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I was perusing the contents of “The Selfless Mind” by Peter Harvey and noticed a section on how a more appropriate translation of viññāṇa is “discernment”.
Later, I checked a few different Sanskrit dictionaries and vijñāna is pretty generally translated as “knowledge” or “science” whereas it is cetanā that is translated as “consciousness”.
Why is viññāṇa translated as “consciousness”, then?
Thank you for sharing your knowledge!
Cetana is intention, which is thought, which is included in sankhara khandha (mental formations aggregate). Refer to SN 22.56.
And what are choices?
Katame ca, bhikkhave, saṅkhārā?
There are these six classes of intention:
Chayime, bhikkhave, cetanākāyā—
intention regarding sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, and thoughts.
rūpasañcetanā, saddasañcetanā, gandhasañcetanā, rasasañcetanā, phoṭṭhabbasañcetanā, dhammasañcetanā.
These are called choices.
Ime vuccanti, bhikkhave, saṅkhārā.SN 22.56
The translation seems not that important. For example, words in English such as “awareness”, “consciousness”, “knowing”, etc, can have various unagreed upon meanings. For example:
In philosophy, different authors draw different distinctions between consciousness and sentience. According to Antonio Damasio, sentience is a minimalistic way of defining consciousness, which otherwise commonly and collectively describes sentience plus further features of the mind and consciousness, such as creativity, intelligence, sapience, self-awareness, and intentionality (the ability to have thoughts about something). These further features of consciousness may not be necessary for sentience, which is the capacity to feel sensations and emotions.
Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence.[1] However, the lack of definitions has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguisticians, and scientists. Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied or even considered consciousness. In some explanations, it is synonymous with the mind, and at other times, an aspect of mind. In the past, it was one’s “inner life”, the world of introspection, of private thought, imagination and volition.[2] Today, it often includes any kind of cognition, experience, feeling or perception. It may be awareness, awareness of awareness, or self-awareness either continuously changing or not.[3][4] The disparate range of research, notions and speculations raises a curiosity about whether the right questions are being asked.[5]
Examples of the range of descriptions, definitions or explanations are: simple wakefulness, one’s sense of selfhood or soul explored by “looking within”; being a metaphorical “stream” of contents, or being a mental state, mental event or mental process of the brain
What seems important is the meaning based on the Sutta explanation, for which the following is the stock explanation of viññāṇa in the EBTs:
Eye consciousness arises dependent on the eye and sights. The meeting of the three is contact. Contact is a condition for feeling. What you feel, you perceive. What you perceive, you think about. What you think about, you proliferate. What you proliferate about is the source from which a person is beset by concepts of identity that emerge from the proliferation of perceptions.
Ear consciousness arises dependent on the ear and sounds. …
Nose consciousness arises dependent on the nose and smells. …
Tongue consciousness arises dependent on the tongue and tastes. …
Body consciousness arises dependent on the body and touches. …
Mind consciousness arises dependent on the mind and thoughts. The meeting of the three is contact. Contact is a condition for feeling. What you feel, you perceive. What you perceive, you think about. What you think about, you proliferate. What you proliferate about is the source from which a person is beset by concepts of identity that emerge from the proliferation of perceptions.
MN 18
Therefore, in the EBTs, viññāṇa refers to the ability of experiencing of sense objects via sense organs.
Obvious this does not mean “discernment”, which can mean:
discernment
noun
- the ability to judge well.
“an astonishing lack of discernment”
discernment
dis·cern·ment di-ˈsərn-mənt
1: the quality of being able to grasp and comprehend what is obscure : skill in discerning
2: an act of perceiving or discerning something
While I have not studied the pre-Buddhist Vedic texts, often the more primitive a doctrine, the more exaggerated the imagined sophistication. For example, in the Book of Genesis in the Bible, which seems to copy Vedic thought about nama-rupa (naming-form), God is very satisfied with HimSelf of being able to name “earth”, “water”, “sky”, etc, from the basic void. Therefore, in these more primitive genres of ideology, it seems “viññāṇa” as “discernment” was overrated from a Buddhist viewpoint.
