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Mind in Buddhism

Contemporary scholar Tadeusz Skorupski states:

In Buddhism there are three principal Sanskrit (and Pāli) terms that are employed to denote what in the west is called mind or consciousness: citta, manas and 'vijñāna (Pāli viññāṇa). In western publications these terms are mostly rendered as mind or consciousness, mind, and consciousness.

The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism states:

...mind is designated as citta because it “builds up” (cinoti) virtuous and nonvirtuous states; as manas, because it calculates and examines; and as vijñāna, because it discriminates among sensory stimuli.

Bhikkhu Bodhi states:

While technically the three terms [citta, manas and viññāṇa] have the same denotation, in the Nikāyas they are generally used in distinct contexts. As a rough generalization:

• Viññāṇa signifies the particularizing awareness through a sense faculty (as in the standard sixfold division of viññāṇa into eye-consciousness, etc.) as well as the underlying stream of consciousness, which sustains personal continuity through a single life and threads together successive lives (emphasized at 12:38-40).
• Mano serves as the third door of action (along with body and speech) and as the sixth internal sense base (along with the five physical sense bases); as the mind base it coordinates the data of the other five senses and also cognizes mental phenomena (dhammā), its own special class of objects.
• Citta signifies mind as the center of personal experience, as the subject of thought, volition, and emotion. It is citta that needs to be understood, trained, and liberated.

For a more detailed discussion, see Hamilton, Identity and Experience, chap. 5.