Does SN 12.44 explain the missing mechanism behind Ud 1.10 and nibbāna?

Discussion
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Hello fellow EBT lovers!

I’m not really new here but I made a new account because I haven’t posted in many years, and looking back on my old posts, I was a little bit too unfiltered. So, please forgive. I will try harder. Anyway…

I previously read Ud 1.10 as though “neither here, beyond, nor between the two” referred directly to the gaps between sensory modalities. It’s almost like a Mandela effect, but looking at the sutta now, it’s clearly not the consensus view of it. I believe I got my view of it from AwakeningToReality if you know that site/FB group.

However, the first part still removes any additional subject from the seen, heard, thought, and known. Digging deeper to see if other suttas would support my initial interpretation, I see that SN 12.44 describes sense faculty, object, and consciousness meeting as contact, from which the process called “the origin of the world” unfolds. DN 15 and SN 12.67 describe consciousness and name-and-form as mutually supporting.

Taken together, do these texts support the following synthesis: contact and reciprocal conditioning generate a coherent subject–world field; ignorance treats its reflexive unity as a primordial knower; and liberation involves the non-establishment or unweaving of that construction rather than merely adopting a no-self belief without deeper explanation of nibbana?

I am distinguishing this cross-sutta inference from the literal wording of any one passage. I would be interested in the strongest textual evidence for or against it, especially parallels and passages concerning the cessation or non-establishment of consciousness.

Sorry if this has already been discussed, but I did do some searching and couldn’t find the thread if so.

Peace and love,
Joel

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Not sure what do you mean by that. Certainly, since puthujjana is an attavadin, to accept the message: “all things are not-self”, requires faith on his part. But to have a faith in such instruction, means to act on it, and adopt the attitude: “this is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self”.

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I mean, no-self does not explain nibbana in a positive sense of what is it.

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You can hardly find something in Suttas what has a form of explanation, descriptions predominate, and if one takes descriptions as explanations, one is already on the wrong path.

Puthujjana is attavadin, and no amount of explanation will help him, since he takes his being (bhava) for granted and is imprisoned in dialectic “to be or not to be?” MN 11

Only descriptions provided by the Buddha may provoke an insight into dependently arisen nature of his existence.

So doctrine of anatta doesn’t explain what nibbana is, it does something much more important, it helps to realise it here and now.

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Have you read SN 35.95 ? It expands on the passage that appears in Ud 1.10. Also further pointers on the relationship between subject-object and the respective consciousness is in AN 6.61.

Hope these help :folded_hands:

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Thank you, dastharak!

AN 6.61 was a very useful pointer. :folded_hands: I’d read SN 35.95 before, but AN 6.61 was new to me.

What struck me most wasn’t that AN 6.61 directly explains multisensory binding. It doesn’t seem to. It was the way the discourse preserves several good interpretations of the two ends and the middle: name and form with consciousness in the middle; the internal and external sense fields with consciousness in the middle; and then the Buddha’s intended gloss of contact, the origin of contact, and the cessation of contact. In every version, craving is the seamstress stitching the process onward into further becoming.

That seems to place contact, consciousness, craving, becoming, and “weaving” in the same contemplative territory, while still leaving the exact phenomenology remarkably compressed.

Do you know of any suttas or early parallels that go further on either of these questions?

  1. How do the six classes of sense-consciousness coordinate—or become one coherent body-and-world experience?
  2. Is there any passage clearing stating that sights, sounds, bodily sensations, and other sense events can be simultaneously present and directly manifest without one overarching consciousness standing behind them?

I’d also be very interested in passages about the cessation or non-establishment of consciousness, contact, or name-and-form while a liberated person is still alive, including the experience in meditation, and especially outside of meditation states.

In addition, part of what I’m trying to understand is the difference between having a precise map and realizing the Dhamma for oneself. A detailed map may help someone avoid mistaking witnessing or oneness for the destination, but it also makes it easier to repeat the right language without seeing anything firsthand. I wonder if Buddha was being a bit vague on purpose so that people could still piece things together for themselves to some extent, in order to have a Eureka! moment which is transformational.

Thanks again. This was exactly the kind of lead I was hoping for.

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Several years back I posted an essay on Vinanna Anidassana where I included quotes from 15-20 suttas along these lines. Here are a few examples from that - not sure if this is what you are asking about:

SN22.99

But the instructed noble disciple … does not regard form as self … nor feeling as self … nor perception as self … nor volitional formations as self … nor consciousness as self…. He no longer keeps running and revolving around form, around feeling, around perception, around volitional formations, around consciousness. As he no longer keeps running and revolving around them, he is freed from form, freed from feeling, freed from perception, freed from volitional formations, freed from consciousness.

But freed does not mean absent:

AN 10.81

“Sir, how many things has the Realized One escaped from, so that he lives unattached, liberated, his mind free of limits?”

“Bāhuna, the Realized One has escaped from ten things, so that he lives unattached, liberated, his mind free of limits.

What ten?

Form …feeling …perception… choices…consciousness (five aggregates)
rebirth …old age …death …suffering …defilements …

Suppose there was a blue water lily, or a pink or white lotus. Though it sprouted and grew in the water, it would rise up above the water and stand with no water clinging to it. [Note: the water didn’t cease to exist]

In the same way, the Realized One has escaped from ten things, so that he lives unattached, liberated, his mind free of limits.”

