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3. Self as Consciousness

What, then, is this ‘me’? Interestingly, for Advaita Vedānta [13] the true ‘I’ (or rather ‘self’: cf. Ram-Prasad this volume) is in no way some trans-experiential entity (as is the view of Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika), but is in a certain sense nothing but experience itself. For Advaita, ‘the self is the object experiencing…, i.e., ‘experiencing of something’, and is not only becoming manifest in it as something which stands, as it were, behind or beyond it' (Hacker 1978: 275). So in this view experience does not take place for a subject, but simply as the subject.Where, then, is the dissent from Buddhism and its rejection of an experiencing self in addition to experience? The crucial difference is that ‘experience’ is meant here in the sense of consciousness (citor caitanya), which in Advaita Vedānta is strictly distinguished from the mind (in the sense of the changing mental states). When, for example, Advaitins speak of jñāna (‘cognition’ or, in the terminology of this paper, ‘experience’) as being the essence of the self, they expressly distinguish it from what they call the vṛtti-jñānas, that is, the manifold transient mental states (Chatterjee 1982: 342; cf. also Hiriyanna 1956: 344 and Timalsina 2009: 17). [14]

13 Just as for Sāṃkhya and Yoga, and, by the way, for the Śaiva Siddhāntin Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha: cf. the
interesting study by Alex Watson (2006) . In his Nareśvaraparīkṣāprakāśa, Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha initially
lets the Buddhist win over Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika, which assume the existence of a self as a further entity
beyond cognition. But while Buddhism concludes that there actually is no self, only the cognitions,
Rāmakaṇṭha holds that cognition itself is the self (ibid.: 213–217). He thereby repeats earlier debates
between Buddhism and Sāṃkhya (whose view of the self he largely inherits) (ibid.: 93).
14 Quite similarly, Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha differentiates between two meanings of jñāna, namely on the one
hand the many transient cognitions, and on the other, the one abiding cognition which is our very self (and
which he also terms, when it comes to contrasting the two senses of jñāna, prakāśa = ‘illumination’
or saṃvit = ‘consciousness’): the latter being a permanent witnessing or experiencing of the passing
cognitions (Watson 2006: 354–373).

You are God

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