Part 11

The Yogācāra

By Quyen Ngo

The Yogācāra school (Conduct of Yoga school), also known as the Cittamātra school (Mind-Only school), and the Vijñānavāda school (Consciousness-Only school), was developed from around the second century CE onwards, with much of the works attributed to Vasubandhu and Asaṅga (Conze, 1962: 250). It seems the Yogācārins came closest to equating dream with waking ‘reality’:

People are hypnotised with a sleep arising from impressions left by the habit of false ways of thought, and, as in a dream, when they see things that are unreal, so long as they do not wake up they do not understand their non-existence.[1]

To them, what appears as an external object is produced by the mind, in the same way that it produces a dream and that cognition arises by itself from previous impressions of the experiences accumulated in the storehouse consciousness [ālaya-vijñāna] from beginningless time (Hattori, 1982: 238). Thus, the Yogācāra views our experience of waking life as similar to a dream, because in both cases what we perceive comes from our unconscious mind.

The Yogācāra view has been taken to mean that they deny the reality of extra-mental objects, a form of idealism. However, their main concern is to focus on the immediate experience, which is a representation produced by the consciousness. Whether there are extra-mental objects or not, all we can experience is thought (Harvey, 1990: 109). To support their arguments, they appealed to meditative visual experiences (Harvey, 1990: 110), and they made extensive use of dreaming to show that the mind can create a world which seems, to all intents and purposes, convincingly ‘real’.

Questions were directed at the Yogācārins regarding their theory, such as: (1) why does the cognition of an object arise at a certain place, at certain time, and not at any place and at any time? (2) The cognition of an illusion occurs to only to the person who is experiencing it, how does their theory explain the cognition of, say, a pot by a number of people? (3) What is experienced in a dream does not produce a real effect. For example, a man bitten by snake does not suffer from its poison when he wakes up. To these, Vasabandhu countered: In a dream, we perceive, for example, a man or woman, at a certain place and time, not at any place and at any time. Also, an object seen in a dream does produce a real effect, for example, nocturnal emission.[2]

The Yogācārins postulate eight types of consciousness. As in early Buddhism, the first six types correspond to the five senses and the mind (Gethin, 1998: 246). In addition, they added the ‘defiled mind’ (kliṣṭa-manas), which interprets data coming from first six senses and is the basis for volition (Harvey, 1990: 107). The eighth type, ‘the storehouse consciousness’ (ālaya-vijñāna), is the deep unconscious level which stores all previous karmic traces, and is the potential for future karmic effects (Ibid).

The Yogācārins also proposed the doctrine of the three natures of reality, which explains that there are three nature, levels or perspectives of reality: (1) the illusory or imagined level (parikalpita-svabhāva) (2) the other-dependent level (paratantra-svabhāva), and the (3) consummate or absolute level (pariniṣpanna-svabhāva) (Nagao, 1991: 62). These three levels may be analogised to (1) the appearance of water in a mirage, (2) the conditions that cause a mirage, and (3) the empty nature of a mirage (Santina, 1997: 173).

The illusory or imagined nature is the conventional truth, the dualistic (subject/object distinction) world-view of the unenlightened, which is unreal imaginings projected by the storehouse consciousness (Gethin, 1998: 247). The consummate or absolute nature expresses the ultimate truth, the enlightened view. The link between the imagined and the absolute nature is the other-dependent nature, which is the flow of mutually dependent phenomena (Ibid). The other-dependent nature connotes the idea of Dependent Arising (pratīya-samutpāda) (Nagao, 1991: 131). It is thought to be the root of saṃsāra and Nirvāṇa, and thus is the most significant (Santina, 1997: 173).

The process by which the other-dependent nature ‘converts’ into the imagined nature is through discrimination of the flow of experiences that arise from within the storehouse consciousness. The manas split this flow of experiences into subject/object distinction (Harvey, 1990: 108). This dichotomy leads to identification of an inner self and the external world of objects, and thus forms the basis for grasping, attachment and suffering. In the absence of discriminative thought the other-dependent nature ‘converts’ into the absolute nature (Nagao, 1991: 137).

If discrimination occurs, as a result of ignorance, then what manifests to us is the illusory or imagined nature, which is saṃsāra. On the other hand, if the mind is purified of discrimination thought and emptiness is realised, then the result is Nirvāṇa.

This may be illustrated by way of a simile: a man is frightened by the appearance of a snake on the road. He is tempted to run but decides to look more closely. As he looks more closely, he realises that it is not a snake but a rope. Thus the notion of a snake is illusory. As he looks more closely, he realises that the rope is made up of strands of hemp (Nagao, 1991: 67). In this simile, the appearance of a snake is like the illusory or imagined nature, the rope is like the other-dependent nature, and the hemp is like the consummate or absolute nature (Ibid). This simile is effective in demonstrating the ‘convertibility’ of the three natures (Nagao, 1991: 65). The rope could either be seen as a snake or as hemp. Objectively it is the same, but our subjective responses could be very different depending on how we perceive it. This analogy also conveys the idea that saṃsāra and Nirvāṇa are not objectively different, it is a conceptual difference. As long as we experience the world in terms of subject/object duality, there is grasping at subject/objects which will lead to suffering (Gethin, 1998: 250). But if the tendency to experience objects can be overcome through meditation, it can lead to the collapse of the subject, its dualistic contrast, to transcend duality and realise the absolute nature (Harvey, 1990: 112).

What we can say is that all the Buddhist traditions liken dream and illusion with saṃsāra in one way or another. To the Sthaviras, illusion comes from not seeing the three marks of phenomena: impermanence, suffering and not-self. As a result, we impute dream-like qualities to phenomena. To the Mahāyāna it is discrimination thought that produce the illusion of saṃsāra. Thus, to the Sthaviras, wisdom is seeing the rise and fall of the dharmas, and for Mahāyāna, wisdom is seeing emptiness and non-dual. In all traditions, seeing Dependent Arising is the key to realising Nirvāṇa, to wake up from the dream of life.

(To be continued)