IMAGINATIONS OF THE UNREAL: Modern Interpretations of Yogacara’s “Idealism”
Jeff Lindstrom
Prof. Neil McMullin
December 19, 2001
Yogacara has often been saddled with the accusation of “idealism.” Commentators and scholars have interpreted Yogacara’s concern for the workings of consciousness and cognition as a belief in the unreality of the external world, produced by the mind or even some overarching monistic consciousness. Increasingly, though, some scholars have undertaken a revisionist counterattack by promoting one or more of these contentions: 1) Yogacara is part of the continuous development of Buddhist thought and not some radical departure from the concerns of other Buddhist schools, 2) Yogacara does not see an ultimate or unique reality in mind or consciousness, 3) the mind does not “create” an external reality, 4) Yogacara does not deny the existence of external objects (artha) despite terms such as cittamatra (“mind-only”) and vijñaptimatra(ta) (“consciousness-only”), and 5) like many other Buddhist schools, Yogacara emphasizes the unreality not of an external reality but rather of the subject/object divide, in Yogacara’s version described as the division between grasper and grasped (grahya and grahaka). Compelling evidence for any one of these statements seriously weakens the viewpoint that Yogacara adopts some kind of extreme idealism. It is my contention that the revisionists are in fact correct on all points based on evidence misread or ignored in the past.
Dan Lusthaus of Florida State University is co-chair of the American Academy of Religion’s Yogacara seminar. He leads the charge against those who feel Yogacara is a form of metaphysical idealism. Lusthaus believes it’s crucial to recognize that Yogacara’s “attention to perceptual and cognitive issues is in line with basic Buddhist thinking and that this attention is epistemological rather than metaphysical” (69). He continues, “When Yogacarins discuss ‘objects’ they are talking about cognitive objects, not metaphysical entities” (69). Instead of producing various ontologies, Yogacarins “attempt to understand how cognition operates” in order to uncover “why people construct the ontologies to which they cling” (69). Lusthaus feels that Yogacara’s arguments are similar to those made by epistemological idealists. Although scholars have pointed out some similarities to Kant or Husserl’s phenomenology, he notes they lack Yogacara’s strong interest in theories of causality (Lusthaus 69).
Thomas A. Kochumuttom sees a slightly different bogeyman: monistic idealism. In four texts attributed to Vasubandhu, one of two half-brothers traditionally said to have founded Yogacara, Kochumuttom sees a consistency both among its own texts and with previous traditions in Buddhism: “It has been the belief that the Yogacarins had broken away from the early Buddhist schools by replacing the latter’s realistic pluralism with a monistic idealism. In contrast to this traditional belief, my contention is that the Yogacara position need not be interpreted as a total rejection of the early Buddhism” (xvi). To the operation of imagination (parikalpa) the Yogacarins attribute “only the distinction between graspable and grasper, not the entire external world, as a monistic idealism would have one believe” (4). Kochumuttom further contends that in Yogacara “a plurality of beings is taken for granted, while the dualistic view of reality is emphatically denied” (3).
In a feisty deconstruction of modern Yogacara scholarship, Alex Wayman writes “A Defense of Yogacara Buddhism.” The professor emeritus of Sanskrit at Columbia University condemns the “copying” of erroneous beliefs on Yogacara passed down from one authority to the next:
The tide of misinformation on this, or on any other topic of Indian lore comes about because authors frequently read just a few verses or paragraphs of text, then go to secondary sources, or to treatises by rivals, and presume to speak authoritatively. Only after doing genuine research on such a topic can one begin to answer the question: why were those texts [written] and why do the moderns write the way they do? (470)
He cites various textual passages to show that only mistranslation or misrepresentation supports the claim that Yogacara denied the existence of the external world: “Of course, the Yogacara put its trust in the subjective search for truth by way of a samadhi. This rendered the external world not less real, but less valuable as the way of finding truth” (Wayman 470).
