Buddhism’s Empty, Illusory Phenomenal Consciousness

Consciousness in Buddhism is sufficiently distinct, with its concepts of emptiness and illusion, that it could command a prime category of its own on the Landscape, yet it also fits decently in idealism, appropriately after Hinduism. Buddhism also arose in ancient India, and the legendary philosophical disputes between Hindu and Buddhist sages enriched both.

Buddhist discussions of consciousness feel radically different from contemporary Western discussions, as philosopher Jay Garfield explains, yet “can be valuable sources of viable alternatives, both with respect to positions on the topic and, more fundamentally, with respect to how questions and debates are framed in the first place” (Garfield, 2015, pp. 135–136).

Nine Levels of Consciousness

Buddhism describes nine kinds or levels of consciousness:

• The first five reflect the five senses: eye consciousness, ear consciousness, nose consciousness, tongue consciousness, and body consciousness.
• The sixth is mind consciousness, which integrates the five senses and provides meaning.
• The seventh consciousness is directed inward, toward one's private thoughts and apprehends spiritual issues; it also creates the concept of self (from which all the deception is said to come because there is no entity ‘self’).
• The eighth consciousness is known as “storehouse consciousness” where all our experiences, actions and deeds, are in some sense “stored,” accumulating a lifetime of karma. (The eighth consciousness persists after death, unlike the first seven that cease when the body dies.)
• The ninth and highest consciousness, known as the Buddha nature, is the purest, forming the foundations for one's life and serving as the core of our energy and the source for all mental and spiritual activity. It cannot be affected by any of the karmic energy from the previous eight levels and attaining the ninth is to find peace and ultimate fulfillment” (Yifa, 2023; The Nine Consciousness, 2022).

Garfield analyzes these nine levels of consciousness by kind. These include: “sensory and conceptual forms of consciousness; consciousness that is introspectible and consciousness that is too deep for introspection; consciousness that takes external phenomena as objects and consciousness that takes inner phenomena as objects; consciousness that is merely receptive and consciousness that is constructive and even projective. In general, the complex set of phenomena is opaque to casual introspection, and are knowable only theoretically or perhaps by highly trained meditators.” Garfield draws parallels between the nine levels and modern theories of consciousness: reflexive models of self-consciousness and self-knowledge, higher-order thought models, higher-order perception models and self-luminosity models (Garfield, 2015).

Phenomenal Consciousness and Illusion

Regarding the Buddhist approach to phenomenal consciousness, the story is complex. On the one hand, as Garfield puts it, “There is no phenomenal consciousness; there is nothing ‘that it is like’ to be me. To believe in phenomenal consciousness or ‘what-it-is-like-ness’ of ‘for-me-ness’ is to succumb to a pernicious form of the ‘Myth of the Given’.^[1].. the sense that there is such a kind of consciousness is an instance of cognitive illusion … The very idea that there is an inner world of qualitative states must be illusory” (Garfield, 2016).

On the other hand, there is rich tradition of Buddhist debate about perceptual consciousness and representationalism: how inner perception articulates with external objects and what we can know about the relationship. The Yogācāra school goes for idealism, “arguing that since direct realism is incoherent, as is representationalism, the direct and only object of conscious experience is an inner state,” while its worthy competitor, the Madhyamaka school, “analyzes consciousness, as they analyze all phenomena, as a set of relations, not as an independent phenomenon or characteristic.” In this deflationary account, “the illusion that there is a special property or center of consciousness is resolved in favor of a network of processes” (i.e., perceived object, sense organ, sensory system, conceptual system) (Garfield, 2016).

From the Madhyamaka perspective, all that we lose is “the illusion that there is more in conscious experience than the psychology and physiology of experience. In particular, reference to internal representations, qualia, phenomenal properties and other such ghostly mediators of our experience drop away.” Garfield argues that such a more naturalistic, more public (less private) view “forces the theorist who takes something like the qualitative character of experience to be real, and to be essential to consciousness, to defend and not to presuppose that view” (Garfield, 2016).

Emptiness and Non-Self

To go deeper into Buddhist consciousness is to go “empty.” Emptiness is a foundational concept in Buddhism and is easily misunderstood (and inappropriately ridiculed). Simply put, “Emptiness is the lack of any intrinsic nature, not another intrinsic nature instead of those we naively superimpose on entities.” Emptiness, Garfield stresses, is never “emptiness of existence” but rather “always emptiness of some more determinate metaphysical property.” As Garfield explains the doctrine of the “two truths,” illuminating Nāgārjuna (c.150 - c.250 CE), perhaps Buddhism's greatest philosopher-saint (other than the Buddha, of course), “nothing turns out to be ultimately real, everything is merely conventionally real, and the ultimate and conventional truths, while radically different in one respect, are in fact identical in another. That is the profound doctrine of the emptiness of emptiness” (Garfield, 2016).

Applied to consciousness, if phenomenal consciousness, like everything else, is empty of intrinsic nature, its claim of qualitative distinction from all other phenomena, its claim of radical subjective experience as a nonpareil occurrence in the cosmos, would seem to weaken. Moreover, though debate abounds, whereas Madhyamaka “takes all phenomena, including mind and the external world, to be conventionally real but ultimately empty, and to be interdependent, Yogācāra takes external objects to be mere appearances to mind, to be utterly non-existent, and takes mind to be the substantially real subjective substrate of those representations,” confirming the Yogācāra position as idealist (Garfield, 2015).

That Buddhism rejects the self, asserting that we are persons, not selves, makes for fascinating explorations (Garfield, 2022). Debate has continued whether the Buddhist “Atman,” often translated self or soul, is permanent and unchanging, a position that Buddhist traditions and texts largely reject. No matter. The nature of the Buddhist non-self (or self) or the Buddhist person does not seem to much affect the deflationary nature of Buddhist consciousness. Self, non-self, person—phenomenal consciousness is the same empty illusion.

Footnote

[1]. “The Myth of the Given is the myth that there is some level of our experience that is immediate, immune from error, given to us, as opposed to constructed, and that this level of experience constitutes the foundation or transcendental condition of the possibility of knowledge of anything else” (Garfield, 2016).