Essay #4
Discrimination of Discrimination: Does the Mind Impute Itself?
Buddha taught four levels of understanding emptiness of inherent existence, each progressively more comprehensive than the last, culminating with his final view: the Madhyamika-Prasangika school (Meaningful to Behold, 5th ed., p. 370). It is not until the Prasangika school that nothing whatsoever is said to exist from its own side. Instead, all phenomena exist through mere imputation by mind. Geshe-la says that the mock philosophical debates between the different schools of thought are not just for the sake of arguing (Ocean of Nectar, p. 290). Their soteriological purpose is to prepare us for our own meditation on emptiness. Oftentimes, the various objections and refutations presented in these debates are anticipating the very conundrums that meditators get themselves into as they contemplate whether all phenomena are empty of inherent existence (Meaningful to Behold, 5th ed., pp. 393-394).
In his commentary to the Heart Sutra, Geshe Kelsang Gyatso explains how to realize the emptiness of our body by meditating on the emptiness of the form aggregate (Heart of Wisdom, pp. 33-94). After his extensive explanation, he says that meditating on the four aggregates of mind—feeling, discrimination, compositional factors, and consciousness—are to be carried out in the same manner (p. 95). I used to wish that Geshe-la would continue with his analysis and step us through the remaining four aggregates as well, but now I realize that he is leaving these for us to work through via contemplation and meditation. Just having lots of information does not equate to personal experience, which is the only way we can validate Buddha’s teaching on emptiness for ourselves.
One tangle that I found myself in when meditating on emptiness was whether the aggregate of discrimination is inherently existent. When the mind apprehends an object, it does so through the power of the mental factor discrimination (Understanding the Mind, p. 110). But if all phenomena exist through mere imputation, does this mean that discrimination is self-imputing? In the teachings refuting self-cognizers, it is said that just as a knife cannot cut itself and sugar cannot sweeten itself, so too the mind cannot experience itself (Ocean of Nectar, p. 254). Following the same logic, it must also be true that discrimination cannot discriminate itself, for if it did then this would amount to a self-cognizer, thereby supporting the Chittamatrin tenet that awareness or subjective experience inherently exists. The following is how I have come to resolve this mind-boggling quandary for myself.
[T]he Madhyamika-Prasangikas deny the existence of self-cognizers. They say that all subjective minds depend upon objects, and all objects depend upon subjective minds. Therefore, there are no independent minds, and so there are no self-cognizers. (Understanding the Mind, p. 51)
Only when a subject and its object are identical do we have a self-reference problem (Meaningful to Behold, 5th ed., p. 386). Therefore, to avoid ambiguity when asking any ontological question, the subject and object should always be explicitly stated. We cannot talk about discrimination in isolation, for discrimination is always the discrimination of something (Cf. Eight Steps to Happiness, p. 206). That is to say, discrimination must always be imputing an object because there is no such thing as a non-functioning, non-imputing discrimination. When we ask, “Does discrimination impute discrimination?” we might at first think that the subject (‘discrimination’) and its object (‘discrimination’) are the same, just because we are referring to them using the same word. But if we make the wording more precise with an everyday example, then the object is actually the ‘discrimination of an apple,’ not just ‘discrimination’ by itself. Then, it is easy to see that the subject (‘discrimination’) and its object (‘discrimination of an apple’) are not the same.
In order for a subject (aka an object-possessor) itself to be an object, it must retain its own respective object. (Subject #2 and object #2 together constitute object #1 in the figure above.) The truncated “discrimination of discrimination” is incomplete because the second ‘discrimination’ is a dangling object-possessor without a specified object. This second subject needs its own object in order to exist. Therefore, we can say that there is no such thing as the “discrimination of discrimination,” except as an abstract idea. However, there is such a thing as the “discrimination of discrimination of an apple,” but there is no self-reference problem here because this time we are not mistaking the subject (‘discrimination’) with its object (‘discrimination of an apple’). So, the Madhyamaka school was correct all along: no phenomenon exists from its own side, not even the mind itself!
To summarize, I think that we can get a little bewitched by language when we reason about abstract concepts. We are often fooled into thinking that just because we can speak of something abstractly, then it must in fact be able to exist that way, in isolation from the other phenomena upon which it normally depends. In the above case, whenever we talk about the mental factor discrimination in general, we must be careful to ground ourselves with particular examples of discrimination, lest we make the ontological claim based on a mere abstraction that some ‘discrimination itself’ exists, which would just be a fabrication of mistaken philosophical analysis.