Phenomenological Buddhism and Buddhist phenomenology
This is the appendix in my book
Phenomenological Buddhism and Buddhist phenomenology
in 2002 the American sinologist and buddhologist Dan Lusthaus published a comprehensive book titled 'Buddhist phenomenology'. Apparently attempts to compare Buddhism and phenomenology have been made before. There are however, important differences between this book and the one you are reading now. 'Buddhist phenomenology' is not a phenomenology of Buddhism but a very extensive and careful translation of two texts: the '30 Verses on the Philosophy of Mere Cognition' (Trimsika-vijnaptimatrata), of the fourth century Buddhist master Vasubandhu and the Chinese text 'Discourse on the Proof of the Philosophy of Mere Cognition', the Cheng Weishl Lun2. This is the comment that the Chinese teacher, translator and traveller Xuanzang (602 - 664) wrote in 659 on the Trimsika based on 10 Indian commentaries, which he had found during his travels in India. Both texts are considered fundamental in the Buddhist school that is called the 'Yogacara'
1 Routledge Curzon, London 2002
2 Sanskrit name Vijnaptimatratasiddhi, also
translated by Louis de la Vallee Poussin - Paul Guthner, Paris 1928.
(Training for Salvation) or 'Cittamatra' (Mere Mind) or also 'Vijnaptimatra' (Mere interpreted this school as a kind of idealism, in other words a philosophy that defends the position that reality is made out of mind or a projection of mind. This is a mistake according to Prof. Lusthaus, in the sense that one does not assume in this Buddhist philosophy that reality is made out of a mental substance. A better interpretation would be to see the Yogacara as a kind of phenomenology3.
'Rather than claiming that a cosmic mind creates the universe, they assert, on the contrary, that one only comes to see things as they actually become by 'abandoning' or destroying (vyavrtf) the mind. Rather than holding the self or subject as non-reducible, their project aims precisely at the deconstruction and overthrowing of the cognitive conditions that give rise to the delusion of selfhood. Rather than declare the Other essentially unknowable, Yogacara invites us to erase the mirror that blocks our view, and thus see the Other completely and unobstructedly, which is to say, no longer as an Other at all.(pp. 5)
This is important because Buddhists in India are careful not to cross the border between Buddhism and Vedic philosophies,
3 'Nonetheless Yogacara is a form of phenomenology, with affinities to Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, etc., if not identities.' (Buddhist phenomenology, pp.
which was not easy because of the undeniable influence of converted brahmin priests in Buddhism. More than anything had to be prevented that a kind of last or metaphysical ground of reality would be introduced like the brahman of the Vedas. The Vedanta, that systematized the teaching of the Upanishads, called itself for instance Advaita, monism4 (literary: without a second), but Buddhism called itself non-dualism, advaya. If one would introduce consciousness as the ground of reality, this would turn out to imply a kind of monism and the result would be a conflict with other Buddhist schools. There have even been accusations of the sort in discussions with other Buddhist schools, so advocates of the Yogacara had to watch their steps in order to avoid all suspicion. According to Lusthaus they have been succesfull.
Something like a substance has indeed been introduced into Buddhism, by the teaching of the so called Buddha nature or Tathagatagarbha. This began in India as a teaching that says that everyone has the foetus of Buddhahood in himself. The word Tathagata is another word for the Buddha and garbha means foetus, but it is also possible to translate it as 'womb'. This meaning has become popular in China, where it became the Buddhist equivalence of the concept of dao, primeval nature or guiding principle, with which every
4 A monism is a kind of metaphysics according to which everything is made out of the same stuff.
Chinese was familiar. The problem was that a number of schools in Tibet and China matched both concepts of Yogacara and tathagatagarbha5 and turned Yogacara in this way into a kind of monism.
Lusthaus denies that Yogacara is an idealism. He admits that according to the Yogacara everything that appears to us appears in our consciousness. It appears to us in what Husserl called the natural attitude, the everyday experience of the world, where everything has the three characteristics, impermanence, worrisome and non-self. Here applies the law of karma according to Yogacara. Every action causes an imprint or a seed in our everyday consciousness and this seed can ripen on a later moment. What is even more is that everything we experience in daily life is nothing but the ripening of these seeds. In this way Yogacara explains the retribution system of karma: consciousness, which is imagined to be a continuous stream, carries along the karmic impressions. Salvation is only possible by a change or a transformation of consciousness, a radical conversion. If this happens, the storehouse consciousness (alaya-vijnana), where all the seeds of karma from the past are stored, changes into a pure consciousness. This does not go well with phenomenology of course, because the appearance of phenomena is all there is and there is no
need whatsoever to fabricate an explanation of it, certainly not by evoking the image of a kind of metaphysical farm. Considering this, it is not yet clear why Yogacara is not a kind of idealism.
