Verse 9 of 30 Layer 3: Senses

What the sense layer carries

此心所遍行　別境善煩惱隨煩惱不定　皆三受相應

Its mental factors (caitta) are: the universal ones, the object-specific, the wholesome, the afflictions, the secondary afflictions, and the indeterminate — all associated with the three kinds of feeling.

Vasubandhu now begins a taxonomy of the mental factors (caitta) that always or sometimes accompany the sixth-tier sense streams. This is the most “API-documentation” section of the entire text: a structured enumeration of the kinds of content that ride along with perception. Six categories of factor — universal, object-specific, wholesome, afflictions, secondary afflictions, indeterminate — combined with three sensation-tones (pleasant, unpleasant, neutral).

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memory

The Distributed Systems Engineer

DSE

Treats alaya as an append-only log, manas as a hot cache, the six senses as consumers.

Pure schema definition. The sense streams come decorated with:

Universal factors (sarvatraga) — always present (5)
Object-specific factors (viniyata) — present in particular operations (5)
Wholesome factors (kuśala) — cultivable (11)
Afflictions (kleśa) — root pathologies (6) and secondary afflictions (upakleśa) — derived (20)
Indeterminate factors (aniyata) — either-way (4)
Plus three sensations (vedanā): pleasant, unpleasant, neutral

Verses 10–14 will unpack each category. From an engineering standpoint this is a feature-flag enumeration: which factors are on, which are off, for any given moment of sense cognition.

Draft not yet reviewed

hub

The Cynefin Practitioner

CYN

Maps each verse to Clear, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic, or Confused.

The taxonomy itself is a Cynefin-style typology of behaviors. It is not a model of how cognition works; it is a vocabulary for describing observed regularities. That is what good classifications do in a Complex domain: they don’t predict, they enable communication about pattern.

Draft not yet reviewed

psychology

The Cognitive Scientist

COG

Reads through predictive processing, Bayesian inference, and self-model theory.

Treat this as Vasubandhu’s “DSM-V of cognition.” Notice the structural sophistication: universals (always present), object-specifics (present in some operations), wholesome (cultivable), afflictions (suppressible), indeterminate (context-dependent), sensations (hedonic tone). The architecture is closer to modern cognitive psychology than to any Western framework available in the 4th century.

Draft not yet reviewed

water_drop

The Process Philosopher

PRO

Whitehead, Heraclitus, Bergson — reality as flow, not substance.

The taxonomy is a phenomenology, not an ontology. These are aspects of the experiential flow, not parts. To list them is not to commit to their being separable.

Draft not yet reviewed

report_problem

The Skeptic

SKP

Mandatory on every verse. Names where the metaphors break.

Resist the database-schema reading. These categories overlap, have fuzzy boundaries, and have been classified differently across Yogācāra commentaries — notably between the Sthiramati line and the Cheng Wei-shih Lun line behind Xuanzang’s translation. The list is not a final API; it is a working vocabulary.

Draft not yet reviewed

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