 One issue of great importance for the Vaibhāṣika and Yogācāra traditions, and consequently of interest to current  scholarship,[26]  is a problem specific to Buddhist meditation theory. The problem comes from an apparent inconsistency among well-founded early Buddhist scriptural positions. On the one hand, there was the orthodox belief that the body was kept alive by consciousness. Even in deep sleep, it was believed that there was some form of subtle consciousness that was keeping the body alive. On the other hand, there was the very old belief, possibly articulated by the Buddha himself, that there are six kinds of consciousness, and that each of them is associated with one of the six senses—the five traditional senses, plus the mental sense (which observes mental objects). The problem was that there are some meditative states that are defined as being completely free of all six sensory consciousnesses. So the question becomes, What keeps the meditator’s body alive when all consciousness is cut off?