On this and many other points these scholars agree that Yogacara neither denies external reality nor states that consciousness or mind creates all that exists. This may not remove the charge of “idealism” entirely. “Idealism,” a Western invention, is a very fuzzy concept, eventually coming to “encompass everything that was not materialism, which included so many different types of positions that the term lost any hope of univocality” (Lusthaus 67). Lusthaus adds:
At one extreme were various forms of metaphysical idealism which posited the mind as the only ultimate reality. The physical world was either an unreal illusion, or not as real as the mind that created it. To avoid solipsism (which is a subjectivized version of metaphysical idealism), metaphysical idealists posited an overarching mind that envisages and creates the universe. (67)
Lusthaus feels Yogacarins could be better described as epistemological idealists, who can be “ontological materialists, accepting that matter exists substantially,” but deny that matter can be known “in itself directly without the mediation of mental representations” (Lusthaus 67). These examples are but a few from the wide world of “idealism,” a term that can be made to mean almost anything you want. However, when the term is used to imply Yogacarins denied external reality and posited an ultimate reality to the mind or consciousness, this meaning cannot be supported.
Another problem with examining Yogacara from a Western perspective, notes Lusthaus, is that aside from some epistemological idealists, most materialists and idealists are “concerned with the ontological status of the objects of sense and thought, as well as the ontological nature of the self who knows” (67). However, Indian philosophy is much more inclined to examine epistemological issues. This is particularly the case with Buddhist philosophy, he says:
The Buddhist goal is not the construction of a more perfect ontology. Instead its primary target is always the removal of ignorance. Hence, while Buddhists frequently suspend ontological and metaphysical speculation (tarka), denouncing it as useless or dangerous, correct cognition (samyagjñana) is invariably lauded. (Lusthaus 68)
Lusthaus says that even the Madhyamikas, “who question the feasibility of much of Buddhist epistemology,” are in basic agreement with the need to correct our errors of cognition (68).
The continuity argument—that Yogacara is a modification but not a repudiation of earlier schools of Buddhism—is somewhat problematic if it springs from a romanticized view of the pristine originality of the historical Buddha’s thought. Such an approach threatens to fall prey to various essentialist traps. However, be that as it may, the biographical and textual arguments are extensive and persuasive. Richard King, another Yogacara revisionist, discusses why Mahayana Buddhist schools such as Madhyamaka and Yogacara are depicted as “generally antithetical” to the “Abhidharma” of Theravada and Sarvastivada, for instance:
Firstly, it often reflects the tendency to conceive of internal doctrinal controversies as the source of schisms in a manner akin to the disputations of Christian history. As Heinz Bechert has pointed out, the principle of schism (sanghabheda) in Indian Buddhism was based upon disputes over monastic code (vinaya) and not differences in doctrinal position. Secondly, increasing examination of Tibetan commentarial materials has allowed Buddhist scholars to provide a much fuller account of the history of Mahayana thought. (King 5)
Hence histories are written exaggerating these discontinuities, presented as if they expose deep divisions that had cut through the heart of Indian Buddhist communities. Even when doctrinal positions are examined in isolation from this overall context there is a great continuity. King feels he can draw strong parallels between early Yogacara and its Abhidharmic predecessors such as the Sautrantikas, whose doctrines helped shape Yogacarin views on alayavijñana (“store consciousness”) and vijñaptimatrata (“cognitive-representation only”) (5, 9).
Other scholars see a similar continuity. For instance, although traditionally termed Yogacara’s founders, Asanga and Vasubandhu elaborated a system of thought that bears many similarities to the Samdhinirmocanasutra of a century or two earlier (Lusthaus 64). In his works Vasubandhu records a similar transition, first earning prominence with his encyclopedic summary of Vaibhasika Buddhism. Then he started questioning his previous work. Kochumuttom infers that “already in writing his commentary on his own Abhidharma-kosa he had shown his openness to new doctrines and formulations” (xiv), and Lusthaus sees in Vasubandhu “a deep familiarity with the Abhidharmic categories discussed in the Abhidharmakosa and attempts to rethink them,” leading him nearer to Yogacarin conclusions (65).
