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, but Necessity is prior to Contingence, just as Principle is prior to its Attribute as Cause and Effect) 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 Pali Abhidhamma and Sanskrit Abhidharma literature of the Mahasamghika (presumably having some initial overlaps with the Pali Atthakathas before some of its concepts was interpolated into its Buddhist Hybrid Sanskritized form as their Abhidharma) 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 scarcely 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. None of the steps of the Noble Eight through Tenfold Path are by any means, aggregates, as they’re what the Mind engages in and through the complete actualization of Ultimate Self-Perfection. Recollection(Sati, Sampajanna) and Dwelling-Abidance(Samadhi) in themselves for example, is not necessarily concerning Self-Perfection(Samma) depending on the context where the Self-Perfection is emphatically not the main concern and is used towards things that are anything other than Samma. Aggregates can’t be “sanctified” in insertion of the Samma prefix, nor is adding Self to what is not-the-Self makes it “clean”. Attabhava(Self-caused mortal-Becoming, Personality) for example, is not Attan(Deathless Essence, True Self), for until it have put an end to the root cause of Self-(Mortal)Becoming, it would falsely identify itself as what it is not and perpetuate more painful rebecomings and unbecomings of itself against itself, ignorantly. Even though the Selfhood is not rejected, the superimposition of Self to what is not the self is profanely affirmed for that ignorant one. Therefore, it is a personification fallacy to claim the Absolute Self has any personality whatsoever.
It must be emphasized, declared even, that there is no metaphysically purified Cit to psychophysical Citta distinction in Pali whatsoever, for that is a latter day Sanskrit based metaphysical system which ignores Vedic, Upanishadic, even Advaita Vedantic literature emphasizing the equivocation of Citta to Atta/Atman, which is to say, the Citta is not the physical brain, nor strictly speaking, even the mentation of aggregate sensations and what it comes in contact away from itself. However, Shankara has not understood the philsophico-historical dialectic of vinnana/vijnana properly as to how Gotama was really more in line with the Vedic use of the term as not knowing, ignorance, which avijja/avidya is what leads the Citta to generate vinnana/vijnana, for they are metaphysically synonymous despite chronologically different, but the Citta is not to be ignorantly dis-subjectified for self-objectification. Shankara’s reappropriation of vijnana as Atman is inconsistent to the wider Dhammo Sanatano/Prisca Theologia, but so too, the whole of Mahayana and Vajrayana, which depended upon Theravadin precursor schools of the Sarivastivada that Theravada generally blindly hold to Buddhaghosa’s mistranslations. Although Theravadins will insist they aren’t Sarivastivadins, most of them had ignorantly treated the Citta as the aggregate instead of treating Citta as the immortal element that must be extricated away from what it is not, mistreating the Citta the same as mano and vinnana, when only a fool, comparatively like a monkey would make such a conflation of terms. Meanwhile, the metaphysics that most Theravadins hold to tends to be in line with Nagarjunian false metamodal equivocations of modulated Samsara as unmodulated Nirvana and vice versa, yet not knowing what is the Tathagata that isn’t qualifiably nor non-qualifiably differentiable in either sides of the same silver of the coin. It is shameful to call oneself a Buddhist when they lack a consistent Buddhology and has failed to actualize Buddhahood for themselves, which is no different to calling oneself Buddha-LARPers-in-name-only but can’t even explain what is Buddhasasana. At best, they’re technically confused Bhikkus/Bhikkunis that are self-devoted towards actualization of Liberation.
Speaking of the term: “Mind”, Plotinus doesn’t really have a hard Unparticipatory Intellect to Participatory Mind division in his paradigm that avoids making multiple convoluted and unnecessary hypostatizations on distinctions without much any difference that merits it, while the Intellect-Mind distinction only really exists as the “Intellective-Principle” Logos/Logistikon as the Participatory Mind within the Psyche as opposed to the undescended-into-phenomena Mind/Intellect that may still in some manner be engaging with an interpenetrative existence alongside the Platonic Forms, the Virtues, etc. Buddhi as “intellect” although technically true in Sanskrit, has no direct implication to referring to Buddha as in Sammasambuddha which is not the persona of Gotama, which is Mara. Buddha in an exoteric definition is any “Awakened One” who isn’t metaphorically lulled to sleep by avijja due to the cultivation of the Vijja to counter the avijja, has awakened themselves away from the falsehoods that keeps one identifying themselves with their unwholesome desires within the dream of appearances. Buddha is the Self-perfected state of the purified Citta. The latter day development of the fourfold Chitta-Buddhi-Ahamkara-Manas paradigm is completely irrelevant to the arguments made in the Original Buddhological Monistic Metaphysical Ontology. The term: brain in Pali is matthalunga, and it’s not the Citta, but rather, the aggregate consciousness-construct. What people call “Aritificial Intelligence” therefore, is a second order aggregate consciousness-construct facsimile from something that has the trace of the will of the first order aggregate consciousness-construct imprinted in a similar but non-natural order based, as it is a willed-evolution, just as domestication and xeno-nano-bio-molecular-chemistry technology in forming new lifeforms that didn’t naturally pre-existed to our knowledge in the natural evolutionary dialectic found in this planet until after humanity really thought things through and experimented on what to cultivate in the plants and animals that were conducive towards the goals that humanity had in mind. This however, had in other ways, disrupted the “natural” balance of the pre-high-sentience ecology, not to say we aren’t as a whole also capable of being more aligned to this balance while living for ourselves too.
