The idea of an enduring consciousness is rejected in Buddhism. First will be described one of the arguments that Buddhists use to support their position, as accounted by the Shaivites Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta, as accounted by David Lawrence1. Then will be presented aspects of the Shaivite response to the Buddhists’ attack.
The existence of a Self is a proposition often offered to explain the apparent connectedness of a person's experiences, even as the content that "flows through" the Self, the ideas, emotions, memories and all other plethora of content that a mind/Self experiences, is a fluctuating myriad of experiences with a variety of different qualities.
The Buddhist argues that if one initially asserts that the Self or consciousness is separate from one’s fluctuating experience, then the Self’s explanatory role is completely undercut (78). The Self must be involved in one’s experience of changing qualities, or else one is postulating a Self as a totally separate yet "somehow" underlying "substratum" of experience, a Self that no longer serves an explanatory purpose.
However, if the Self is involved in any way in one’s fluctuating experience, if the Self really is considered the substratum in which changing impressions take place, then the Self seems to necessarily lose its asserted enduring quality, because the Self is changed by the fluctuating experiences it is meant to be the "enduring vessel" for (78). Thus runs a brief presentation of the Buddhists’ rejection of an enduring subject.
At first, Lawrence presents what even he seems to consider as the Shaivas’, shall we say, more lame arguments against the Buddhist critique. One of the Shaivite responses is that because the Lord Shiva is omnipotent, He can reconcile with His power the apparently incompatible simultaneous existence of change or multiplicity and enduring unity, both of which is Shiva himself (104-105). Lawrence shrewdly calls this response to the Buddhist challenge a resort to "deus ex machina" (105). This response of course does not by itself support the existence of Shiva’s enduring self-recognition. Other arguments would be needed to postulate the existence of Shiva’s self in the first place before one could subsequently cite Shiva’s omnipotence as a viable solution, and such has not yet been accomplished in the chronology of Lawrence’s presentation (105).
A little better is the Shaivite resort to analogies from ordinary experience. These analogies of the simultaneous unity and multiplicity of Shiva include the movements of a dancer and the dancer, the waves of the ocean and the ocean, and so forth (105). However, this resort to ordinary experience is inadequate to convince the Buddhist, because the seeming unity of ordinary experience is also rejected by Buddhism as merely a mental construction, an illusion (74, 77).
The Shaiva does a little better by simply responding that unity and multiplicity, specifically the multiplicity of change in the one Self of Shiva in this context, exist in different aspects of Shiva. "In the respect in which everything is internal and ultimately identical with Siva, it is one; in the respect that it is emanated, it is many." (103) However, these two arguments at best only dispel the logical impossibility of unity and multiplicity/fluctuation simultaneously existing. No positive support, no evidence for an enduring consciousness is proffered.
However, Monistic Kashmiri Shaivism seems to make a stunning comeback with its analysis of memory. Buddhists and Shaivas agree that memory has access to the past by means of impressions from original experiences (78). The Shaivas also agree with the Buddhists that impressions can account for the similarity between a memory with the original experience (124). For example, the full process of rememberence can be explained like this: first one sees a pot. The perception of the pot is an impression the now exists as a memory. Later on, one sees a pot. Finally one immediately thinks "ah, this (the present pot) is that (the memory of the first experience of the pot)." One main aspect of the remembering of the (past-experienced) pot is the similarity that exists between the present pot and the memory of the earlier pot. There is another crucial aspect of the process of remembering that the Shaivite point out:
However, the Shaivas argue that this Buddhist theory does not account for the cross-episodic awareness aspect of memory (124). As described earlier, the experience of remembering includes an awareness of not only of similarity between the present object and a previously experienced object. Remembering also includes an awareness of having a previously experienced the object. "This is that," the object designated as that is qualifed as being experienced before.
Now how could this present temporary fleeting unique episode of remembering awareness have an awareness of previously experiencing something? If the previous episode is a unique particular awareness, and the remembering episode is a unique particular awareness, then the remembering episode could not be qualified as previously experiencing anything. Each cognitive episode, according to Buddhism, is distinct and unique, and no number of episodes have any authentic connection or unity amongst them. If this were true, how could one episode, all by itself, have the ability recall or connect itself to a previous episode in memory? Yet one knows and Buddhism does not deny that such occurs.
Thus The Shaiva asserts that the Buddhist theory of cognition cannot account for previous
awarenesses of awareness. The Shaiva response is finally that there must be a continuing
enduring self that is involved with awareness of previous awarnesses (125). An
enduring self can of course be aware of its own, united, collection of awarenesses across
time.
Citation
Lawrence, David. Rediscovering God with Transcendental Argument: A Contemporary
Interpretation of Monistic Kashmiri Saiva Philosophy. SUNY Press, Albany, New York:
1999. All references in this essay are from this book.
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