YOGACARA SCHOOL
• The Yogacara school provided methods by which one could identify and correct the cognitive errors inherent in the way the mind works.
• The founding of Yogacara, is usually attributed to ASANGA and VASUBANDHU (4th to 5th century C.E.), but most of its unique concepts had been introduced at least a century earlier in scriptures such as the Saṃdhinirmocanasūtra.
Historical overview
• Key Yogacara notions such as only-cognition (vijñaptimātra), three self-natures (trisvabhāva), the ĀLAYAVIJŇĀNA (warehouse consciousness), and the theory of eight consciousnesses were introduced in the Saṃdhinirmocanasūtra and received more detailed, systematic treatment in the writings of Asanga and Vasubandhu.
• Born Brahmans in Purusapura (Pakistan) to the same mother but different fathers.
• Asanga entering the MAHISASAKA school, while Vasubandhu joined the Vaibhāsikas in their stronghold in Kashmir.
• According to tradition, after many years of fruitless practice and solitary meditation, in a moment of utter despair, Asanga began receiving instruction from the future Buddha, MAITREYA, who resides in the Tusita heaven.
• Maitreya dictated new texts for Asanga to disseminate. Asanga also composed works under his own name, though the Chinese and Tibetan traditions disagree about the attribution of these texts.
• For instance, both ascribe the Mahayanasamgraha, Abhidharmasamuccaya, and Mahayanasutrlamkara to Asanga, and Madhyantavibhaga to Maitreya, but Chinese tradition attributes the Yogacarabhumi to Maitreya, whereas Tibetans credit Asanga with this text.
• Vasubandhu grew dissatisfied with Vaibhasika doctrine and, became a Yogacara through Asanga’s influence.
• Asanga’s Yogacarabhumi, is a comprehensive encyclopedia of how one progresses along the stages of the path to enlightenment.
• Vasubandhu’s pre-Yogacara, the ABHIDHARMAKOSABHASYA, also provides a comprehensive, detailed overview of the Buddhist path.
• After Vasubandhu, Yogacara developed into two distinct directions or branches:
• (1) a logico-epistemic tradition, exemplified by such thinkers as Dignaga, DHARMAKIRTI, Santaraksita, and Ratnakrti; and
• (2) an abhidharma-style psychology, exemplified by such thinkers as Sthiramati, Dharmapala, XUANZANG, and Vintadeva.
Classic texts
• The Yogacarabhumi (Maitreya-Asanga) describes seventeen stages (bhumis) of practice, beginning with an exposition of what it means to have a body with the five sensory consciousnesses, and moving on to instructions on developing a vast array of mental and meditative capacities and on engaging the sravaka (HINAYANA), PRATYEKABUDDHA, and BODHISATTVA vehicles, culminating in NIRVANA without remainder.
• The Mahayanasamgraha details how hearing, thinking, and contemplating the Mahayana teachings destroys the ālayavijñāna from within, like a germ infecting a host, since the Buddha’s word (buddhavacana) is ultimately irreducible to mental constructions; eliminating the ālayavijñāna therefore results in buddhahood.
• The Madhyantavibhaga, implicitly deploying the theory of three natures (trisvabhava) to define and explicate Buddhist practice, illustrates how SUNYATA (EMPTINESS) and cultivating positive insight (parinispanna) act as an antidote (pratipaksa) to the pervasive false mental constructions (parikalpita) one projects as lived experience, resulting in reality being experienced just as it is (purified paratantra).
• Vasubandhu’s Karmasiddhiprakarana (Investigation Establishing [the Correct Understanding] of Karma) discusses various Buddhist theories on how karma works, concluding that all is momentary but held together by causal chains, consequences of actions requiting their doer through mental causal chains embodied in the alayavijñana.
• Vasubandhu’s most important Yogacara texts are his Viṃsatikā (Twenty Verses) with commentary and Triṃsikā (Thirty Verses), together sometimes called the Vijñaptimātra treatises.
• The Triṃsikā densely packs the entire Yogacara system into thirty short verses.
Vijñaptimātra
• vijñaptimātra (“consciousness-only” or “representation-only”), which is not meant to suggest that only the mind is real.
• Vijñapti is grammatically a causative form, “what makes known,” and thus indicates that what appears in cognition is constructed, projected by consciousness, rather than passively received from outside by consciousness.
• Since nothing appears to us except within our acts of consciousness, all is vijñaptimatra.
• Yogacara rejects solipsism and theories of a universal mind that subsumes individuals.
• According to Yogacara, each individual is a distinct consciousness stream or mental continuum (cittasantana), and individuals can communicate with each other, teach and learn from each other, and influence and affect each other.
• Even rūpa (sensorial materiality) is accepted, if one realizes that physicality is only known as such through sensation and cognition.
• Everything we know, conceive, imagine, or are aware of, we know through cognition, including the notion that entities might exist independent of our cognition.
• Although the mind does not create the physical world, it generates the interpretative categories through which we know and classify the physical world
• Those interpretations, which are projections of our desires and anxieties, become obstructions (āvarana) preventing us from seeing what is actually the case.
• In simple terms, we are blinded by our own self-interests, our own prejudices, our desires. Unenlightened cognition is an appropriative act.
• Yogacāra does not speak about subjects and objects; instead, it analyzes perception in terms of graspers (grāhaka) and what is grasped (grāhya).
• From a Buddhist point of view, consciousness is differentiated from the soul in that the former is an ever-changing, momentary, and impermanent element.
• Consciousness, however, is considered to continue like a stream and is thought to be somehow transmitted from one life to the next, thus enabling karmic causality over lifetimes.
