The Difference Between the First Five Consciousnesses and the Sixth Consciousness

The difference between the first five consciousnesses and the sixth consciousness is: the sixth consciousness often discerns together with the first five consciousnesses, giving rise to mental activities such as analysis, thinking, reasoning, judgment, perception, and investigation. The five consciousnesses discern the coarse aspects of the five sense-objects, while the sixth consciousness discerns the subtle aspects of the five sense-objects. When the sixth consciousness is not discerning together with the five consciousnesses, it is the solitary mental consciousness. The sixth consciousness engaged in discursive thinking is the solitary mental consciousness; the sixth consciousness pondering over past and future is the solitary mental consciousness; and the mental activity of consciousness during dreams is also the solitary mental consciousness. For example, when looking at a person, the mind consciousness, through analysis, discerns that this person has a certain temperament, cultivation, education, and virtue; discerns the person's approximate age, whether they are male or female, and what their character and disposition are like—all of these are contents discerned by the sixth consciousness.

Under ordinary circumstances, the mind consciousness discerns the five sense-objects together with the five consciousnesses. The five consciousnesses discern the coarse forms, sounds, smells, tastes, and tangibles, while the mind consciousness discerns the subtle forms, sounds, smells, tastes, and tangibles; these so-called subtle forms, sounds, smells, tastes, and tangibles are the mental sense-objects (dharmas). For example, when the eye faculty contacts material form, the eighth consciousness produces eye consciousness; when the manas contacts the mental sense-object upon material form, the eighth consciousness produces the mind consciousness. Then eye consciousness and mind consciousness together discern the material form, and thus it can be clearly discerned what the material form is. For example, when looking at a rice cooker, the eye consciousness knows the color of the rice cooker, while the mind consciousness knows its shape, whether it is new or old, its quality, its specific size, its structure, its materials, and so on. In fact, when the eyes see form, it is discerned jointly by eye consciousness and mind consciousness; it is not that the eye faculty, merely by possessing the nature of seeing, can see things. Although a dead person still has the eye faculty, they no longer have eye consciousness and mind consciousness, and therefore a dead person cannot see form. When seeing form, it is the eye consciousness that can discern information such as colors and brightness; beyond this, the consciousness that can discern an object's size, shape (square or round), length, and other mental sense-objects is the mind consciousness.