This same Meta-modal duality between Non-modal Dualism and modal Dualism argument has infected Neoconfucian Daoist Metaphysics with the Wuji(Non Polar, but sometimes ignorantly mistranslated as a repurposed sunnata/sunyata[Emptiness])-Taiji(Supreme Polar) system, while the western form of this same “Worldly Duality which is Void”(samphappalapa/sambhinna-pralapa), similar in truth to “μηδὲν ἄγαν” as “Nothing is the Many” that one must “separate from”(veremani/vi+ramati), comes from linguistic misapprehensions of Plotinus by the whole of the Athenian School Neoplatonists, but in pitting the Ineffable nothing(a nothing that’s also not even nothing, so it fails to even be reified properly) against the Undeterminate Unity in therefore positing an Indefinite Duality that is a basis for the third to arise as the immediation for mixture of the Ineffable, the Undeterminate within the Indefinite into and as Qualified Being, Form, Intellect, the Plotinian Second Hypostasis, etc. This isn’t a denial that Plotinus in some ways can be read to had used the Ineffable as means to explain Unities that depends upon the Ineffable, but this is a reification fallacy in reifying the “unreifiable” to having any ontological status when its true definition lacks any true ontological referent whatsoever as it is exclusively an abuse of self-referential language that borrows ontological referents on one end, but abstracts an abstraction away from the ontological referent in decoupling from it, therefore it’s just an ill-formed concept in the Minds of fools. Post-Kevaladvaita Vedantic and Tantric systems also abuse this Meta-duality system, same for the Abrahamic theologians from Pseudo-Dionysius to Ibn-Arabi to Spinoza to various others into current era “modernity”. It can even be argued that the Ancient Egyptians too, have reified Nothingness as Divine as Something-from-Nothing-Divinities and forms, as Nun (which is falsely reified nothing) makes Khephri (scarabs were seen as insects and insects were seen as children from nothing, a Creatio Ex Nihilo fallacy) and Ra. Diairesis is still Dianoetic Discursive thinking that is almost the same in meaning with vijnana for it knows in dualized divisions. In modern mathematics circles, Set Theory also engages in sophistry in “counting” an empty set as nothing as if it was something. Sets are only valid if it can instantiate what it accounts for, but nobody can instantiate the innumerably many numbers, so no infinities nor infinitesmals are ever allowed whatsoever, while zero means “no number” as a placeholder where one expects a number but gets a symbol that represents something intangible as a nothing-through-something-minus-something or void in its numerical, symbolic place among other numbers.