Lusthaus defines idealism in the beginning as everything that is no materialism (pp. 4), but if we would take this to the letter he would already have lost his case, because Yogacara clearly is no materialism. A little later he distinguishes however, three types of idealism: metaphysical, epistemological and critical epistemological. Metaphysical idealism is the view that reality consists of consciousness or is a projection of consciousness. The epistemological idealism is the view that reality only exists as far as it is known by a consciousness. Critical epistemological idealism is not very different, it adds that what enables this knowing, the reality beyond our knowledge, is principally impossible to be known. This is the position of Immanuel Kant, but according to Lusthaus also the view of Husserl. This is quite puzzling: Yogacara is no idealism, it is a kind of phenomenology, which appears to be a kind of idealism after all! Anyway the point of view of the Yogacara is according to Lusthaus different, because it does not acknowledge the knowing consciousness as the final reality, it promises a transformation after which reality in itself, the noumenon (that according to Kant is principally unknowable) will appear to us.
Since we only know rupa (material form, EH) through our theories of it, i.e., actual perception instantiates embodied conditioning, what we know as rupa is largely our own projection.'
If Lusthaus is right, then daily consciousness does not change after conversion into a pure consciousness, but into something quite different, something that shouldn't be called consciousness any more. This view is a position that according to Lusthaus is different from the one of Kant and Husserl. That he is wrong and didn't understand very much of Kant or Husserl, or any of the other phenomenologists he mentions, is however not our concern here. What matters is the question how close Yogacara is akin to phenomenology.
What Lusthaus misses is the difference between the empirical and the transcendental ego. Of course, Yogacara does not acknowledge an atman, and empirical self or ego. This is an illusion and it is part of the life world. It can be happy or depressed and if so we can cure it with medicine. It can be called an illusion, because it does not exist apart from what we say and think about it. According to John Locke and Jean-Paul Sartre it is based on memory. In other times or cultures depression could perhaps be
considered to be a disease of the body and not of the ego. Things are different with the transcendental ego, this cannot be found in the world. It is the unity of consciousness, the continuity that makes conversion or a transformation of consciousness possible. Kant thought it was the structure of consciousness and the necessary condition for responsibility. According to Husserl it is a way of being conscious, being not personal but in name of everyone. The transcendental ego is not selfish and there is no reason at all to speak here of a 'closure or narcissistic self-referentiality of consciousness' (pp. 5). A certain self-referentiality cannot be denied of consciousness even not according to Buddhism. When Siddharta Gautama became a Buddha, only he himself achieved salvation and not the whole world with him. Perhaps one could compare the transcendental ego with the concept of the tathaghata, the liberated ego, we take meditative experiences of selflessness and limits of the language into account. Why is it that Lusthaus thinks of phenomenology as a kind of idealism? He suspects Husserl to suppose that the world is a product of our imagination. This point of view is not unusual, we find it in the philosophy of Kant and Schopenhauer. According to the latter reality is vital force, so perception is essentially not different from imagination. We project our
own presentations on the sense data that our senses offer us.
