above that in guarding the senses as doors, the
bhikkhu must not be entranced. Though the Pali for this is na nimittagczhi,150
which more literally means that he must not seize upon (any sensory
experience), I mentioned there that such entrancement or seizing comes
not from the sense but from the ~amkhirakkhandha.'~' Even if one interprets
Carter's use of the word 'grasps' metaphorically, as indicating something
like 'pays attention to' or 'is conscious of', by stating that it 'knows' he
would still be attributing more to manodhitu than we are able to confirm
from the texts.
Second, Carter's description of dhammi as "internal psychic and
external physical" phenomena is potentially ambiguous. The analysis of
the @atanas is into the subjective senses and the objective sense objects: the
@atanas as a whole represent the means whereby the individual as subject