Kochumuttom acknowledges that because Abhidharma and Yogacara “represent two different traditions within Buddhism, one begins to wonder if Vasubandhu the author of the Abhidharma-kosa and Vasubandhu the co-founder of the Yogacara system really are one and the same person” (xi). Because of limited historical sources and variations in calculating the year of the Buddha’s nirvana, proposed dates for Vasubandhu’s life extend “roughly from the early third century A.D. to the early sixth century A.D.” (Kochumuttom xi) Faced with this lack of consensus, E. Frauwallner proposed the “two Vasubandhus” theory in 1951 concluding that an older Vasubandhu lived before 400 A.D. and co-founded Yogacara while Vasubandhu the author of Abhidharma-kosa lived between 400 and 500 A.D. (Kochumuttom xii). However, Kochumuttom believes most scholars remain unconvinced, with even Frauwellner reported to have abandoned his own theory (xii-xiii).
One of the more controversial features of Yogacara is the alayavijñana, translated as “warehouse consciousness” by Lusthaus (64), or “store consciousness” by Wayman (460) and Kochumuttom (xiii). Kochumuttom cites the history of alayavijñana to show that “an almost spontaneous transition from Abhidharma-kosa to the Yogacara system is not altogether unwarranted” (xiii). He continues: “the theory of store consciousness (alaya-vijñana) which is universally recognized as a basic innovation by the Yogacarins, is after all only the ‘christening’ of the theory of the seeds (bija) in the Abhidharma-kosa” (xiii).
Buddhist theorists were fashioning consciousness into an increasingly complex system of stages and modes. The concept of alayavijñana grew out of these efforts. In what Lusthaus calls “Standard Buddhism,” there was already a theory of “six types of consciousness, each produced by the contact between its specific sense organ and a corresponding sense object” (72). For example:
When a functioning eye comes into contact with a colour or shape, visual consciousness is produced. When a functioning ear comes into contact with a sound, auditory consciousness is produced. Consciousness does not create the sensory sphere, but is an effect of the interaction of a sense organ and its proper object. (Lusthaus 72)
In other words, we are not conscious of the world directly but only through our senses of eye, ear, nose, mouth, body and mind. Each sense organ is associated with a kind of consciousness and a sensory object domain (Lusthaus 72). There is no consciousness of a sensory object except through the related sense organ. Abhidharma then elaborated a concept of cittas (what perceives) and associated caittas (such as sensory contact, attention, appropriational intent and anger). Vasubandhu described Abhidharmic views in his Abhidharmakosa and Wayman details some implications of this system:
Abhidharma Buddhism recognizes six senses and their objects, from the sense of eye with its object of formations (in shape or color) to the sense of mind (manas) with its object of natures (dharma). But this does not mean that one necessarily perceives such sense objects. So Buddhism taught that there is a ‘perception’ (vijñana) based on the eye, and so with the other senses as bases (ayatana). Because the senses had the power to apprehend those various objects, they were given the Sanskrit name indriya, a word which means ‘a power’. It follows immediately that ‘perception’ is powerless; that is, it is unable to contact the object directly, but must depend on whatever the source organ comes up with. (456)
Alayavijñana made its appearance when Yogacara split manas further into three different consciousnesses: manovijñana (empirical consciousness), klistamanas (a kind of manas “obsessed with various aspects and notions of self”), and alayavijñana (warehouse consciousness). (Lusthaus 73) Kochumuttom believes that the Yogacarin version of alayavijñana simply collects together the seeds (bjias) of past experience already described in Vasubandhu’s own Abhidharmakosa: “If so, it is not impossible that the author of Abhidharma-kosa himself worked out, on his own or in collaboration with others, the theory of alaya-vijñana and other allied theories of the Yogacara system” (xiv).
