#mahayana-buddhism — Public Fediverse posts

@[email protected] Very interesting, Rachel. I'm not familiar with Advaita Vedanta, but from my Mahayana Buddhist perspective, there seem strong similarities between the consciousness you wrote about here and the mind as we understand it. In our teachings, the six types of consciousness (eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mental) are types of primary minds that perceive and understand phenomena (objects). It's made clear in the teachings that the mind is not the brain or a function of the brain. If the mind (particularly the very subtle mind) can transcend death, it can't be part of the body that dies.

Materialism assumes that what we perceive exists inherently and exists in its 'true' form regardless of our perception of it. It's an okay way of engaging with the world we perceive around us in a conventional sense day-to-day (and Western science wouldn't exist without it), but it relies on us perceiving objects as they 'truly' exist, which is inevitably mistaken; if an object existed inherently in a true sense, we would all perceive it the more-or-less same, but we don't.

Many decades ago I did a university paper on the philosophy of the mind, where we looked at this question. Some of the students in the class were also studying psychology, and they really struggled with the notion that the mind or consciousness was separate from the brain and not a function of it. It made for some interesting conversations in our classes! #MahayanaBuddhism