Buddhi, including ahamkara and the senses, often called citta in Yoga, is always incessantly suffering changes like the flame of a lamp, it is made up of a large preponderance of the pure sattva substances, and is constantly moulding itself from one content to another.  These images by the dual reflection of buddhi and puru@sa are constantly becoming conscious, and are being interpreted as the experiences of a person.  The existence of the puru@sa is to be postulated for explaining the illumination of consciousness and for explaining experience and moral endeavour.  The buddhi is spread all over the body, as it were, for it is by its functions that the life of the body is kept up; for the Sa@mkhya does not admit any separate prana vayu (vital breath) to keep the body living.  What are called vayus (bio-motor force) in Vedanta are but the different modes of operation of this category of buddhi, which acts all through the body and by its diverse movements performs the life-functions and sense-functions of the body.

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[Footnote 1:  As the contact of the buddhi with the external objects takes place through the senses, the sense data of colours, etc., are modified by the senses if they are defective.  The spatial qualities of things are however perceived by the senses directly, but the time-order is a scheme of the citta or the buddhi.  Generally speaking Yoga holds that the external objects are faithfully copied by the buddhi in which they are reflected, like trees in a lake

  “tasmims’ca darpane sphare samasta vastudrstayah
  imastah pratibimbanti sarasiva tatadrumah” Yogavarttika, I. 4.

The buddhi assumes the form of the object which is reflected on it by the senses, or rather the mind flows out through the senses to the external objects and assumes their forms:  “indriyanyeva pranalika cittasancaranamargah taih samyujya tadgola kadvara bahyavastusuparaktasya cittasyendryasahityenaivarthakarah parinamo bhavati” Yogavarttika, I. VI. 7.  Contrast Tattvakaumudi, 27 and 30.]

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Apart from the perceptions and the life-functions, buddhi, or rather citta as Yoga describes it, contains within it the root impressions (sa@mskaras) and the tastes and instincts or tendencies of all past lives (vasana) [Footnote ref 1].  These sa@mskaras are revived under suitable associations.  Every man had had infinite numbers of births in their past lives as man and as some animal.  In all these lives the same citta was always following him.  The citta has thus collected within itself the instincts and tendencies of all those different animal lives.  It is knotted with these vasanas like a net.  If a man passes into a dog life by rebirth, the vasanas of a dog life, which the man must have had in some of his previous infinite number of births, are revived, and the man’s tendencies become like those of a dog.  He forgets the experiences of his previous life and becomes attached to enjoyment in the manner of a dog.  It is by the revival of the vasana suitable to each particular birth that there cannot be any collision such as might have occurred if the instincts and tendencies of a previous dog-life were active when any one was born as man.