The Marvel of Consciousness: Existence and Manifestation in Jñānaśrīmitra’s Sākārasiddhiśāstra

Abstract

This paper considers Jñānaśrīmitra’s defense of manifestation (prakāśa) as the criterion of ultimate existence (paramārthasat). In the first section, "Asatkhyāti and Adhyavasāya: making sense of manifestation as the criterion of the real", I show the way that, in response to Ratnākaraśānti’s Nirākāravāda, Jñānaśrīmitra argues for a sharp distinction between manifestation and determination (adhyavasāya) in an effort to establish that the manifestation of something unreal (alīka, asat) is incoherent. The unreal, he thinks, is only ever determined; it is never manifest to consciousness, properly speaking. In the second section, “To be manifest is to be locked away in a single awareness-event”, I turn to one of the consequences of this view that Jñānaśrīmitra embraces: what manifests is only what appears in a single moment of conscious awareness. In the third section, “The scope of neither-one-nor-many: Jñānaśrīmitra’s Interpretation of PV 3.220–221”, I consider one of the problems this raises: how is it that an appearance with mutually opposed parts (a so-called citrākāra, for instance a variegated butterfly’s wing that is both blue and yellow) manifests in one and the same unitary moment of awareness? Jñānaśrīmitra solves this problem by appealing to the nature of manifestation and its distinction from determination: what is manifest, even if it is variegated, is nondual and indivisible; distinctions arise only on the basis of determination. I trace the details of this solution in the context of his discussion of an important pair of verses from Dharmakīrti. Finally, in the last section, “The marvelous nonduality of variegated awareness-events”, I turn to the surprising buddhological consequences of this solution.