Yogacara, then, built upon rather than undermined previous Buddhist concepts of cognition and consciousness. One of the more frequent reasons scholars attribute idealistic motives to the Yogacarins are two terms: cittamatra (often translated as “mind only”) and vijñaptimatra (often translated as “consciousness only”). Although Yogacarins sometimes called their system vijñaptimatratavada, meaning “mere representation of consciousness,” this is meant in a restrictive sense argues Kochumuttom (5). The mind contributes the concepts of the grasper and the graspable, and the distinction between them. These “characterizations are entirely imagined (parikalpita), and are, therefore, mere representations of consciousness (vijñapti-matra)” (Kochumuttom 5). Kochumuttom says that never in the four Yogacara works he presents “has the term vijñapti been used to describe the absolute state of reality, nor is there any indication that the final state of existence has to be defined in terms of vijñana. Instead, as already observed, the absolute state of reality is defined simply as emptiness, namely the emptiness of subject-object distinction” (Kochumuttom 6). Kochumuttom also distinguishes between vijñapti-matra and vijñapti-matrata:
Whenever Vasubandhu uses the term vijñapti-matra he means to say that the contents of samsaric experience, (such as the subject-object distinction, the forms of subjectivity and objectivity), are all merely representations of consciousness. But whenever he uses the term vijñapti-matrata he refers to the state in which one realizes (saksat-karoti) the fact that the contents of one’s samsaric experience are, or rather were, mere representations of consciousness. (Kochumuttom 206)
He then elaborates upon this distinction by quoting his translation of stanzas 26 to 28 in Vasubandhu’s Trimsatika (Kochumuttom 208):
As long as consciousness does not abide
In vijñapti-matrata,
The attachment to the twofold grasping
Will not cease to operate.
One does not abide in it [i.e. vijñaptimatrata]
Just on account of the [[[Wikipedia:theoretical|theoretical]]] perception
That all this is vijñapti-matra,
If one places [=sees] something before oneself.
One does abide in vijñapti-matrata
When one does not perceive also a supporting consciousness,
For, the graspable objects being absent,
There cannot either be the grasping of that,
[Namely, the grasping of the supporting consciousness].
Kochumuttom explains that vijñapti-matrata “stands for the state (of nirvana) in which one realizes the fact that the contents of the samsaric experience are vijñapti-matra” (208) and this realization brings about the end to our “two-fold grasping (graha-dvaya), namely the passion for subjectivity and objectivity, which is characteristic of any samsaric experience” (Kochumuttom 208). Clearly neither vijñapti-matra nor vijñapti-matrata implies that reality distinguished from our subject–object delusions is “consciousness only,” “mind only,” or “representation only.”
Wayman criticizes how editors of a compendium handled vijñaptimatrata in a translation of Vasubandhu’s twenty-verse treatise, the Vimsatika: “The translation from the Chinese by Hamilton was reprinted in A Source Book by Radhakrishnan and Moore. We learn there that these twenty verses are on vijñaptimatrata, there rendered ‘Representation-Only’” (456-457). Wayman says he is embarrassed that these editors he respects added this footnote on page 328: “A better translation of vijñaptimatrata would be ‘ideation-only,’ since ‘representation’ suggests rather than denies external reality.” To this Wayman retorts, “Well, no fair mistranslating a Sanskrit term just to make one’s theory come out right! That remark was made because of thinking that Vasubandhu’s treatise denies external reality” (457).
Wayman also disputes the rendering of cittamatra as “mind-only” (including in his own past essays) (450). He believes “mind” (citta) and “only” (matra) were reconnected by readers of translations into European languages, thus they were unaware of the original Sanskrit connotations of citta and matra (450-451). Wayman examines the Sanskrit meanings of matra and its neuter form matram to dispute a view that cittamatra necessarily means mind and only mind. It could also mean “amounting to mind,” “just mind,” “mirroring mind,” or even “being mirrored by mind” (451). Wayman says matra could also mean “only” in the sense of “entirety”—meaning other elements are being ignored, not denied: “For example, there is the compound sthanamatra, in the meaning ‘a place in general’, thus any and all places and excluding what is not a place” (451).
