Salayatana

Meaning

Six working stations, the sense faculties through which experience is assembled: eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind. Yes, in Buddhism the mind is a sense faculty too. These are the six internal bases.

Each internal base has a corresponding external one: forms for the eye, sounds for the ear, and dhammas for the mind - that is, mental objects: thoughts, images, memories, ideas.

Mind as the sixth sense

In the Buddhist model the mind is not the chief of the five senses, seated somewhere above them, but simply the sixth sense base in the same series. Just as a sound becomes an object of the ear, so a thought, image or memory becomes an object of the mind, arising without our ordering it.

“The all”

In SN 35.23 the Buddha states: the eye and forms, the ear and sounds, the nose and odours, the tongue and tastes, the body and tangibles, the mind and dhammas - this is “the all” (sabba).

“The all” does not necessarily mean that nothing exists beyond the six bases. Rather, that everything capable of becoming a knowable phenomenon for us turns out to lie within the sense bases.

This is how the saḷāyatanas fit into the chain of dependent origination: the fifth link, conditioned by mentality-materiality (nāma-rūpa). With the six bases there is contact, and with contact, feelings of different tone: pleasant, unpleasant, neutral.

In practice

Try noticing through which door exactly a given sensation, thought or state has arrived.

Sometimes it turns out that the five external doors are entirely quiet, and only the mind is showing cartoons, replaying yesterday’s conversation or rehearsing tomorrow’s catastrophe.

Even the act of distinguishing noticeably clears perception: this is not a sound, not something seen, not a bodily sensation - the object came in through the mind door.