But when the Buddha arose, there were much more subtle & difficult things to “discern”, which the Buddha equated with “wisdom”. Therefore, for a primitive caveman who thinks he is a very special for his capacity to “name-forms”, the basic viññāṇa seems like “discernment” to him. But for a Buddha, the basic perceptual processes of “name-forms”, for example, are just primitive. The Buddha was seeking far more sophisticated understanding. So it is likely or possible that the “viññāṇa” the primitive Brahmins believed was “discernment”, for the Buddha was merely basic sense experience and unrelated to anything profound. Therefore, the Buddha may have adopted the term “viññāṇa” from the existing language but the Buddha relegated it to something very basic and unworthy of special exaltation. 
Hi CurlyCarl, thank you for your response.
Sometime ago, when you initially responded, your answer seemed adequate to me but after having thought about the topic some more and actually having read “The Selfless Mind”, I am not so sure now.
Unfortunately, this topic is quite abstract and discussion of it can get very technical, very quick. I am not educated in Pali, Buddhist literature, or in the cultural context of the time so it’s difficult for me to gauge how correct one may be in their viewpoints based on those areas of study.
The reason I am particularly interested in the translation of vinnana is because it has a profound impact on how we interpret the Buddha-dharma. If vinnana is simply awareness, then it’s falling away at final Nirvana would mean that there is no awareness for a Tathagata after their death. Moreover, how could an enlightened being even claim to have experienced Nirvana while alive, since that would be contradictory? One cannot experience anything while unconscious.
Furthermore, consider this [sutta], AN 10.81 (SuttaCentral):
“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 … 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. In the same way, the Realized One has escaped from ten things, so that he lives unattached, liberated, his mind free of limits.”
For me, a mind free of limits yet without consciousness makes no sense. Rather, it makes more sense to reexamine our translation of vinnana. I will return with a defense of this argument later.
Thank you again for engaging with me!
Many of the english language terms used to teanslate buddhist ones suffer from carrying the semantic baggage of the english term from the recent past of our own psycholgical science.
Most translators are not historians of english psychology or english philosophy.
“Awareness” “consciousness” (of) “knowing” (in the sense of knowing the percept is present) etc are all fine if we take them the rught way.
“Discernment” is in my opinion a poor translation on the grounds that in english we usually mean that as a faculty of “taste”;
He painted with Discernment
He was an art collecter of great Discernment
Etc
The basic picture of the busdhist after they have mastered jhana and understood the implications of abayakata/samayudaya-nirodha is that of someone who:
Is still alive and able to talk to people and walk around etc.
Is absolutely free in the sense of KNOWING* that there are no furthure occurances of any kind of perception/state of being/occasion of consciousness (of) /sensation/ etc that could delude one gone such a way into mistakenly thinking they are a person who is suffering**
*(the way I know that thebarea of a square on the hypotenuse of a triangle has an area that is equal to the sum of the areas of the squares along the lengths of the two right angled lengths ajacent and opposite to the aformentioned hypotenuse)
**(In the sense that makes us miserable sometimes, that is "getting old, getting sick, dying, getung a tooth knocked out, having a compound ftacture, losing a child, losing a parent, losing a lover, a home, ones limbs, ones sight, climatte change, sudden meteor impacts, etc)
The words dont really matter so much, its the consequences that count 
Metta.
This is how I have come to understand it. 
Vi-nana literally means ‘double knowing’. It implies a sense of Self. It should be translated as ‘knowing that I knew’… but that would be too clunky. In plain English terms, we simply term it as ‘Consciousness’ .
Where this term differs from ‘Consciousness’ is in the specific ‘I’ buried within it.
When there is no ‘I’ there is no ‘Vi-nana’. There is only ‘nana’. Just the knowing - no knower! But that does not imply loss of ‘Consciousness’ which is a much broader term.