Buttressing his semantic analysis, Wayman describes a reported debate between Asanga and an opponent over cittamatra:
As the first attack, the opponent states, “It is not valid that there is a mind-only in the sense of ‘continuous substantiality’ (dravyatas), because it contradicts scripture.” The opponent is asked: “How does it contradict scripture?” That person responds: “He (the Buddha) said, ‘If the citta consisted of lust defilement (upaklesa) and consisted of hatred and delusion defilements, it could not become liberated.’” Asanga replies: “But what is the objection to that?” He seems to mean that we accept what the Buddha taught, and so if the citta does not consist of these defilements (or contain them), it would be liberated; hence your scriptural appeal cannot deny to mind-only a ‘continuous substantiality’. The opponent does not give up, and retorts: “Mind-only by itself is invalid, because if there is not two together, when one does not resort to representation (vijñapti) of lust, etc., one would be free (of those defilements) [which we know is not the case].” (Wayman 451)
Wayman concludes, “It is clear that the Buddhist opponents did not criticize on the grounds that Asanga denied the existence of the external world (which, of course, he did not do)” (451). Instead, Asanga’s opponent, in this case “obviously a follower of the Buddhist Abhidharma,” is merely arguing there can be no cittas without caittas (which, as Lusthaus [73] says, are the “objects, textures, emotional, moral and psychological tones of citta’s cognitions”) (Wayman 451-452). This issue is far removed from believing the world itself is only citta.
On a related topic, Wayman criticizes interpretations of “cittamatram yad uta traidhatukam” from the Buddhist Dasabhumika-sutra. He disputes the translation, “This triple world is mind-only,” which “has seemed to support the claim that the Yogacara denies the existence of the external world” (452). Not only is this sutra “not really a Yogacara scripture” (452) he cites two explanations in Vasubandhu’s “great commentary” on the Dasubhumika-sutra, neither explanation denying the existence of the external world. Wayman also notes that traidhatu is a derivative noun of tridhatu (meaning “three worlds”)—similar to how Gautama is a family derivative of Gotama (Wayman 453). Wayman feels that traidhatuka means “derived from, or faithful to, the three worlds” (453) of desire, form, and the formless world, a standard Buddhist division. Wayman concludes that traidhatuka is referring to the concept of twelvefold dependent origination: “That is to say, whatever may be the ‘three worlds’ in a minimal sense—whatever else may be attributed to them, an elaboration of them, a product of them—has been added by the mind” (454). Stating that the mind adds to the three worlds is very different from having the mind create the three worlds.
Examining the Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan versions of Vasubandhu’s twenty verses, the Vimsatika, Wayman reviews other statements misunderstood as a Yogacarin denial of external objects. He translates the second verse of the Sanskrit version as follows: “This just amounts to representation, as the sight of unreal hair, moon, etc. of one with an eye-caul—because being the (subsequent) manifestation of an unreal artha (external thing) (457).” Wayman states that this verse is not referring to external reality as such. In this verse: “there is a mental representation that amounts to tinsel, ‘fool’s gold’, a false wealth. Vasubandhu appears to mean that the mind imagines an external artha in front, but the mind has only a report or representation of what the sense organ had sensed” (Wayman 457). Again a Yogacarin text is avoiding directly commenting on the qualities of an external reality but contents itself with discussing the relationship between mind and a sense-organ, which is the only way we know of sense-objects from our dualistic perspective.
The first verse (found only in the Chinese and Tibetan versions) can be translated this way: “If representation lacks an external object (artha), there is no certainty (aniyama) of space and time; there is no certainty of the composite stream (of consciousness) and agency is not valid” (Wayman 457). Wayman states, “We notice again that Vasubandhu does not here deny an external object, because the sentence makes a supposition, ‘If...’” (457). He also condemns a translation of a commentary on verse 16 “as though there is a denial of the copula (‘although there is no external object’). But when we consult the Sanskrit that [Sylvain] Lévi edited, we find the sentence worded differently: ‘Even in the absence of an external object (vinapy arthena)’” (458). “Thus,” concludes Wayman, “when we examine the text more carefully, we find that Vasubandhu does not deny the existence of external objects in this and in the previously cited materials, even though the translator, just by his manner of translating, made it appear so” (458-459).
