Beginning with the Question of Eye, Ear, Nose, Tongue, Body, and Mind
Why does Buddhism speak of the eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind? Instead of immediately attaching a textbook definition, I suggest twisting the question slightly. What would Buddhism speak about if it did not speak about these six faculties? What have non-Buddhist religions, myths, and philosophies placed first when explaining human beings and the world? Only by comparing the two can we see that these terms are more than a list of sense organs.
The six were not necessarily presented as a single set from the very beginning. Early teachings chiefly discussed the five faculties, or five senses, and seeing and hearing were probably emphasized first. Later, mind was added to eye, ear, nose, tongue, and body. Mind can be called consciousness or mentality. Buddhism thus came to examine not only what enters through the five bodily senses but also what appears and can be observed as thought and emotion.
Eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind are not six characters to memorize. They ask how human beings observe the world and how that observation continues into thought.
Claims About What the World Is Made Of
For comparison, consider Jainism. Frequently mentioned alongside Buddhism as an ancient Indian śramaṇa philosophy, Jainism explains the world through jīva and ajīva. Jīva is a mental principle close to life and soul, while ajīva refers to nonmental things, including matter, time, and space. It is a dualistic worldview in which the material realm gathers and disperses while something belonging to jīva continues.
People of that age debated questions such as “What am I?”, “Am I eternal?”, “What is the world made of?”, “How does the world operate?”, and “Where do we come from and where are we going?” This was not confined to India roughly 2,500 years ago. Across a broad region, Greek philosophy, Indian philosophies and the Upaniṣads, and the Chinese Hundred Schools of Thought offered similar questions and answers. Whether or not they directly influenced one another, it was an age in which human beings constructed competing worldviews.
To understand why Buddhism discusses the six faculties, we must first distinguish talk about a world humans have observed from talk that posits a world they cannot observe.
The Four Marks in the Diamond Sutra and an Invisible Substance
When we connect the term jīva with Buddhist literature, the four marks in the Diamond Sutra—self, person, sentient being, and life span—come to mind. Kumārajīva’s translation, which is widely read in Korea, speaks of four marks, while Xuanzang’s translation presents nine. Even translations of the same Diamond Sutra classify them differently. What matters is not memorizing four terms but examining what they commonly posit.
The mark of self is connected with ātman. The mark of person does not simply mean an image of someone else; it relates to pudgala, the individual person. The mark of a sentient being relates to sattva, the notion of a living being endowed with sentience. Bodhisattva can likewise be understood as a sattva who seeks wisdom. The mark of life span concerns enduring life and connects with the notion of a jīva or soul believed to continue after the body disappears.
Although these four marks use different expressions, they have something in common: the idea that, beyond the visible body and changing phenomena of life, there is a separate and unchanging “something of me” that does not disappear at death. Jainism’s jīva and ajīva also explain that while the material body disperses, jīva continues. The problem is whether this alleged something can be observed through the senses common to human beings.
Before speaking of a self, soul, or jīva that continues after bodily death, we must ask whether it is universally observable to human beings.
What Metaphysics and Gnosticism Demand
When people imagine something that cannot be confirmed through sight, hearing, or another sense and begin to say that it really exists, they enter the realm of metaphysics. They posit a reality beyond visible phenomena: a soul, a subject that reincarnates, heaven and hell, or an afterlife. The Little Prince’s statement that what is essential is invisible to the eye is also connected to the metaphysical thinking I have criticized.
This mode of thought continues into Gnosticism. It claims that spiritual practice enables someone to know what ordinary people cannot see, exercise supernatural powers, converse with gods, or see the future, past lives, and the afterlife. Its structure says that only a special few who reach a certain state can know. The same question can be put not only to Jain jīva but also to claims about heavenly beings and asuras, Vishnu, Avalokiteśvara and Amitābha, the Dharma-body of a Buddha, manas and ālaya consciousness in Yogācāra, the age of the decline of the Dharma, prophecy, and karma. Can anyone observe them?
If only a special practitioner is said to have seen something while everyone else is unable to verify it, the claim demands faith rather than knowledge.
When Observation Is Impossible, Faith Becomes Necessary
If something universally unobservable is said to have been seen only by a genius, superhuman, long-term practitioner, or person believed to have been spiritually advanced since a former life, everyone else has no way to confirm it. Even if one claims that hell and heaven exist or that a soul keeps changing bodies, if I can neither see nor verify it, the only remaining choice is to believe or disbelieve.