Just because a mytho-theological trope is enacted in multiple traditions both old and new, doesn’t mean it is how reality actually is like, for nobody counts any “nothing” as something. An un-form is realized through what has form (although usually the form of everything or totality is negated of each every thing for a more thorough well-formed conception of void) by some Intellect that takes away some form from another form to see what remains in some form without it being devoid of its Mind-independent ontological referent, so a well-formed concept of say, the thing-in-itself of the void, is still within the hypostatic realm of the Mind, for it to be known by the Mind, it in some ways maintains independence from the Mind while being able to be brought into attention by the Mind as a Mind-independent thing-in-itself. One can reify this valid void through the Mind that “does nothing”. The understanding is the well-formed concept that is actualized in the Mind in referring to things that is also Mind-independent, so the epistemology is Mind-dependent, but the ontology of the thing-in-itself abides in the same realm as the Mind without being reducible as the Mind-at-rest, for its monoeidetic simple substance exists in an uncreated yet also noetic manner as an intelligible cause for things in effect that requires said cause for it to become from the beingness of the form in-formation through the form of motion and various other forms prior to motion and posterior to motion depending on what that being-in-becoming requires. What the Ineffable ultimately is, is a Mind-dependent yet ill-formed concept that has a true definition in its ill-formed conception but no well-formed conception thereof. The Ineffable emphatically cannot be the Tathagata which doesn’t deny the Absolute Self, for it is “THAT Absolute” prior in hierarchy to its epistemological isness and epistemological isnotness. Sunnata Ceto Vimutti culminates in realizing what’s Asunna, non-empty, which can only ultimately be the Self in the positive, but inadequately expressed in the negative as many valid apophatic anagogical terms in deemphasis of the epistemological apophaticisms that something doesn’t primarily possess in the positive manner as means to leaving the ontological kataphatic attributes and appelations not be mistaken into and as strictly its epistemology, but if there was not even one attribute that the Self possesses positively, it simply doesn’t even exists to begin with, which is impossible. There are innumerably many secondary epistemological apophatic terms for each every thing-in-itself in relation to each ever other thing-in-itself, so unless the attribute of something doesn’t primarily possess an apophatic aspect, secondary apophaticisms is not what truly makes it that thing itself to begin with. Contradictions in its attributes would disprove its well-formed concept status, while if anything has some Mind-independence properties, there is some reifiable/identifiable, positively attributive, non-contradictory requisites of said thing even if one has yet to actualize what they are for themselves. It is preposterous to claim the Self is fully unavailable to the impure Mind, but Self-Perfection is real as it is demonstrable through some way unto the Absolute, due to the wisdom that they divulge is irrefutable, inevitable, and irreducible, instead of arguing for what is refutable, evitable, and reducible. They remain unshakable in their conviction despite of their opponents trying to find some sort of argument to deny that they are the Absolute, that it simply cannot be in any other way.
Things 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. The real reason why Pali Prakrit is worth studying is because of its anti-possessive, anti-recursive grammatical structure that forces one to not appeal to meta-aggregations of the Divine to the Profane, as well as to maintain a stronger ontological language that is resistant to miscommunication and abuse of words, it’s primitivity is akin to the hierarchical primacy of reality. It is not that big of a deal however to use recursive grammar so long as one doesn’t make metaphysical fallacies that are utterly unprincipled. One is forced to switch Immortal Mind and mortal consciousness when reading the majority of foolish metaphysical systems as mortal mind and Immortal Consciousness, but only to put it back in its proper realignment in a consistent paradigm that includes these valid criticisms at heart.
Perception, Feeling, Experience, Memory, Volition, Consciousness, Mentation/Mentated, Sensation, Composition, Personality, Brain, these distinct aggregates despite using capitalization in English that might emphasize importance to the fool, nevertheless, still are aggregates regardless of emphasis, 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. Imagine that you are using a language used by pathological liars that make up fake etymologies and a myriad of finicky particularized language-specific excuses. A simplistic language in its grammar is useful as it is less prone to unnecessary grammatical abstractions of an excuse, whether not having capitalization, to not having recursive grammar, yet still having some self-consistent modularity in its compound word combinations that has the philosophical dialectic baked into its own terms that doesn’t betray its own inherently provided meaning and having much less polymorphisms in its definitions compared to other languages. That is what Pali approximates in practice, but English can also be used in a manner that approximates these things as well, although meaning-for-meaning Pali to English translations tend to get verbose, only to keep the reader reading these translations understand the totality of what is being expressed while reading what is being said, for those who translate word for word does not want people to think there is a true way of understanding what is actually being expressed and not merely what it literally corresponds to superficially. This only applies to very rigorous philosophic paradigms, while ironically, word for word translations is great for otherwise verbose and imprecise philosophers since they all struggle with the meaning of the words that they themselves don’t know what it means, so a bilinear comparison alongside a non-dogmatic dictionary, can help someone form their own grasp of what is being said. The sad thing about that is how word for word mistranslations of Original Buddhism makes it seem less than what it really is about and it cannot be understood without doubting the translators and checking the source texts for yourself while keeping the primer in mind in letting the text define its own terms with careful analysis. If you couldn’t form said primer for yourself in verifying these matters for yourself, you’re at the mercy of the translator. A similar sort of issue also exists in translations of Plotinus in English, and who knows what other languages and cultures suffer the same fate of misunderstanding their best philosophers due to an external influence that deceptively negotiates a different unfaithful misinterpretation.
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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