Although there is no denial of an external reality, there is certainly a denial that descriptions of such an external reality would be particularly useful. “Careful examination of Yogacarin texts,” writes Lusthaus, “reveals that they make no ontological claims, except to question the validity of making those ontological claims” (69). He says that “Yogacara never denies that there are sense-objects (visaya, artha, alambana, etc.) but it denies that it makes any sense to speak of cognitive objects occurring outside an act of cognition” (Lusthaus 71). King elaborates on this issue:
At the risk of labouring the point, we should note that for the Yogacarin it is not the case that we simply ‘imagine’ our experiences. They are ‘real’ to the extent that they are ‘given’ without our conscious intervention. The pure given-ness (vastu-matra) of our experiences is thus beyond our conscious control. The question of ‘externality,’ however, is prevented from entering the Yogacara account since it is a quality which cannot be a veridical aspect of our experience (since if x is really external to our consciousness then it cannot be within its perceptive range). There may or may not be an external world beyond our perceptions, but this will have nothing to do with our actual experience which can only be ‘internal’ and subjective. Such, according to the Yogacarin, is the nature of conscious experience. (King 12-13)
As Lusthaus points out, even thinking about reality outside of cognitive experience “is itself a cognitive act” (71). The resulting metaphysical description is “appropriated by its interpreters whose proclivities would project onto it what they wish reality to be”—through a process of cognitive projection (parikalpita) resulting in ontological attachment (pratibimba) (Lusthaus 69). Lusthaus says this projective reductionism is “to mistake one’s projections for that onto which one is projecting” and is the central concern of the vijñaptimatra doctrine (69), or as King describes it:
Attachment to the objects of experience (alambana) as if they were independent and external to the subject is the primary cause of the perpetuation of one’s cognition of samsara. Ignorance and attachment (based upon past karman) thereby cause the bifurcation of consciousness into subjective and internal and objective and external. This is the ‘myth of the transcendent object’—that is the fallacious belief that one is having a veridical experience of an exteral world; the myth (maya) under which all unenlightened beings are labouring. (King 13)
If consciousness is not the ultimate reality, then what is the meaning of enlightenment for a Yogacarin? “Enlightenment consists in bringing the eight consciousness to an end,” writes Lusthaus, “replacing them with enlightened cognitive abilities (jñana)” (73). “Overturning the basis” replaces manovijñana with the “immediate cognitive mastery” of non-conceptual discernment. Klistamanas is replaced by “the immediate cognition of equality” that equalizes self and other. The “great mirror cognition” replaces the warehouse consciousness. It “sees and reflects things just as they are, impartially, without exclusion, prejudice, anticipation, attachment, or distortion,” writes Lusthaus. “The grasper–grasped relation has ceased” (Lusthaus 73). According to Kochumuttom:
Right in the beginning of his Madhyanta-vibhaga-karika-bhasya Vasubandhu makes it unquestionably clear that ‘the imagination of the unreal’ [[[abhuta-parikalpa]]] means the discrimination between graspable and grasper [grahya-grahaka-vikalpah]. Then the text goes on to say how the whole world of experience, including the experiences of inanimate and animate beings, self and ideas, is mere imagination of the unreal, and how it rests on the unreal distinction between graspable and grasper. (4)
Following along with this approach, “samsara is the illusory consciousness of grahya-grahaka distinction, the cessation of which will automatically result in one’s liberation (mukti). Thus, graspable-grasper distinction is the only factor the Yogacarins attribute to the operation of imagination” (Kochumuttom 4).
This weight of evidence seems to satisfy the five criteria for accepting a revised view of Yogacara: 1) Yogacara is not some radical departure from the Buddhist mainstream, 2) mind or consciousness is not the ultimate reality, 3) mind does not “create” some external reality, 4) Yogacara does not deny an external reality, and 5) the way to liberation is realizing the illusory nature of a subject/object divide (grasper/grasped in Yogacara).
