 According to Śāntarakṣita, vijñānas can include feelings and emotions whereas in Western psychology and philosophy cognitions are distinct from emotions and feelings. This means that the role of vijñānas in Śāntarakṣita’s system is different from the role of cognitions in Western psychology and philosophy. As I mentioned above, in the history of Western philosophy the distinction between feeling and cognition has often been used as the demarcation between feeling and rational thought with the ideal of affectless thought. For Śāntarakṣita and other Buddhist philosophers the ideal is not necessarily that of affectless thought. Instead, their ideal is that of an existence free from afflictions (kleśas). So, they try to extinguish one kind of mental phenomenon but their distinction is different from the distinction between feeling and thought. For them, all mental phenomena that provide an obstacle to liberation should be eliminated. This includes what Western psychologists would call emotions or feelings. However, it also includes many affectless cognitions. This means that the Western psychological category “emotions” does not feature prominently in Śāntarakṣita’s account of the mind. In fact, it is not clear that he would even recognize such a category. According to Buddhist psychology, some kleśas straddle the Western divide between feeling and thought. They involve both feeling and thought and they are a mental phenomenon, called a vijñāna. Whereas for many philosophers in the history of Western philosophy, the ideal has been to purge feeling from thought, in order to attain a standard of rationality, the ideal for Śāntarakṣita and other Buddhist philosophers is to free our mental life from those vijñānas which are kleśas. The reason is not to attain some standard of rationality because, for Buddhists, most vijñānas are suspect in that they involve an attachment to the present life and therefore pose an obstacle to liberation.