In secs. 85, 86, 97 and 98 of Ideas 1, he paints the following picture: Drawing upon the Aristotelian notion of Form and Matter, Husserl says that noesis gives ("animates," "bestows") meaning to raw sensate material (e.g., colours, texture, sounds, etc.), called hyle. The hyle, he says, is not intentional. Intentionality constitutes or appropriates what is non-intentio-nal, and thereby imbues it with 'meaning' (Sinn). The noetic constitution or appropriation of 'hyletic data' is what produces the noema, or the object as it is cognized. (ibid. pp.14)
This description is the spitting image of the one that Kant and Schopenhauer gave us, but also of the representation of the Yogacara: Experiences in our stream of consciousness give us the illusion of a world, based on the raw data of our senses. The question is whether Husserl really would go along. He describes perception and experience of meaning from the point of view of a phenomenological reduction, he has pushed the world aside and tries to describe the experience of phenomena. He didn't try to give a causal explanation for the appearance of the world, because he knows that for such an explanation you need to suppose another world. He notices that in this experience of things also an
aspect of sense data is to be found, apart from the aspect of meaning. This he compares with the difference between matter (hyle) and form in the philosophy of Aristotle. The hyle, or matter, is in other words an aspect of the phenomena and it appears in the phenomenological reduction, it is nowhere to be found in the natural world, it just refers to this world. It does not appear to an individual consciousness, because Husserl puts himself in the position of the transcendental ego. This certainly is not a metaphysical precipitation of things like Lusthaus thinks. Husserl does not suppose anything, he merely notices. This difference between form and matter also shows itself when we read a text, for example. When we read, we see characters and they
have the aspect of form and of meaning, which were later called signifier and signified by the structuralists. It is certainly not the case that we first see the form and the colour of the characters and subsequently recognize the character. When we see the character we often even do not notice what exactly the form is, we see the meaning. We see the form only when we pay attention to it, for instance when we have to choose a font. The only thing that Husserl wants to say, is that meanings just do not float around by themselves, but need a material carrier in order to be part of our world. This matter aspect or hyle is not very interesting to him, because it
does not contribute much to the meaning. Lusthaus interprets this however, as a proof of Husserl's so-called idealism. The notion of the hyle signifies what an individual consciousness encounters that cannot, in some important sense, be reduced to that consciousness, and yet which never appears anywhere else except in a consciousness. This notion, then, is the crux for determining the extent to which Husserlian Phenomenology is idealism. On the one hand, Husserl seems to treat the hyle as something objective, something which in itself contributes its essence to an instance of cognition. On the other hand, he declares it a part of the noetic side of cognition. (pp. 14)
This shows us that Lusthaus has no clue of the phenomenological reduction. Matter is no part of perception like we experience it in our natural daily attitude. It certainly is not existing matter or substance (zhi M), like Lusthaus wishes to interpret it (pp. 27). If that were the case, we would have to call Husserl an empiricist. The matter or hyle aspect of the phenomena is immanent to consciousness, as phenomena are. Or, in other words, our mind is confronted with appearances most part of our lives, these refer to a reality that seems to exist without us and outside us. Even when we dream or hallucinate, we are convinced that we find ourselves in an
existing world. The phenomenological reduction brackets this world, leaves it aside. What rests and is the focus of consideration are the phenomena. These phenomena exist for us, but need a carrier. Lusthaus however sees it differently:
The note G is "that which appears," i.e., it is an 'object' that is temporally or contextually defined. However, the tone G, i.e., the raw sensate appearance that impinges on our awareness, is the hyle. It may be loud or soft, shrill or harmonic. As it impinges on us, we 'fill' it with meaning, which means we reduce it to an object situated in a meaningful context (a melody).
...the hyle would be, for Husserl, only what is immediately present. And only what is immediately present is "genuine." (ibid. pp.15) Husserl is however, quite clear in his analysis of time: we hear the complete melody and when we hear a tone, because this lasts a little bit longer, we hear it in the context of the melody6. The melody is real. Only this way tones can have a meaning and express beauty. It is also obvious in reading: one would not understand a word, let alone a sentence, if one would read character after character. Children who start reading, first spell the characters of words, and only afterwards
6 Edmund Husserl: 'Phanomenologie der Lebenswelt, ausgewahlte Texte II - Reclam 8085, Stuttgart 1986, pp. 89 ff.
recognize the words. When they read more, they start to recognize whole words, they remember word images. People who have learned to read very fast recognize complete lines. Besides, we have the problem of time, Lusthaus interprets time like a modern kind of empiricist, because he takes over the momentanism of Yogacara. This means that only the moment truly exists, a consequence of the abhidharma theory of momentary atoms or dharmas. Only raw sensate variable data impinge on us, moment after moment. The idea of a self-same object is a 'meaning' that we project.; we provide a sense of constancy that is never actually present in sensation. We 'fill' the hyle with our projections, and thereby perceive a meaningful object, i.e., a noema. (ibid. pp. 16)
Consciousness is according to Husserl intentionality, being directed to an object. There is no consciousness without an object and no object without a consciousness. So consciousness cannot react to something because in that case it would have to exist before the reaction. Moreover, matter would have to exist apart from consciousness. In other words, Prof Lusthaus believes in dharmas, and he is blind for the problems they entail. Noesis is consciousness intending toward its object/meaning. It
reacts to and acts upon hyle, and constitutes the noema or noemata (meaningful objects) out of that encounter. (ibid. pp. 16)
In his book 'Ideeen I', just before one of the passages Lusthaus refers to, Husserl explains very clearly what he means:
But now we must describe what is left of that as a phenomenological residuum if we reduce it to its 'pure immanence' and what therefore may or may not hold good for the realy inherent component of the pure mental process. And here it must be made perfectly clear that, more particularly, there belongs to the essence of the mental process of perception in itself the 'perceived tree as perceived', or the full noema, which is not touched by excluding the actuality of the tree and that of the whole world; on the other hand, however, this noema, with its 'tree' in inverted commas, is no more contained inherently than is the three which belongs to actuality.
