How would you translate vinnana?
We’ve had this discussion quite recently. I follow the crowd and translate it as “discrimination”. This seems to be the most common approach nowadays.
Jñā means “to know, knowing, knowledge”. So vijñāna is an action noun that has to be a kind of knowing (we often translate Indic action nouns as present participles). The suffix vi- can have different impacts on a word, but here seems to imply “division”. Ergo, the kind of knowing that discriminates objects within experience.
As vijñānaskandha I take it to refer to the objectification of experience: the identification of the object behind the experience, contrasted with saṃjñā which is the recognition of the experience one is having. So if I hear a conch being sounded, saṃjñā is the knowledge “hearing a sound”, while vijñāna is the knowledge “someone is blowing a conch”.
The usual Buddhist critique is that once we start thinking about objects as existing separately from our experience of them, then we have strayed from experience per se. This is prapañca or worldbuilding. Iron Age Buddhists saw little point in this but, then, they didn’t have empirical science. And they were coming from a position of being able to make sensory experience cease at will.
Note that vijñāna is not an abstract noun like conscious-ness. In the general run of things, if one translates an action noun as an abstract noun, or vice versa, this is counted as “a mistake”.
The nominalist critique tells us that no abstract consciousness is required for us to experience a conscious moment. Just as no “self” qua entity is required to have experiences. Grouping conscious moments together and positing a “consciousness” could be a useful shorthand, except that virtually everyone reifies the abstraction and takes consciousness to be a thing. In practice, “consciousness” is simply a bad idea that we retain because of the legacy of European thought.
No matter how many conscious moments we experience, “consciousness” never becomes an entity with its own agency. It’s always an abstraction away from what we experience. And, therefore, “consciousness” comes under the heading of prapañca.
Thank you. It is all clear.