self,
and for the same reason.

Here we find ourselves sailing on the high seas of dogmatic terminology
and must investigate the meaning of this important and untranslateable
word. It is equivalent to the Sanskrit _samskara_, which is akin to the
word Sanskrit itself, and means compounding, making anything artificial
and elaborate. It may be literally translated as synthesis or
confection, and is often used in the general sense of phenomena since
all phenomena are compound[410]. Occasionally[411] we hear of three
Sankharas, body or deed, word and thought. But in later literature the
Sankharas become a category with fifty-two divisions and these are
mostly mental or at least subjective states. The list opens with contact
(phasso) and then follow sensation, perception, thought, reflection,
memory and a series of dispositions or states such as attention, effort,
joy, torpor, stupidity, fear, doubt, lightness of body or mind, pity,
envy, worry, pride. As European thought does not class all these items
under one heading or, in other words, has no idea equivalent to
Sankhara, it is not surprising that no adequate rendering has been
found, especially as Buddhism regards everything as mere becoming, not
fixed existence, and hence does not distinguish sharply between a
process and a result--between the act of preparing and a preparation.
Conformations, confections, syntheses, co-efficients, tendencies,
potentialities have all been used as equivalents but I propose to use
the Pali word as a rule. In some passages the word phenomena is an
adequate literary equivalent, if it is remembered that phenomena are not
thought of apart from a perceiving subject: in others some word like
predispositions or tendencies is a more luminous rendering, because the
Sankharas are the potentialities for good and evil action existing in
the mind as a result of Karma[412].

The Buddha has now enumerated four categories which are not the self.
The fifth and last is Vinnana, frequently rendered by consciousness. But
this word is unsuitable in so far as it suggests in English some unified
and continuous mental state. Vinnana sometimes corresponds to thought
and sometimes is hardly distinguished from perception, for it means
awareness[413] of what is pleasant or painful, sweet or sour and so on.
But the Pitakas continually insist[414] that it is not a unity and that
its varieties come into being only when they receive proper nourishment
or, as we shoul