Abstracts Accepted

The Concept of Mind in Early Buddhism

Gyan Prakash*  

Abstract

In early Buddhism the word mind, viññana (consciousness), citta (mind, consciousness),
mano all are interchangeable without any risk of unintentional modification of the meaning. Early Buddhism emphasized Dhamma as real discarding any metaphysical nuances to it. Buddhism differ from other religions in that no room is allotted for an ultimate reality corresponding to the concept of “self”. The cardinal teaching of Buddha is that everything is made up of independent, discrete, elements which are known as Dhamma. In early Buddhism individual is nothing but the collection of the constituent elements (Dhamma) of a personal life, without holding on to the concept of an eternal soul/self. In early Buddhism Viññana has been explained in many ways but it is much more a pregnant concept with a deep philosophical significance. In early Buddhism Viññana or mind is neither a sense organ nor like a ‘lord of the town’ because one should not take it different from matter. Buddha does not vouch eternal entity. But it does not mean that he replaces the self by word mind. So, in this paper I have argued that
in early Buddhism Nama and Rupa are intermingled and interwoven and Nama represents the entire activity of body because one cannot locate the mind into the body. In short, neither in the microcosmic nor in the macrocosmic sense can the Upanisadic concept of the soul be regarded as being identical with the Buddhist concept of viññana or consciousness.

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*Research Assistant & Doctoral Research Scholar in Philosophy
Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, IIT Bombay, Mumbai – 400 076
Email- gyansi@gmail.com 

Accepted for 1ST Workshop MBC.