Jiva

MIND, MATTER AND GOD : JIVA, JADA AND ISVARA
M.M.NINAN
consequent Laws of the Universe in which they live. Early Buddhism as taught by
Gautama was a materialistic monism.
Here, the epistemology of the Buddha is a special form of realism that allows both for
the direct perception of reality and the constructions of those less realized. The
perceptions of humans are conditioned by the state of the mind and the emotions of
people themselves. Only Buddhas and liberated beings perceive the world directly; that
is, they see the Dharma, whose regularity and stability remains independent of the
existence of Buddhas (S.II.25). Unenlightened beings, on the other hand, see the world
indirectly through a veil of negative emotions and erroneous views.
Some texts go so far as to suggest that the world is not simply seen indirectly, but rather
that it is literally constructed by our emotional dispositions. For instance, in the Majjhima
Nikāya (I.111), the Buddha explicitly states that “what one feels, one perceives” (Yaṃ
vedeti, taṃ sañjānāti). That is, our knowledge is formed by our feelings. The influence of
feelings in our ways of knowing can also be inferred from the twelve-link chain of
dependent arising, which explains the arising and cessation of suffering. The second
link, saṅkhāra, or formations, conditions the arising of the third link, consciousness. The
term saṅkhāra literally means “put together,” connoting the constructive role of the
mental factors that fall into this category, many of them affective in nature.
Similarly, the Buddha of the Pāli Nikāyas says that “with what one has mentally
constructed as the root cause (Yaṃ papañceti tato nidānaṃ), perceptions, concepts,
and [further] mental constructions (papañcasaññāsaṅkhā) beset a man with respect to
past, future, and present forms…sounds…odours…flavors…tangibles…mind-objects
cognizable by the eye…ear… nose…tongue…body…mind” (M.I.111-112). That is, the
knowledge of unenlightened beings has papañca, or mental constructions, as its root
cause. The word papañca is a technical term that literally means diversification or
proliferation; it refers to the tendency of unenlightened minds to construct or fabricate
concepts conducive to suffering, especially essentialist and ego-related concepts such
as “I” and “mine,” concepts which lead to a variety of negative mental states such as
craving, conceit, and dogmatic views about the self (Ñāṇananda 1971).
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