Yes, and maybe this is also indicated by a fragment in a sutta (at the moment i do not know the one) in which the Buddha refutes the view of someone that it is this conscious in this life that goes on in the next life? It seems to indicatie that we must not see consciousness as a continuum.
Next to this i feel it is still questionable what Buddha meant with vinnana. Is that dependend on context? For example, has vinnana as 3-th factor in PS really the same meaning as in sense-vinnana?
Is vinnana just a bare awareness of a sense object or does it involve much more such as also all kinds of associations one has with a sense object, expactations, feelings, memories, meaning an object has for oneself, that kind of things.
Youâre probably referring to the following sutta:
Now at that time a mendicant called SÄti, the fishermanâs son, had the following harmful misconception: âAs I understand the Buddhaâs teachings, it is this very same consciousness that roams and transmigrates, not another.â
MN 38
I remember listening somewhere that this sutta means that we donât have a constant and permanent consciousness transmigrating (which would be tantamount to having a soul), but rather that we have a stream of consciousness that transmigrates.
Maybe the following suttas are helpful:
And what, bhikkhus, is consciousness? There are these six classes of consciousness: eye-consciousness, ear-consciousness, nose-consciousness, tongue-consciousness, body-consciousness, mind-consciousness. This is called consciousness. SN 12.2 (dependent origination)
Any kind of consciousness at allâpast, future, or present; internal or external; coarse or fine; inferior or superior; far or near: this is called the aggregate of consciousness. SN 22.48
It seems that consciousness involves at least perception and feeling too:
Feeling, perception, and consciousnessâthese things are mixed, not separate. And you can never completely dissect them so as to describe the difference between them. For you perceive what you feel, and you cognize what you perceive. Thatâs why these things are mixed, not separate. And you can never completely dissect them so as to describe the difference between them.
MN 43
Reference to the momentariness of the mental phenomena, is found in the Anguttara NikÄya (1.48) :
âMendicants, I do not see a single thing thatâs as quick to change as the mind. So much so that itâs not easy to give a simile for how quickly the mind changes.â
For a master teacher like the Buddha, whose teachings abound in most appropriate similes to explain various concepts, to say he is not able to give an appropriate simile for rapidity of change of mental phenomena, should be indicative of their extreme momentariness.
Hereâs a paragraph from Being and Time that neatly captures Sartreâs contribution to the topic of momentariness.
[The] totality [of temporalization] never is achieved; it is a totality which is refused and which flees from itself. It is the wrenching away from self within the unity of a single upsurge, an inapprehensible totality which at the moment when it gives itself is ready beyond this gift of self. Thus the time of consciousness is human reality which temporalizes itself as the totality which is to itself its own incompletion; it is nothingness slipping into a totality as a de-totalizing ferment. This totality which runs after itself and refuses itself at the same time, which can find in itself no limit to its surpassing because it is its own surpassing and because it surpasses itself toward itself, can under no circumstance exist within the limits of an instant. There is never an instant at which we can assert that the for-itself is, precisely because the for-itself never is. Temporality, on the contrary, temporalizes itself entirely as the refusal of the instant.
(BaN, 211, Part 2 Being-for-Itself, Chapter 2 Temporality, Section 2 The Ontology of Temporality, Subsection B The Dynamic of Temporality)
You will not find any justification for momentariness in the EBTs because there is no proper justification for such a notion. The only way the idea of the mind-moment obtains is if we conceive temporality as if it were something that can be observed externally, from the third person. But any such observation would, by its very nature as an observation, necessarilly occur in a temporalized way; our discernment of temporality is itself temporal. Thus third-person accounts of temporalityâaccounts that ignore the fact that we cannot step outside of time because we are made of time, so to speakâdo not actually describe temporality proper. They rather assume temporality and then conceive themselves to give an account of temporality after having already assumed that which they wish to account for. How else could one ever discern the end of one mind-moment and the beginning of another except by having access to some hypothetical third position by which the difference could be delimited? Such a third position is a fantasy.
