Yogācāra

Yogācāra (“practice of yoga”), also called Vijñānavāda (“the doctrine of consciousness”) or Cittamātra (“mind-only”), is one of the two great schools of Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy in India, alongside Madhyamaka. Founded in the fourth and fifth centuries by the half-brothers Asaṅga and Vasubandhu, it holds that the world as we experience it — a world of independent objects confronting independent subjects — is a construction of consciousness: there are only representations (vijñapti-mātra). It developed a theory of eight consciousnesses, including a storehouse consciousness (ālaya-vijñāna) that carries the karmic seeds of all experience, a doctrine of three natures (trisvabhāva), and a path in which awakening is a radical “turning around” of the basis of consciousness. Yogācāra deeply influenced Buddhist logic, Chinese and Japanese Buddhism, Tibetan philosophy, and — through debate — Hindu Vedānta.

History

The school’s name reflects its origin among meditators: Yogācāra thinkers drew on meditative experience, in which objects appear vividly without external support. Its scriptural sources include the Saṃdhinirmocana Sūtra (“Sūtra Unravelling the Thought”) and the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra. Its foundational treatises were composed by Asaṅga — the vast Yogācārabhūmi (“Stages of Yoga Practice”), the Mahāyānasaṃgraha — some attributed by tradition to the future Buddha Maitreya, who is said to have revealed them to Asaṅga in the Tuṣita heaven; and by Vasubandhu, whose Twenty Verses (Viṃśatikā) and Thirty Verses (Triṃśikā) are the classic short statements of the system. Later Yogācāras included Sthiramati and Dharmapāla (6th century) — and the logicians Dignāga and Dharmakīrti, who wrote largely from a Yogācāra standpoint. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, who studied at Nālandā under Śīlabhadra, translated Yogācāra texts and founded the Faxiang (“dharma-characteristics”) school in China.

The teaching

Only representations

Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses open: “All this is merely representation (vijñapti-mātra), because of the appearance of non-existent objects, as a man with an eye disease sees non-existent hairs, moons and so on.” The realist objects that if there were no external objects, experiences would not be restricted to particular places and times, would not be shared by many people, and would not have real effects. Vasubandhu answers each with the example of dreams: in a dream too, objects appear in particular places and times; in hell, many beings share the same visions of torturers (produced by shared karma); and a wet dream has real effects. He then attacks atomism: external objects must be either single partless atoms, which cannot be perceived, or aggregates of atoms — but atoms, if partless, cannot combine (they would coincide), and if they have parts, they are not atoms. So external objects are incoherent; there are only representations.

Whether Yogācāra is a metaphysical idealism (only minds exist) or a phenomenological or epistemological thesis (we only ever know representations, and should suspend belief in what lies beyond them) is debated by modern scholars.

Eight consciousnesses

Earlier Buddhism recognised six consciousnesses: the five senses and the mind (mano-vijñāna). Yogācāra added two:

7. Manas, the “afflicted mind”, which constantly misidentifies the storehouse consciousness as a self, generating the sense of “I” and “mine” with its four afflictions: self-view, self-delusion, self-pride and self-love.
8. Ālaya-vijñāna, the storehouse consciousness, a subliminal stream that receives the impressions (vāsanās) of all experiences as seeds (bīja), which later ripen into new experiences — including the experience of a world. It explains how karma persists between lives without a self, how we recover consciousness after deep sleep, and why we share a common world (similar seeds produce similar worlds).

Three natures

Every phenomenon can be described in three ways (trisvabhāva):

• The imagined nature (parikalpita) — things as we ordinarily take them: independent objects grasped by independent subjects. This is unreal.
• The dependent nature (paratantra) — the actual flow of conditioned consciousness, arising from seeds.
• The perfected nature (pariniṣpanna) — the dependent nature empty of the imagined nature: consciousness free of the subject–object split. This is suchness (tathatā), emptiness rightly understood.

Turning the basis

Awakening, for Yogācāra, is āśraya-parāvṛtti, the “turning around of the basis”: the storehouse consciousness is purified of its defiled seeds and transformed into the mirror-like wisdom of a Buddha; the eight consciousnesses become four wisdoms. Practice, accordingly, aims at seeing through the subject–object duality.

Critics

Madhyamaka thinkers (Bhāviveka, Candrakīrti) criticised Yogācāra for treating consciousness as more real than objects — consciousness too is empty. Nyāya, Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta philosophers attacked its idealism: Ādi Śaṅkara argued (Brahma Sūtra Bhāṣya 2.2.28) that the waking world differs from dreams, since dreams are contradicted on waking and waking experience is not; and that consciousness always has an object distinct from itself. Kumārila wrote a long refutation in his Ślokavārttika. Yet Gauḍapāda’s Advaita borrowed much from Yogācāra.

In conversation

Vasubandhu’s challenge is the classic one for any realist: in a dream, the world looks just as solid — how do you know you are not dreaming now?