Some Thoughts

"Daring to live means daring to die at any moment, but also means daring to be born, crossing great stages of life in which the person we have been dies, and is replaced by another with a renewed vision of the world, and at the same time realizing that there will be many obstacles to overcome before we reach the final stage."
- Arnaud Desjardins

According to Wikipedia, humans, or human beings, are "bipedal primates belonging to the mammalian species Homo sapiens (Latin for 'wise' or 'knowing' man) under the family Hominidae (the great apes)." Humans can be distinguished by their highly developed brain capable of abstract reasoning, language and introspection. This, combined with an erect body carriage that frees their upper limbs for manipulating objects, has allowed humans to make greater use of tools than any other species.

I'm a human, and chances are that if you're reading this, you're a human, too.

Humans (and often other animals as well) are variously said to possess consciousness, self-awareness and a mind, which correspond roughly to the mental processes of thought. The mirror test asks whether animals have self awareness by determining whether they are able to recognize themselves in a mirror. Such self-recognition is said to be an indicator of consciousness. Humans (older than 18 months), great apes (except for gorillas), and bottlenose dolphins have all been observed to pass this test.

In addition to consciousness, however, humans are also said to possess the ability to discriminate a difference between themselves and their environment. The extent to which the mind constructs or experiences this discrimination, the passage of time and free will is a matter of some debate.

It is maintained by some religions and other factions that the universe itself is nothing but consciousness. The "consciousness-only" school of Buddhism maintains that all existence is simply consciousness, and therefore there is nothing that lies outside of the mind. This means that conscious experience is nothing but false discriminations or imagination; thus, the notion of consciousness-only is an indictment of the problems engendered by the activities of consciousness.

Embedded at the heart of Buddhism, there lies a seeming paradox. In contrast to the Brahmanic teachings of the Upanishads, the Buddha stated quite clearly that the self (atman) is an illusion, and thus there is no soul (anatman). However, there is transmigration (samsara) from one body to another. This poses a difficult question: "If there is no soul, what is it that reincarnates?"

The consciousness-only school resolves this paradox by explains that the conception of "self", the illusory atman, is produced from underlying "seeds." The seeds have a natural affinity to join together and when this happens, consciousness arises. Actions in this world, good, bad and neutral, affect (or "perfume") these seeds. The seeds then produce new seeds, with some seeds tainted by our actions, and others unaffected. Even after death, the impressions resulting from our acts linger on in the seeds. Since the seeds have a natural affinity to join together, reincarnation occurs when seeds fuse and new states of consciousness (delusions of "self") form, carrying with them the karmic history, just like DNA is carried on in living seeds.

A Buddha is someone who has managed to obliterate all impressions of himself, all perfumings of the seeds, and escape the wheel of samsara. Such consciousness, fully cleansed of karmic sediment, is known as "pure consciousness."

Still with me? Good. The question, then, is in the consciousness-only school, can a Buddha be said to have self-awareness, and is pure consciousness different enough from ordinary consciousness that it can be considered a whole other thing? If so, then is a Buddha "conscious" of being human, and is he even a human being ("wise" or "knowing" man) or the next evolutionary step, say, "enlightened" man (Homo tathagatha)?