Many authors have tried to get around this problem of semantics by using ‘Awareness’ or ‘Knowing’ for a non ‘I’ based Consciousness viz ‘nana’. But these terms too are unsatisfactory as they too imply an ‘I’.
There are three overlapping terms Citta, Mana, and viññāṇa. All refers to consciousness in English. To differentiate and realize it, start to sit & watch the breath. It maybe long (depend by person) but someday one will realize it. Same process different timing.
My preference: cognizance
The problem with using “consciousness” is that we would have to say that we have six ‘consciousnesses’, which doesn’t work because we use that word in a way that allows for only one.
Agree, but the AN10.81 quote doesn’t appear to say that the Realized One is without consciousness (among nine other things) - simply that he’s unattached to and liberated from it, his mind free of limits.
The lotus is floating on top of the water, not hovering in a zero-G waterless void.
Some times the work of translation could be clever syntax juggling. Wether the translator is wise and developed enough to grasp the deep semantic content is an open question.
But still, if some term is translated as consistently as possible it may be that, some readers may surpass the translator in the latter aspect.
Anyway for me understanding a term like vedana for instance is more than the ability to explain it using other words. It is becoming clear that there is such a phenomenon(dhamma) that is referd as such by that name and distinguish it from various other phenomenon, say for example sanna etc.
“Consciousness” is an abstract noun, used to cover a range of ideas. But fundamentally, it was coined in a milieu in which it made sense to think of some quality that linked and made sense of individual moments of conscious awareness; something over and above the experiences themselves. This was reified into ideas like consciousness being the “theatre of experience”, or being a “thing” that a being could “possess” or “have”. Moreover, consciousness is at the heart of vitalistic theories: the idea that one can explain living things by the addition of something called “consciousness” to matter. This is simply a variant of the ancient matter/spirit dichotomy which underpins all versions of the mind/body problem.
Abstractions are not things, they are ideas that we have about things. Consciousness is not a thing, not something anyone can “possess”; it’s an idea we have about the fact that we have ideas in the first place. So, what is the nature of consciousness? The nature of consciousness is abstract. That’s it. “Consciousness” does not exist outside of our ideas about experience. This is true of all abstractions.
The big problem is that none these concepts exist in the doctrines of any Buddhist sect. Notably for example, vijñāna is an action noun from the verb vijānati, it is not an abstract noun. So trying to equate vijñāna and “consciousness” is to try to equate different levels of abstraction. This doesn’t work. It’s a category error. It’s like conflating a red rose with the idea of the colour red.
Indeed, if I argue for an overarching quality to experience that is seperate from experience, and one that is apt to be reified, then most Buddhists would recognise this as a form of ātmavāda. If the outcome of the theory is that I believe in an entity over and above sensory experience, then that is an ātmavāda. And that is game over, within most Buddhist frameworks (though ātmavāda beliefs are ubiquitous in real world Buddhist societies - See Joseph Walser’s article Buddhism Without Buddhists).
So no, vijñāna does not mean “consciousness”. It never did, and it never could. It was a philosophical error on the part of early translators. One that we seem to be doomed to repeat. And one that severely impedes understanding of Buddhism in Europe and her colonies.
If you look at it the other way, it is quite difficult to discern what vijñāna does refer to in Buddhist texts. For example, sometimes it’s just another dependently arisen dharma. And other times, Buddhists talk about vijñāna as providing the missing continuity necessary for rebirth (while somehow not being an ātmavāda), while others vehemently deny that vijñāna does provide that kind of continuity. The best answer we get is that vijñāna is that which does the activity of vijānati; though this is not accompanied by an explanation of what vijānati does.
My take, FWIW, is that in the skandhas, at least, vijñāna is part of the process of objectification of sensory experience. It reflects our identification of the object of perception, as distinguished from identifying the experience (saṃjñā). I’ve argued this in print, so I won’t go over the whole argument again here.
