abstract
| - The mindstream doctrine, like most Buddhist doctrines, is not homogeneous and shows historical development (as is evident through the exploration of this article), different applications according to context and varied definitions employed by different Buddhist traditions and yana. Rhys Davids (1903: pp. 587–588) critiques de La Vallée-Poussin's work on the "saṃtāna": Professor de la Vallee Poussin finds a very positive evolution of vijnana-theory in certain Sanskrit-Buddhist texts. The term samtana is joined to or substituted for it--a term which seems to approximate to our own neopsychological concept of mind as a 'continuum' or flux. And he infers from certain contexts that this vijnana-samtana was regarded, not as one permanent, unchanging, transmigrating entity, as the soul was in the atman-theory, but as an "essential series of individual and momentary consciousnesses," forming a "procession vivace et autonome." By autonomous he means independent of physical processes. According to this view the upspringing of a new vijnana at conception, as the effect of the preceding last vijnana of some expiring person, represents no change in kind, but only, to put it so, of degree. The vijnana is but a recurring series, not a transferred entity or principle. Hence it is more correct, if less convenient, to speak, not of vijnana, but of the samtana of pravrtti-vijnanani.
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