7 Es gilt jetzt zu beschreiben, was davon als phanomenologisches Residuum verbleibt, wenn wir auf die “reine Immanenz” reduzieren, und was dabei als reelles Bestandstuck des reinen Erlebnisses gelten durfte, und was nicht. Und da heiSt es sich vollig klarmachen, daS zwar zum Wesen des Wahr-nehmungserlebnisses in sich selbst der “Wahrgenommene Baum als solcher” gehort, bzw. das volle Noema, das durch die Ausschaltung der Wirklichkeit des Baumes selbst und der ganzen Welt nicht beruhrt wird; daS aber anderseits dieses Noema mit seinem “Baum” in Anfuhrungszeichen ebenso we-nig in der Wahrnehmung reell enthalten ist, wie der Baum in der Wirklichkeit. (Ideen I, pp. 225-226)
The phenomenon, that what remains in the reduction, is not less or not something different from what we perceive in the natural attitude, but it is not identical either. The phenomenon is not a part of the world we live in. If one wants to cut down the tree one has to do this in the natural attitude. The characterisation of the phenomenological reduction and, likewise, of the pure sphere of mental processes as transcendent, wrists precisely on the fact that we discover in this reduction the absolute sphere of stuffs and noetic forms whose determinately structured combination possess, according to immanent eidetic necessity, the marvellous consciousness of something determinate and determinable, given thus and so, which is something over against consciousness itself, something fundamentally other, non-really (Irreeles) inherent, transcendent; [the charactarisation of mental processes as 'transcendental' further rests of the fact] that this is the primal source in which is found the only conceivable solution of those deepest problems of cognition concerning the essence and possibility of an objective ballad knowledge of something transcendent. (tr. F. Kersten)8 *
8 Die Bezeichnung der phanomenologischen Reduktion und im gleichen der reinen Erlebnissphare als “transzendentaler” beruht gerade darauf, daS wir in
The sphere of experience we enter by performing the reduction is transcendental, it is in other words that which we are aware of as the natural world, free from ontological bias. Without phenomena we could not be aware of anything, and there would not exist any world for us at all. The phenomena refer to this world as being a structure where phenomena reveal themselves. Those who think that the world exists apart from our experience, believe in what the Buddha called satkayadrsti. This is bracketed by the reduction. The phenomena refer however, to a transcendent world of experience. This world may be an illusion, but it is a serious illusion, the one we live in. In Buddhism reality is not an empty void, because the Buddha called existing and non-existing extremes that were to be rejected9. From this we can see that both Husserl and the Buddha were very much aware of the problem of how to clarify the way phenomena appear, phenomenality. Lusthaus is not convinced. He and the American philosophers he quotes, interpret Husserl and of course Buddhism in an empiricist way. He thinks that
dieser Reduktion eine absolute Sphare von Stoffen und noetischen Formen finden, zu deren bestimmt gearteten Verflechtungen nach immanenter Wesensnotwendigkeit dieses Wunderbare BewuSthaben eines so und so gegebenen Bestimmten oder Bestimmbare gehort, das dem BewuStsein selbst ein gegenuber, ein prinzipiell Anderes, Irreelles, Transzendentes ist, und daS hier die Urquelle ist fur die einzig denkbare Losung der tiefsten Erkennt-nisprobleme, welche Wesen und Moglichkeit objektiv gultiger Erkenntnis von Transzendentem betreffen. (Ideen I 228)
9 Kaccanagotta Sutta, Samyutta Nikaya 12.15
Husserl's hyle or matter should explain perception causally, in spite of the fact that in the reduction the empirical world has been put aside and perception as a causal process is in that case out of the question. In the same line of thoughts he thinks that the Buddha perceives the causes of suffering directly and takes them away like aspirin diminishes fever, in other words, like an event in the world. Didn't the Buddha see the causes of suffering when he achieved salvation10? Not a word about the concept of dependent arising, that says no causes but conditions exist. Things that arise dependently do not cause each other. What Lusthaus fails to see is in other words that the Buddha was not a man who invented a new trick to fix suffering. At the moment he reached salvation there was no world to be found, because world and world consciousness are mutually dependent and he had let go of the world.
