The primer to understanding what Original Buddhism meant by vinnana is attainable, as long as one emphasizes that it’s not the various higher tiered (yet still are aggregates) mano(mentated)-aggregates such as manovinnana, nor the non-aggregate Ceto/Citta(Mind), Atta(Self), Brahman(Absolute), Buddha(“Atta=Brahman”-Comprehensor), Tathagata(Hidden One), nor abandoning the Pali Prakrit (with a few exceptions such as what Ken Wheeler has done in seeing Advaitic philosophical terms in Sanskrit goes through a metaphysical back-formation, projection of wisdom into the Pali Prakrit just as Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit initially transferred some uniquely Buddhistic terms into Sanskrit to express certain philosophical concepts) and never begin to come up with terminology that seeks to elevate the aggregate as if it was prior to material phenomena by not combining the Sam in Samma with any aggregate, there won’t be much confusion when one breaks down the term vinnana into vi and nana, whereas vi means apart in the tearing asunder into two parts, Nana is equivalent to Sanskrit Jnana(Knowing) and synonymous to Panna(Wisdom) without the Vi, for Panna is advaya(Non-dual). The dual-knowledge can get differentiated against its dual-knowing false self, recursively in endless logical yet ignorantly engaged dialectic divisions and combinations of subject-object dualisms with no end in sight through mentating upon it, hence, manovinnana, mentated-consciousness. Understanding therefore, that it is the capital M Mind in its endless avijja(Ignorance, without Gnosis, external illuminating radiance ab-extra to and from the Light) that wills forth the formation of vinnana(lowercase c consciousness) after every deformation of vinnana in the past due to also the craving for more life, contextualizes the reasoning behind the Second Truth of the Four Noble Truths and its subsequent Noble Eight-Tenfold Path, in beholding the disease behind suffering and not of the effectuated suffering-in-itself of which there is no escaping, so long as the form that caused the effect has not deformed, only fools preach liberation from contingently-necessitated(and necessarily-contingent, both are a false meta-dichotomy) phenomenal suffering-in-itself.
The issue, however, are the cultures that proceeds to recontextualize a foreign culture with their own cultural linguistic baggage that colors it in ways that’s invalid to it. Initially, the Atthakatha commentaries of the Pancanikayan corpus promotes Pro-Self interpretations. It used Pali terms such as Ekapuggalo(One-person), Ekasabhava(One-True-Nature), etc. Latter day Abhidhamma literature of the Mahasamghika and Sarivastivada’s recontextualizations of Mahasamghika’s doctrinal tenets conveyed it as luminous(pabhassara/prabhasvara) Mind-nature(cittasabhava/cittasvabhava) metaphors and had turned into Sarivastivadin recontextualizations as mulavijnana(root-consciousness) among other terms that tries to make whatever Presectarian Buddhic doctrines in the Mahasamghika’s doctrines look like a provisional teaching on purpose to justify their disguised miccha-ditthi(wrong views) with enough distractions and disinformation in not even engaging in what it originally meant and taught, downgrading Ekasabhava of the Pro Immortal Self interpretations of Buddha’s teachings into a strawmanned conventional self-nature as something that’s strictly still an aggregate. By the time the Yogacara School came about, more terms such as sam+(vedana/vitti), sva+sam+(vedana/vitti), etc., which has never been used in the Pancanikayan corpus became widespread through that school and was picked up via cultural osmosis by Patanjali as it is used in the second half of the Yoga Sutras section 4 verse 22 as svabuddhisamvedanam(ones-own-intellectual-awareness of their feelings). The Liberant that is the Citta, has been conflated with what is the aggregate through semantic abstraction attempts that weren’t needed to be done and stopped as manovinnana/manovijnana but was not stopped at that point by some, although this isn’t to deny some sort of alokasanna(non-worldly/”light”-perception) of the dibba-cakkhu(divine eye) of the Ekaggata-Citta(One-Pointedness of the Tranquil Mind), but just because it can behold impermanence doesn’t mean it is itself impermanent for also beholding impermanence, so it can’t be downgraded into phenomenological consciousnesses as an aggregate.
The whole enterprise of the various Esoteric Buddhist Schools, where they are right about, is how they must surpass the very teaching-form that they were guided by, yet unfortunate of them that they know not the Authenticity of the Original Presectarian Buddhasasana is actually nevertheless teaching them what has always been true, even though sectarian, superficial schools are more obsessed with the lesser paths’ rites to be reborn into a more competent mortal that can directly engage in the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path, some of that however can be doubted to even being worth wasting one’s time over matters of saddha/sraddha, though it be a fetter to deny the Buddhic truth, one does not strictly speaking need to trust the truth to see for one self if it is ultimately true. Sammaditthi is realized in letting go of the various micchaditthi, so regardless of the exoteric functions of the sangha, it’s not at all pertinent for ones own salvation.
This doesn’t get any better from here on out, for the very language this article is written in, borrows the various philosophical languages that the English language had borrowed. Consciousness, Awareness, even Apperception, such terms from various combinations of root words stemming from Greek, Latin, German, French, etc., that English borrows, are all together vague and reciprocated in meaning to each other, and at a certain abstraction, indistinguishable from each other, such as say, Self-Consciousness, Transcendent-Awareness, Transcendental-Apperception. Perception, Feeling, Experience, Memory, Volition, Consciousness, Mentation/Mentated, Sensation, Composition, these terms have multiple manifold relational differentiated identifiable compositional meanings with each other and in relation to the aggregates within dependence origination in a piling heap of metastable psycho-somatic dynamic meta-aggregational opinions that don’t exist in themselves but in a parasitical relation to the forms it is en-formed in-formation in what it appears as so is not always as what it is perceived as by fools in a superimposition of truths and lies and so the opinions of the same is ultimately wholly false, so long as one has not been able to extricate the simple truth behind an opinion away from the falsity that it is mixed with.
The Epistemologorrheic abomination of the fool’s desolate a-bythos, undeeply-shallow in its foundations, uprooted by any deeper Ontological introspection, is more apparent as the more one is so enmeshed with the interweaving web of formations, they ensnare thine True Self in what is not-the-Self. Much more can be said about how the rest of the world falters with a flimsy etymological analysis of naively borrowed philosophical terms, but much less can be said about simplifying the core essence of the teaching-forms of all metaphysics, which only pleases the Wise among the wise ones in engaging in realizing a noble divination of the simplex primer. Such a primer already has been expressed before in my artbook ironically since it is superficially complex to many.
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Pythagorical 