Yet despite this mass of textual evidence the misinterpretations continue. Lusthaus’s argument against Yogacara’s “metaphysical idealism” takes up much of his article on Yogacara in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1998). The very same publisher has since produced the Encyclopedia of Asian Philosophy (2001), which includes these opening lines from the entry on “Yogachara” written by Chris Bartley:
Yogachara, ‘the practice of meditation’, is a Buddhist Mahayana school asserting the unreality of objective duality and denying the mind-independence of the material sphere. Yogacharins hold that while consciousness is the only genuine existent, it has the constructive capacity to bifurcate itself into experience of subjects and objects (vikalpa). (Bartley 586)
This is a rather confused introduction to Yogacarin doctrine. As has been demonstrated, the whole point of Yogacara is in fact to assert, not deny, “the mind-independence of the material sphere.” What Yogacara objects to is the mistaken belief that our mind’s projections, our imagination of the unreal, should be considered real! Bartley appears to be confusing sense-objects with objects of consciousness. Similar misrepresentations follow:
The school differentiates itself from the universal emptiness teaching (shuna-vada) of the Madhyamikas in asserting the irreducible reality of constructive consciousness. Mind, which imagines or constructs duality (the non-existent), exists in its own right. (Bartley 587)
Again, more nonsense. As Lusthaus points out, with the overturning of the bases even the alayavijñana fades away, the relative nature of the grasper/grasped distinction having been replaced by a “great mirror consciousness,” non-dualistic and hence having no object (73). The projective constructions of the mind have ceased, and Yogacara would deny that mind itself still “exists in its own right.”
Wayman in his caustically deconstructive fashion describes our last example of dubious scholarship. He comments on T.R.V. Murti’s classic The Central Philosophy of Buddhism. Wayman says readers of chapter 13, “supposedly on the ‘absolutism’ of Vedanta, Madhyamika, and Vijñanavada, will readily find out that the Yogacara position (called here ‘Vijñanavada’) is set forth, not from Yogacara books, but from their rival Vedanta and Madhyamika books” (Wayman 459). In Wayman’s opinion, Murti then inserts a Yogacara text and makes it conform to his preconceptions:
Having decided that the opponents must be right, when he then cites a Yogacara treatise it must be made to agree with Murti’s suppositions. So, referring to the Madhyatavibhaga, he says, “The constructed subject-object world is unreal; but this does not make the abhutaparikalpa unreal; for, it is the substratum for the unreal subject-object duality. It is, however, non-conceptual.” So abhutaparikalpa, which means “the imagination of what did not (really) happen,” is ‘non-conceptual’! (Wayman 459)
So, according to Murti, abhutaparikalpa—the “imagination of the unreal” in Kochumuttom’s translation—is somehow more “real” than its projections. However, ahbhutaparikalpa isn’t some transcendent mechanism for creating the subject–object duality—instead it is that very duality, and hence unreal. This duality would seem to be just about as conceptual as you can get. Wayman concludes with this stinger: “I conclude that Murti in this chapter does not advance the understanding of Yogacara Buddhism” (459).
Modern scholarship of Yogacara has been hampered by dubious scholarship and the imposition of Western attitudes about philosophy onto a very different tradition. In such ways texts are cited to portray Yogacara as an idealistic philosophy in which mind creates reality, an external reality is denied, and mind itself stands as some kind of ultimate reality. In fact, Yogacara makes no ontological claims about external reality, does not believe mind is the ultimate reality, and believes that the imagination of the unreal projects objects of consciousness and not material objects. “Ironically,” writes Lusthaus, “Yogacara’s interpreters and opponents could not resist reductively projecting metaphysical theories onto what Yogacarins did say, at once proving Yogacara was right and making actual Yogacara teachings that much harder to understand” (69). Although there are signs of hope, it seems many modern Buddhologists—and their own imaginations of the unreal—continue to construct a Yogacarin projection bearing little resemblance to what a careful examination of the texts and the tradition can uncover.
WORKS CITED
Bartley, Chris. “Yogachara.” Encyclopedia of Asian Philosophy. Ed. Oliver Leaman. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.
King, Richard. “Vijñaptimatrata and the Abhidharma Context of Early Yogacara.” Asian Philosophy March 1998: 5-17.
Kochumuttom, Thomas A. A Buddhist Doctrine of Experience: A New Translation and Interpretation of the Works of Vasubandhu the Yogacarin. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1982.
Lusthaus. “Buddhism, Yogacara School of.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward Craig. London and New York: Routledge, 1998.
Wayman, Alex. “A Defense of Yogacara Buddhism.” Philosophy East and West March 1996: 447-476.
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