Lusthaus reproaches Husserl for not having written a phenomenology of causality. Again he appears to be stuck in the empiricists point of view. Causality is an explanation for events in the world, but this is bracketed in the reduction. Husserl deals with phenomena and meaning. The Yogacara however, needs causality,
10 However, we shall see later that Buddha (if not all Buddhists) did argue that efficient causal relationships are capable of being immediately cognized. The Theravadin interpretation of Buddha's enlightenment experience, viz. that he perceived the causes which produce and end 'suffering,' must insist that they are. (ibid. pp. 17)
because without cause-and-effect the ripening of karmic seeds cannot be explained (if causality can do the job is an open question by the way)11. If we take karma to mean motivation (Cetana), there is no causation, because sedimented meanings, that have become obvious, do not cause our behaviour, they inspire or motivate it. If I am used to drink coffee in the morning, this is not a matter of cause and effect, like the programming of a washing machine, I like coffee, so I choose it. There is no causal impediment for me however to choose to drink tea someday. If this choice would have an ethical relevance, it would evoke an attitude, a kind of ethical involvement in the world. This is a kind of orientation, that could influence my involvement in the world. If, for instance, I would choose tea because I have learned that in the production of coffee slavery is involved, the choice would be an expression of my sympathy with other human beings at the other side of the world and possibly a sense of justice. This expression could become a sediment in my consciousness and so influence my choices in the future. This does not exclude my responsibility and I may choose differently in the future. I could just as well think that I have been sufficiently compassionate and have done
11 The self's structures, its meanings, are, as Husserl points out in his later writings, sedimented meanings, embodied history. In later chapters we will see that these sedimentations are called bijas (seeds) and vasanas (perfumings; habitual residue) by Yogacara. ibid. pp. 25) my share for a better world and need not take the possibility of slavery into consideration any more. The Yogacara model of karmic seeds that automatically ripen and cause my behaviour does not fit into a phenomenological description. Yogacara explains that karma causes the world (pp. 173), but causation cannot take place without one. Phenomenologically world and karma are dependently arisen, because karma is an aspect of our involvement in the world. There is no coercion here, no necessity, because we have our responsibility, but the boundaries are blurry. Only in case of a trauma or mental illness there is coercion, but in case of the explanation of sickness the part of karma is questionable as we have seen. For Lusthaus karma and the will are cognitive functions:
'Through the repetitive conditioning of pain and pleasure, we acquire our karmic habits.' (ibid. pp. 173) The difference between knowing and the will is generally undisputed. If I see the rain falling down, it does not give me any karma, does it? Still I have gained some knowledge, because I behave differently. Or would looking for my umbrella give me a bad rebirth? When Lusthaus writes that we get karma by automatic reactions to pleasurable and undesirable stimuli, he turns it into an almost physical process12. 12 Through the repetitive conditioning of pain and pleasure, we acquire our karmic habits. pp. 173
When I feel cold and get goose-bumps, again and again, this must be karma! If it were motivation, this would mean that karma is my emotional reaction to the cold, for instance if I would get angry because no one has turned on the heating. This blaming of others and not accepting unfavourable conditions would be a sediment that would shape my character indeed.
Lusthaus thinks this is a consequence of his identification of will or cetana with intentionality13. If these were really the same, even the Buddha would still have karma, because he was well aware of the world around him. The suttas however deny that the Buddha had any karma. Karma is the result of actions that are motivated by the will, which arises on the basis of emotions, in other words by selfish involvement in events in the world. For someone who does not have a self-feeling, involvement loses its fixed basis, it becomes relative and situational, and there is no karma any more because there is no desire. Orientation itself is not selfish, as Kant noticed; the aesthetic gaze is without interests14. When we look at a plant with beautiful flowers, we just admire the flowers and thoughts of owning them or buying them just do not arise. So the conclusion is that the Yogacara is far from being a phenomenology.