This is where faith is elevated into the most important virtue. This is not limited to Islam, Christianity, or shamanism. Places bearing the name of Buddhism also say that, after practice and understanding, faith is ultimately most important. Because they have told stories that cannot be dealt with through universal observation and reason, they have no choice but to demand belief. They insist that people believe unverifiable claims about mysterious states, prophecy, the power to summon rain, conversations with heavenly beings, former lives, and the afterlife.
I call this superstition. A structure that sells something unverifiable by saying “Believe in God,” “Believe in the Buddha,” or “Belief will help you” spreads superstition. The criterion is not which religion’s name it bears. The criterion is whether gaps in unobservable and unarguable claims are filled with faith.
The claim that faith is indispensable also means that you cannot directly verify what the speaker has presented.
Buddhism Speaks of Observation Through the Sense Faculties
Buddhism, by contrast, speaks of observation. Human beings see with the eyes, hear with the ears, smell with the nose, taste with the tongue, and feel contact with the body. This is why Buddhism carefully examines eye, ear, nose, tongue, and body. Seeing and hearing may come first because they are particularly important to human beings. The central issue is how we observe phenomena that actually appear to us.
Name-and-form, or nāma-rūpa, can be understood within this flow. Rūpa initially means visible shape or form, but it expands toward the entire material realm observed through the senses. Nāma is name: the activity through which humans distinguish what they observe, give it names, and assign meaning. Name-and-form therefore speaks together of the world that actually appears and the human activity of classifying, naming, and understanding it.
The existence of a word in the world does not mean that the substance designated by that word also exists. We cannot conclude that souls, gods, and an afterlife exist merely because those names exist. We must distinguish what has been observed, the names attached to it, and the imagination that those names generate anew.
Buddhism discusses eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind because it seeks to distinguish the observed world from the names and meanings human beings attach to it.
The Undeclared Questions and the Attitude of Not Answering What We Do Not Know
If Buddhism deals with what can be observed, how should it answer questions about what cannot? We can recall the fourteen undeclared questions that the Buddha is said not to have answered. Even when asked how vast the universe is, when the world began, where we go after death, or whether a soul or god exists, one should not answer recklessly without grounds in observation and verification.
This does not mean prohibiting questions. It means placing question marks—“Does that really exist?” and “Is it truly real?”—beside statements believed merely because parents, priests, or books said so. It separates what can be confirmed from what cannot and escapes the delusion that a substance must exist because a name exists. We need not deny even the possibility that something invisible exists. But possibility and the assertion that it actually exists are entirely different. Imagination is only imagination, and what we do not know must be answered with “I do not know.”
The undeclared questions are not a silence that forbids thought; they are a refusal to lie that one knows what has no observational basis.
The Result of Prayer and the Conclusion of Observation and Reflection
Under the name of Buddhism, some chant Amitābha or Maitreya who has not yet come, insist that Avalokiteśvara actually exists, or claim that someone can see former lives and the afterlife and predict the future. I do not regard such statements as actual Buddhism. If Buddhism is a religion that addresses observable things and their workings, selling experiences that no one can confirm already departs from its starting point.
The efficacy of prayer can be approached in the same way. Throw a rock into water and pray as much as you want for it to float; it will not. If someone says that prayer changed something invisible, we must ask how they know that it changed. The same applies to asking whether prayer can send a deceased mother, who is feared to have sinned greatly and gone to hell, into heaven. If it cannot be observed, there is no way to confirm whether it is possible, and all that remains is belief or disbelief.
For this reason, a statement that something unobservable certainly exists has no value from a Buddhist standpoint. What matters is observing, reflecting on causes and results, and repeatedly asking what we see and fail to see. We can acknowledge that something invisible may exist. But we must not leap from that possibility to “It certainly exists.”
Observation and reflection are the alpha and omega of Buddhism. That is why Buddhism speaks of eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind, and tells us to say that we do not know what we do not know.
The problem is people who insist that what they have neither seen nor confirmed must exist and make a living by selling superstition. They do not hesitate to deceive people 365 days a year while declaring the existence of things they have never seen. Examining the six faculties is Buddhism’s most basic training for asking what human beings have actually observed and distinguishing imagination from fact.
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