by Tang Huyen

The Buddhist view of sensation is that it is given all at once. Were we to forego mentation and simply receive the sensation wholesome and uncut, we would be in Nirvana the whole time. That's the only difference between Samsara and Nirvana.

Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, "Medieval Biblical Commentary and
Philosophical Inquiry as Exemplified in the Thought of Moses
Maimonides and St. Thomas Aquinas", in Eric L. Ormsby, Moses
Maimonides and his Time, Washington, DC: Catholic University of
America Press, 1989, p. 107:

"truth is one and error the cause of multiplicity"

and note 31: "Although this specific articulation is taken from
Aquinas's In librum Beati Dionysii De Divinis Nominibus Expositio
(Rome: Marietti, 1950), IV, 4, the same understanding is common
to the Western philosophical tradition which identifies univocity
with God and hence with simplicity and truth and degrees of
multiplicity with progressive distance from God and truth."

Augustine is full of this distinction. I think it is from
Plotinus, who got it from Indian (Hinduist?) sages in perhaps
Iran. It has no association with Jewish mythology, not that I
know of.

Ernst Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und
Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit (The Problem of Knowledge in
Philosophy and Science in Modernity), III, 370: "The unity of
scientific experience is the 'whole' which has not to be built
from its parts, but conversely from which the parts are rather
first separated and extracted after the fact by critical
analysis [Die Einheit der wissenschaftlichen Erfahrung ist das
'Ganze', das aus seinen Teilen nicht aufgebaut zu werden
braucht, sondern aus dem vielmehr umgekehrt die Teile erst
durch die kritische Analyse nachträglich gesondert und
herausgelöst werden]."

Another manner of approaching the topic is the Buddhist view
of sensation and mentation: the sensation is whole and
continuous, though fully differentiated (and not a homogeneous
blank), and mentation jumps in to cut it up into bits and pieces
according to its own pigeon holes — concepts and categories,
structures and frameworks — and processes the results
accordingly, that is, in multiplicity. But the sensation is
free of all such pigeon holes, including unity.

The results are the things and objects of our daily life, from
concrete to abstract, right up to unity and multiplicity, God
and reality, all of which are derived and not given, abstracted
by mentation and not delivered on a platter by sensation.
Sensation is free from all such baskets and cages, and the
highest basket and cage is the something or the thing in general,
so that sensation has no thing and object.

So Buddhism takes an interpretation that is about the discursive
mind (de intellectu), whereas Thomas and Fénelon take an
interpretation that is about things (de re), be they parts of
mind. To paraphrase Cassirer, sensation is the 'whole' which has
not to be built from its parts, but conversely from which the
parts are rather first separated and extracted after the fact by
critical analysis (saṃkalpa, vikalpa) into things and objects.

Cassirer, ibid., pp. 367–368: "Against Hegel's assurance, that in
the construction of his logic it would not deal at all with the
process of a merely subjective reflexion, but of the objective
'march of the very thing itself', the succession of moments would
exist only for us, for a spectator who cannot grasp at once the
content of the absolute, and who must divide it into separate
successive moments [Das Nacheinander der Momente würde dann —
entgegen Hegels Versicherung, dass es sich im Aufbau seiner
Logik keineswegs um den Fortgang einer bloss subjektiven
Reflexion, sondern um den objektiven 'Gang der Sache selbst'
handle — nur für uns, nur für einen Zuschauer bestehen, der den
Gehalt des Absoluten nicht auf einmal zu erfassen vermag,
sondern ihn sich in getrennte successive Momente zerlegen muss]."

The Buddhist view of sensation is that it is given all at once,
and if we stop there and simply receive it passively, in rapt
attention, we would receive it whole and entire, at one go, but
we are afraid of its glorious fullness and proceed to break it
up into bits and pieces to process it piecemeal instead, to the
measure of our limited mentation (not: mind), and thus we cause
the fall to occur to ourselves. Were we to forego mentation and
simply receive the sensation wholesome and uncut, we would be
in Nirvana the whole time. That's the only difference between
Samsara and Nirvana.

Buddhism, Thomas, Fénelon, Hegel, Cassirer talk in different
ways about something that should not be broken up, and its
breakup is the fall. By the way, atom means unbreakable —
insécable in French.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on June 13, 2004. Author: Tang Huyen (Laughing Buddha, Inc.). Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

Tang Huyen was a scholar of Buddhist studies with deep command of Pāli, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan sources. Posting to talk.religion.buddhism and related groups from 2003 to 2008, he was among the most rigorous analytical voices in the English-language Buddhist Usenet world. This post is one of his most sustained exercises in comparative philosophy: the Western tradition from Aquinas through Cassirer knows that truth is one and error the cause of multiplicity; the Buddhist tradition knows the same thing through the doctrine of sensation and mentation. Sensation arrives whole; mentation splits it; the split is the fall. Tang Huyen traces this single insight across traditions, languages, and centuries, and closes with an etymology: atom, insécable — the unbreakable that we insist on breaking.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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