• Consciousness also keeps the body alive and distinguishes animate beings from inanimate elements.
• According to the scriptures that put forth the first pattern, as long as the consciousness has objects (alambana) to be conceived and to be attached to, it stays in the realm of SAMSARA, and the psycho-physical existence will enter the womb (i.e., one will be reborn in the next life without being liberated from samsara).
• Twelve causal links basically consists of two portions: the first (one through seven; ignorance through feeling) centering on consciousness, and the second (eight through twelve; craving through old age and death) centering on craving.
• The third item, Consciousness, is usually understood as the consciousness at the moment of conception.
• According to Yogacara tradition, at the time of one’s death, a powerful attachment to one’s own existence arises and makes one’s consciousness grasp the next life.
• Driven by this perverted thought, the being enters the womb, and the consciousness merges with the united semen and “blood,” after which the semen-blood combination becomes a sentient embryo.
• The Buddhist notion of karma is intimately connected to the notion of appropriation (upādāna).
• By definition, whatever is noncognitive can have no karmic implications or consequences.
• Intention means desiring something. • Only cognitive acts can have karmic
repercussions. This would include meaningful bodily gestures that communicate intentions (such gestures are also called vijñapti).
• Buddhists need focus only on what occurs within the domain of cognitive conditions (cittagocara).
• Categories such as external object and materiality (rūpa) are cognitive constructions.
• Materiality is a word for the colors, textures, sounds, and so on that we cognize in acts of perception, and it is only to the extent that are perceived and ideologically grasped, thereby becoming objects of attachment, that they have karmic significance.
• The deepest-seated erroneous view to which SENTIENT BEINGS cling, according to Buddhism, is atmadrsti, the view that a permanent, eternal, immutable, independent self exists.
• No such self exists, and deep down we know that. This makes us anxious, since it entails that no self or identity endures forever.
• Yogacara texts say: Negate the object, and the self is also negated
Three natures (trisvabhāva)
• The pervasive mental constructions that obstruct our view of what truly is the case are called parikalpita (imaginative construction).
• The actual webs of causes and conditions at play are called paratantra (dependent on other [causes])..
• Ordinarily paratantra is infested with parikalpita.• Parinispanna (consummation) is the removal of
parikalpita from paratantra, leaving only purified paratantra.
• Since the notion of “self-nature” is itself a parikalpic idea that presumes self-hood, it too must be eliminated.
• Thus the three self-natures are actually three non-self-natures (tri-nihsvabhāva).
• Parikalpita is devoid of self-nature since it is unreal by definition.
• Paratantra lacks self-nature, since other-dependence precludes “self” nature.
• Parinispanna—the Yogacara counterpart to the Madhyamaka notion of s´unyata (emptiness), which stands for the lack of self-nature in everything—is the antithesis of self-nature.
• Thus the three self-natures are ultimately understood as three non-self-natures.
• If causality requires temporal contiguity, how can consciousness temporarily cease during sleep, unconscious states, certain forms of meditation, or between lives, and then suddenly recommence?
• Where did it reside in the interim? • If karmic consequences occur long after the act
they are requiting was committed, and there is no substantial self, what links the act to its eventual karmic effect, and in what does this linkage reside?
• Most importantly, how can consciousnesses that are derivative of contact between organs and objects become projective?
• Manovijñāna became the organ of the sixth consciousness, rather than its by-product; manas became the seventh consciousness, responsible for appropriating experience as “mine” and thus infesting experience with a sense of self-hood (and thus also called ādānavijñāna, “appropriative consciousness,” and klistamanas, “defiled mind”).
• Consciousness that merges with the semen-blood combination is understood as the storehouse consciousness (ālayavijñāna).
• The ālayavijñāna, the deepest layer of one’s subconsciousness, maintains all the residue of past KARMA as “seeds,” which will give rise to their fruits in the future.
• Experiences produce seeds (bija) and perfumings (vāsanā) that are deposited in the ālayavijñāna.
• These seeds regenerate new seeds each moment.
• Consciousness that merges with the semen-blood combination is understood as the storehouse consciousness (ālayavijñāna).
• The ālayavijñāna, the deepest layer of one’s subconsciousness, maintains all the residue of past KARMA as “seeds,” which will give rise to their fruits in the future.
• Experiences produce seeds (bija) and perfumings (vāsanā) that are deposited in the ālayavijñāna.
• These seeds regenerate new seeds each moment.
• The ālayavijñāna flows onward like a constant stream, changing each moment with each new experience, thus providing karmic continuity as the seeds reach fruition.
• The ālayavijñāna continues to function even while the other consciousnesses become temporarily inoperative, unconscious.
• Hence it is also called “foundational consciousness” (mūlavijñāna).
• Although it stores karmic seeds and engenders their projection, the ālayavijñāna is a karmically neutral mechanical process (anivrta, avyakrta).
Purification of the mental stream
• Yogacara practice consists of analyzing cognitive processes in order to purify the mental stream of pollutants (asrava), removing all obstructions to unexcelled complete enlightenment.
• Bad seeds and perfumings need to be filtered out, while good seeds need to be watered and cultivated, so they will reach fruition.
• Mental disturbances (klesa), such as greed, hatred, delusion, arrogance, wrong views, envy, shamelessness, and so on, are gradually eliminated, while karmically wholesome mental conditions, such as nonharming, serenity, carefulness, and equanimity, are strengthened.
• As the obstructions from emotional and mental obstructions (klesāvarana) are eliminated, purification continues until the deepest seated cognitive obstructions (jñeyāvarana) are finally extinguished.