All five aggregates are still present for the Arahant but as they are no longer conditioned (SN22.48, SN22.79) they no longer get ‘built up’ forming ‘the world’ (a world of ‘things’ which I grab onto as me and mine for example.

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Thanks, this helps with one part of what I was asking.

I agree that the five aggregates don’t simply vanish while an arahant is alive, and that being freed from them means they’re no longer clung to or taken as me or mine.

I’m still unsure about saying that the aggregates are “no longer conditioned,” though. SN 22.79 explicitly describes conditioned form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness. Did you mean that they’re no longer conditioned by ignorance and the āsavas, which seems to be your broader argument, rather than that the aggregates themselves have become unconditioned?

After I posted this reply originally, I found one partial answer in MN 43. It says the five physical sense faculties have different domains and can’t experience one another’s domains, while mano is their common resort and experiences their domains. That may explain common access. But I still don’t see it explaining whether sights, sounds, bodily sensations, and thoughts can all be simultaneously present before or without being assembled into one unified body-and-world experience.

So I think we may be separating different questions:

  1. Do the aggregates remain for a living arahant?

  2. Are they still appropriated as me or mine?

  3. How do the six sense streams become one coherent experience in the first place—and does that cross-sensory unification itself change in direct nibbāna?

The passages you quoted seem mainly relevant to the first two. My narrower question is the third.

I also read your older viññāṇa anidassana thread. There you seem to describe the aggregates as faculties of an undefiled citta, and eventually speak of unconditioned knowing. That may be where our interpretations diverge. In the experience I’m trying to understand, colors, sounds, and bodily sensations remained vivid, but there was no underlying knower behind them. Their ordinary fastening into one body, one world, and one witness had come apart.

I’m describing a temporary direct unweaving event there, not claiming that an arahant walking around afterward has no sensory contact or can’t function normally.

So when you say the aggregates no longer get “built up” into the world, do you mean only that they’re no longer built into a world of me and mine, clinging, and future becoming? Or do you think the cross-sensory unification itself changes? If you mean the latter, is there a sutta passage that addresses it?

If there isn’t one, that’s also useful for me to know. I can then state plainly that the integration and de-integration mechanism is my phenomenological model rather than something the suttas directly spell out.

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SN22.79 describes the five clinging aggregates as conditioned by sankhara (choices):

Choices (sankhara) produce conditioned phenomena; that’s why they’re called ‘choices’.
And what are the conditioned phenomena that they produce?
Form is a conditioned phenomenon; choices are what make it into form. Feeling is a conditioned phenomenon; choices are what make it into feeling…

Further down in SN22.79 he is describing the ‘de-conditioning’ process (my term):
And what things do they get rid of and not accumulate?
They get rid of form and don’t accumulate it.
They get rid of feeling …perception …choices …consciousness and don’t accumulate it.

So is he getting rid of and not accumulating choices which is the conditioning factor producing conditioned phenomena? That’s how I read it.

  1. According to the suttas, for the Arahant the five aggregates remain (note that they are not defined as clinging aggregates any longer). And they are now described as scattered and abandoned, etc.

  2. According to the suttas no. The sense of I am this or that, I am, as well as conceit are no longer present.

  3. How do the 6 sense streams become one coherent experience:
    In my view, this is what dependent origination is describing. The little engine at the center spinning out ‘the world’ is namarupa (perceptions and form as clinging aggregates - that is they stick together to create the impression of a distinct ‘thing’) and consciousness that grabs on to that namarupa-bundle-‘thing’ and experiences it as reality. That is then taken as me/not me or mine/not mine - the great illusion/magic show.

Does that cross-sensory unification itself change in direct nibbāna?

The Bahiya Sutta and other similar ones seem to be saying yes. Specifically, in the seen there is just seeing, in the heard just hearing and so on. To me this implies that the worldly person sees distinct objects/things and so they take on a sense of permanence and graspability where as the Arahant experiences the underlying flow of phenomena without objectifying it. That’s the impression I get.

It seems to me that the Arahant is still able to function pretty well so maybe the experience must still leave them knowing which car is theirs and how much money is still owed on it. So perhaps this is more of a ‘transcends and includes’ as opposed to one type of experience vs another but who knows?

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Yes, this is much closer to what I was asking—thanks. SN 22.79 is especially useful because it gives an explicit construction and dismantling vocabulary: formations construct the conditioned aggregates, while liberation is described in terms of dismantling, scattering, and no longer accumulating them. I’m not sure I would go as far as saying that the living arahant’s aggregates themselves become unconditioned, but I agree that the passage supports something more than merely changing one’s intellectual view of them.

Your reading of the Bāhiya instruction as a shift from apparently graspable objects to underlying flow is also the closest direct agreement I’ve found with my third question. My model goes one step further: in the direct event, the common body-world-witness assembly drops out while sights, sounds, and bodily flows remain self-presenting. Ordinary functional integration returns afterward, so your “transcends and includes” possibility may fit the arahant’s ordinary functioning.

MN 43 seems to give us separate sensory domains plus a common resort, and SN 22.79 gives us construction and dismantling. I still don’t see a passage that explicitly names the cross-sensory binding mechanism itself, but these are definitely meaningful pieces of the synthesis.

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I saw this in one of your earlier posts:

Are you familiar with Samaneri Jayasara youtube channel? She narrates a wide selection of mystics from different traditions. Very interesting stuff. Might be what you are looking for.

Yes, I think he focused his attention on the practice and wanted to avoid saying too much about the result. I don’t think he was in to religious belief systems.

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