What Is Consciousness in Buddhism? Awareness, Consciousness-Of, and the Architecture of Appropriation
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) August 25, 2026 preprint DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22093484 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Topics | Buddhism |
| Key points | Argues that Buddhist sources do not refer to a single thing by "consciousness": early viññāṇa is always consciousness of something, Abhidharma and Yogācāra develop this into momentary events and a substratum consciousness, and Dzogchen distinguishes dualistic mind (sems) from primordial knowing (rig pa). The paper proposes a three-level architecture—awareness, consciousness-of, and the appropriated "I"—belonging to different textual strata, and contends that awareness is transcendental without being elsewhere, immanent without being an entity, and generative without being a causal agent, making the question of its location malformed rather than unanswered. |
Abstract
A companion paper argued that consciousness science makes explanatory claims of five distinguishable strengths, and that the strongest—why physical organization is accompanied by experience—remains open. This paper asks a prior question: what is referred to when Buddhist sources speak of consciousness? The answer is not one thing. Early Buddhist analysis treats viññāṇa as constitutively differentiated—visual, auditory, mental—and as arising in dependence on faculty and object, so that what dependently arises is always consciousness of something rather than consciousness as such. Abhidharma refines this into momentary cognitive events; Yogācāra adds a substratum consciousness while resisting its reification; and the Indian debate over reflexive awareness divides the tradition on whether cognition includes intrinsic self-illumination. Later Dzogchen sources draw a distinction earlier vocabulary does not straightforwardly make, between dualistic mind (sems) and primordial knowing (rig pa), the latter presented not as a further mental content but as the open ground within which subject, object, and their differentiation appear—a claim that provoked the rangtong–shentong controversy and remains contested. The paper reconstructs a three-level architecture—awareness, consciousness-of, and the appropriated “I”—while insisting that its levels belong to different textual strata. It argues that awareness so understood is transcendental without being elsewhere, immanent without being an entity, and generative without being a causal agent, and that the question of its location is malformed rather than unanswered. Comparison with the scientific programme is deferred.
Comparable studies
Other theoretical and historical papers on buddhism, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mental balance and well-being: Building bridges between Buddhism and Western psychology. | 2006 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience | 1995 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Buddhist and Psychological Perspectives on Emotions and Well-Being | 2005 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Too Early to Tell: The Potential Impact and Challenges—Ethical and Otherwise—Inherent in the Mainstreaming of Dharma in an Increasingly Dystopian World | 2017 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| From self to nonself: The Nonself Theory | 2016 | Theoretical or philosophical paper |