[Lal]

Johnny_Lim was also unable to post the following comment, and he emailed me the comment.
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“Dhammā, Kamma, Saṅkhāra, Mind – Critical Connections”

Under point #3,

“All the other five types of viññāṇa (cakkhu viññāṇa, sota viññāṇa, ghāna viññāṇa, jivhā viññāṇa, kāya viññāṇa) are ALWAYS vipāka viññāṇa.”

Say, a man saw an attractive lady walking towards his direction. The initial seeing is a vipāka viññāṇa. But this man has a habit of looking at beautiful ladies and so he enslaves his eyes to take in several more glances at the lady.

Aren’t the subsequent looking events no longer purely a vipāka viññāṇa? Shouldn’t they be classified as kamma viññāṇa or even a mixture of both?

I’m thinking along the line when we abuse our sense faculties to commit kamma and therefore instead of functioning as indriya, our sense faculties have now become Āyatana.

[Lal]

Johnny: “Aren’t the subsequent looking events no longer purely a vipāka viññāṇa?”

Yes. Those subsequent “looking events” are done with INTENTION (thus involve vaci sankhara to think about the mind-pleasing figure and to turn the head with kaya sankhara), and are DONE WITH kamma vinnana. In other words, they involve “sankhara paccaya vinnana.”

Even though those subsequent “lookings” involve cakkhu vinnana, they are INITIATED by mano vinnana.

That is a good question. We need to be thinking along those lines.

[Johnny_Lim]

Hi Lal,

Is ‘sankhara paccaya vinnana’ essentially a ‘upadana paccaya bhava’ in the akusala-mula pavutti PS cycle? If that is the case, what the man has done by taking several subsequent glances at the attractive lady is that he kickstarted a process to fabricate renewed existences unbeknown to him. Can we view this renewed existence as kamma bija since it is a natural byproduct of the above defiled process?

[Lal]

Hi Johnny,

‘Sankhara paccaya vinnana’ is not the same as ‘upadana paccaya bhava.’

What happens is that in the “tanha paccaya upadana” step, one gets “trapped” in that particular arammana, in your example, an attractive woman.
– Then one would start generating lustful thoughts (vaci sankhara) about the woman and may turn and take another look (involving kaya sankhara.)
– Those sankhara are generated due to avijja via “avijja paccaya sankhara.” Then it creates or feeds the “lustful vinnana” via “sankhara paccaya vinnana.” That then goes through the rest of the PS steps including revisiting the “tanha paccaya upadana” step. The next step there is “upadana paccaya bhava” and thus he is in a “temporary lustful bhava.” Then he may be “born” in that lustful state and may take further actions, such as going and talking to her.
– Paticca Samuppada steps are not necessarily linear as I discussed in the past few posts.

[Author]

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