It might be more accurate to translate it as experience, since it’s closely related to the senses and also to the inner experience in the mind. But there is a sense of recognition or knowing to the word that experience doesn’t capture. To me, consciousness is not that bad of a translation because Buddhists thought of vijnana as a continuing awareness, which is how “being conscious” is used in English. “Consciousness” is problematic to me, but it is the noun form of “conscious,” and vijnana is a noun.
The trouble is that general English words like consciousness, awareness, or cognizance are used in a variety of ways that can cause confusion, whereas vijnana is usu. very specific as the conscious part of the mind. I’m not sure how to get around that other than trusting the reader to narrow their understanding down as they become familiar with Buddhist language. The important point is that vijnana requires something to be conscious of. It could be tangible like sight or sound, or it could be ideas or mental images. But there’s something it’s recognizing. Strictly speaking, Nirvana is not something like that, but Buddhists do confusingly describe it as bliss or a place to go. I think some were speaking figuratively, and some may have taken it literally. It’s not that clear to me.
Vijnana is used in less common ways by Buddhists, too. Sometimes it’s the entity that goes from one rebirth to the next, making it a kind of impermanent spirit or soul. I think this was controversial among Buddhist traditions, but some Buddhists described it with this word. In that case, the meaning is more like “mind” or “spirit” than “consciousness.”
Going back to your original question, one has to be careful of Sanskrit dictionary readings of Buddhist terms. Different Indian traditions used the same word in sometimes very different ways, so we do have to look at how a tradition defines them in their own texts. General Sanskrit dictionaries usu. take the Vedic tradition as normative. Another example is that samjna can mean “conscious” in Sanskrit, but Buddhists use it for perceptions or concepts.
Yes, I think this is correct. Maybe something like ‘thingness’ where a single word is desired.
I agree that the term consciousness carries with it a load of different meanings that are not necessarily appropriate in a Buddhist context. In the past, in some cases I simply preferred discrimination, as that seems to be narrower in meaning, and more indicative of the basic process described in the texts. But in certain contexts it does not work well.
Let me expand on how viññāṇa is described in the early texts, beyond the stock formula in which we learn that sense sphere + sense faculty gives rise to sense viññāṇa. I think we can identify four basic qualities of viññāṇa: (1) reference, (2) contingency, (3) presumption and (4) a certain dynamics.
(1) Reference is simply that we are cognizant of something, and that that something is outside of viññāṇa itself, like a book or a tree. I don’t know that this is declared in the EBT, but (3) and (4) depend on it.
(2) Contingency means that viññāṇa is dependently co-arisen and transitory. This is implied by the stock formula. In MN 38 i258, the “misguided monk” Sāti believes, “As I understand the Dhamma taught by the Blessed One, it is this same viññāṇa that runs and wanders through the round of rebirths, not another?” and the The Buddha replies, “have I not stated in many ways consciousness to be dependently arisen, since without a condition there is no origination of consciousness?” The fact that viññāṇa is an “aggregate” should tell us that there are a lot of them: it is not a “thing” (or a faculty or an “ability”) but rather a phenomenal event, some kind of “awareness event.”
Qualities (3) and (4) are less often mentioned, but explained perhaps most thoroughly by Ven. Ñāṇānanda, in The Magic of the Mind (1974) and in the
Nibbāna Sermons (2008) and other texts available at https://seeingthroughthenet.net/. The discussion in my book Dependent Co-arising (2021, https://bhikkhucintita.files.wordpress.com/2021/10/dependentcoarisingweb1006.pdf, chapters 3 and 10) is based on Ñāṇānanda, but is more concise.
(3) Presumption is quality of viññāṇa to make up what it wants and to convince us that it is true:
Now suppose that a magician or magician’s apprentice were to display
a magic trick at a major intersection, and a man with good eyesight
were to see it, observe it, and appropriately examine it. To him —
seeing it, observing it, and appropriately examining it — it would
appear empty, void, without substance: for what substance would
there be in a magic trick? In the same way, a monk sees, observes,
and appropriately examines any viññāṇa that is past, future, or
present; inner or outer; blatant or subtle; common or sublime; far or
near. To him — seeing it, observing it, and appropriately examining it
— it would appear empty, void, without substance: for what
substance would there be in viññāṇa?” (SN 22.95)
Viññāṇa creates a world of objects, and even gives us the burden of a self in relation to those objects.
