Identity and Experience_Hamilton_1996

3 * Identity and Experience
samsrZric experience: in spite of terms such as 'the sphere of no-thing', such
levels do not constitute liberating insight and are part of the samsiin'c
cognitive process. They would not be psycho-cosmological 'spheres' if they
were not.15* On the other hand, if dhammii applies at lokuttara levels it might
include within it the unconditioned as well as conditioned phenomena, as
it does in the tilakkhana formula (discussed in chapter IV). In view of the
diversity of phenomena included within the term dhammii, it is perhaps
unnecessarily ambiguous to define it as the empirical world when 'knowable~'
is more clearly an inclusive term.
An important implication of understanding manodhiitu as smus communis
is that any and all sensory activity involves the activity of the manodhGtu. If it
is the coordinator and collator of all sensory input, then it is activated
whenever any of the other five senses functions. In this respect it is unique
among the senses; it functions, as already suggested, as a quasi sense.
References in the canonical material to only five kiimapnii might be based
on this assumption: though manodhztu would be involved in the process of
the arising of visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory and tactile pleasure it
would not in itself be the basis for a specific type of pleasure in its own
right.
But this assumption overlooks the 'normal sense' aspect of manodhiitu,
and it is this aspect alone which features in the second understanding of
manodhiitu that one can extract from the Sutta FiFitaku, to which I now return.
Even if manodhiitu functions as a quasi sense which processes all incoming
raw data, another part of its function is as the sense which processes
abstract phenomena, as we have seen above. As such, one might think that
pleasure could be associated with these abstract thoughts or ideas. This
possibility is referred to in some passages which are otherwise problematic
in the light of the analysis of manodhiitu as s m communir. Such passages only
treat manodhitu as an ordinary sense, that is the sixth in the series of senses,
and assume that it functions in the same way as the other senses in relating
to its corresponding object. Though such passages confirm one role of
manodhiitu, however, they indicate that for the authors of such passages it is
not understood as comprehensively as has been described above.
An example of this is in the description of the arising of feelings in the
Madhupindikasutta, which was quoted from above.159 It gives exactly the
same description for all six senses: visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile
and 'mental'. Thus the sentence construction for the description of
'mental feeling' is the same as it is for visual feeling. 160 No mention is made
of the manodhiitu being activated as collator for the other senses. Nor does
the commentary on this passage suggest that manodbiitu functions differently
from the other senses: having described the arising of visual feeling, it states
that the same process applies to auditory feeling and all the others.161
Similar passages about the arising of feelings are found elsewhere in the
canon.162 Likewise, in many of the Suttas whose content is primarily