(4) The dynamics of viññāṇa is described succinctly as:
That which is called mind, mentality or viññāṇa arises as one thing
and ceases as another all day and all night. (SN 12.61)
More specifically it is a process of alighting at a particular focal point (viññāṇaṭṭhita) within the phenomenal world and then growth at that focal point. Alighting and growth are described either in relation to name and form or in in relation to the five (or first four) aggregates. This dynamics produces a cycle (vaṭṭa) of mutual causality between viññāṇa and name and form.
As long as viññāṇa remains, it remains involved with form,
supported by form, founded on form. And with a sprinkle of relishing,
it exhibits growth, increase, and flourishing. [This is then repeated for
feeling, perception, formations] (DN 33 iii228)
For one dwelling, bhikkhus , watching the allure in phenomena, which
leads to bondage, there is a descent of viññāṇa. Conditioned by viññāṇa there is name and form … (SN 12.59)
All of these qualities are subject to observation in everyday experience. They are playing as you read these words. An additional quality widely attributed to viññāṇa is more abstract and has to do with rebirth. I argue in Dependent Co-arising (pp. 222-9) that this interpretation is erroneous, but realize that convincing others is an uphill battle.
I prefer Ven. Kumāra’s translation as ‘cognizance,’ but for a different reason: ‘Consciousness’ is easily understood as simple awareness of any kind. ‘Cognizance’ suggests something far more specific and very complex.
Thank you.
I think it very useful to see that vinnana can be just sense-vinnana and also kamma-vinnana and sometimes also patisandhi vinnana. (there are more classifications)
Kamma-vinnana is a vinnana loaded with expactations, with desires, with emotions.
In other words, it is not just only looking, not just only hearing, not just only seeing etc. but there is also a certain mentallity towards the sense-object. That mentallity is not the same as vinnana.
In practise i can see there is seldomly only seeing, only hearing, only sensing, there is much more going on in relation to what is sensed.
In SN 12.67, consciousness and name and form are said to lean against each other. In SN22.79, the names of the khandas are described through verbs:
And why, bhikkhus do you call it ‘Viññāṇa’? ‘It cognizes’, bhikkhus, that is why it is called ‘Viññāṇa’. And what does it cognize? It cognizes sour, it cognizes bitter, it cognizes pungent, it cognizes sweet, it cognizes alkaline, it cognizes non-alkaline, it cognizes salty, it cognizes bland.{2} ‘It cognizes’, bhikkhus, that is why it is called ‘Viññāṇa’.
You referenced SN 22.95 already – and I find these few verses later in the sutta to be informative as well:
Vitality, warmth, and viññāṇa:
when they leave the body,
it lies there tossed aside,
food for others, mindless.
Your quote from SN 12.61 also shows that citta, mano, and viññāṇa have an overlap/synonymity or can be confounded at times:
That which is called mind, mentality or viññāṇa arises as one thing
and ceases as another all day and all night.
In this case kamma vinnana is meant, because sense-vinnana (sota-vinnana, for example) cannot be the same as mentallity. That is impossible.
Kamma vinnana means there is more going on than just hearing, for example. There is also a mentallity towards what is heard, such as dislike or a like.
Mind is also not the same as vinnana, because when one is deeply asleep, and there is no sense-experience in anyway, then one is still not mindless.
In a sense the mind still experiences also things in deep dreamless sleep. Also without consciousness there can be reactivity and body movements.
Right; the differences and similarities between citta, mano, and viññāṇa, and those between different uses of viññāṇa, can inform the choice of word used to translate it.
There is also the totality and complementarity of the aggregates, described as “the All”, which are the field of identification so to speak, also informing the choice of word used to translate viññāṇa. Whatever doesn’t fall under the other aggregates must be contained within viññāṇa.
Is it vinnana who does or the defilements?