It could
13 Intentionality itself becomes synonymous with karma. pp. 192 14 Immanuel Kant: Kritik der Urteilskraft' - F.T. Lagarde, Berlin 1793, 1.1 §2
be some kind of critical idealism, if it would claim that objects of knowledge outside of consciousness do not exist. In that case it could be compared with the philosophy of Kant, may be even more with the one of Schopenhauer: the world is will and representation. Yogacara is also called Vijnaptimatra, which means nothing but cognition or representation. It has little to say about a reality in itself15. Reality in itself does exist however but it is only known by the one who has reached salvation by a conversion of the worldly consciousness, and by direct intuition without concepts. It is however, not clear how we have to understand this, but anyway there is no doubt that causality really exists and is not an interpretation16. The confusion about the reality in itself in later Buddhism has offered an opportunity for the imagination to picture an image of countless Buddha's and Buddhisattvas, heavens or Buddha fields, in other words for a very elaborate metaphysics. If this is not enough, it is combined with the atom theory of the abhidharma. Kochumuttom, who is quoted many times by Lusthaus, describes Yogacara even as a realistic pluralism17, which would make it a kind of
15 Buddhist phenomenology pp. 536
16 This overturning transforms the basic mode of cognition from consciousness (vi-jnana, discernment) into jnana (direct knowing). Direct knowing was defined as non-conceptual (nirvikalpa-jnana), i.e., devoid of interpretive overlay. Ibid. 537
17 I maintain that the entire system, when understood in terms of realistic pluralism, makes better sense... By realistic pluralism I mean a theory that recognizes a plurality of beings which really exist and operate independently of each other. Thomas A. Kochomuttom: 'A
satkayadrstP. The true reality, the thing in itself, would be the flashing of the atoms (dharmas) and this is a process that takes place by itself. The lists with dharmas by the way are a peculiar series of moments of consciousness, character qualities and emotions, supplemented with material elements like forms, time, place, difference etc. The lists are different for each school and they vary between 89 up to 125. They are just as useful for reaching salvation as is a list of all Paris tube stations for reaching Paris18 19. Developed from early lists or matikas, small lists that were meant to summarize the teaching20, they have been learned and repeated over and over again as the highest wisdom, until even the Yogacara could not find any use for them any more. Salvation according to the Yogacara is not a change of life attitude, but the entrance into another metaphysical world. It is like when one is watching TV, one suddenly receives glasses by which one can see all pixels of the screen light up separately. Some claim that we do not understand the teaching of it fully as long as we do not experience salvation21.
This could have Buddhist doctrine of experience' - Motilal Banarsidas, Delhi 1989, pp. 1)
18 Once it is freed of the subject-object prejudice, it is just suchness, or emptiness, or the thing-in-itself. Ibid. pp. 7
19 'Buddhist phenomenology' pp. 542
20 Noa Ronkin: 'Early Buddhist Metaphysics', pp. 27
21 It is not possible, however, to discuss this [[[doctrine]] of vijnapti-matrata] in all its aspects, which can be perceived only by an enlightened one. Vijnapti-matrata-siddhih... sarvatha sa tu na cintya, Buddha-gocara. Vimsatika 22; Buddhist phenomenology pp. 213) something to do with the fact that nivana according to abhidharma is an independent existing element22. Anyhow, how can we match this with the atoms? Do we become pixels ourselves, do we lose our unity of consciousness? Is anything of this experience to be found in the sayings of the Buddha? And what use is a teaching for us ignorant people if it can only be understood by the enlightened ones? Luckily the Buddhist tradition has after centuries of discretion abolished the atoms, because they caused more trouble than they could make clear.
Yogacara has been influenced very much by the philosophy of Samkhya and Yoga, where salvation means a union with the purusa, the universal mind, and any identification with nature is given up23. This could explain the dualistic tendencies that still remain and it also gives an alternative etymological explanation for the name, Yogacara literally means followers or practitioners of Yoga. Concluding we can establish that Yogacara has no likeness or affinity to any kind of phenomenology. It knows no reduction, it does not deal with meaning and it has dogmatic ontological presuppositions. The dharmas or atoms are not phenomena, because they do not appear and they are just supposed to exist dogmatically. It is full of causal explanations and things are not taken to
22 Kochomuttom. pp. 208-209 23 Ibid. 219
exist like they appear, as phenomena, but like the theory dogmatically claims. The presuppositions that are at the base of the book of Prof Lusthaus appear unfounded and even derived from sloppy reasoning24 and misunderstandings concerning phenomenology, although he deserves much credit for his translations and description of the Yogacara.
24 Besides his incomplete description of the different phenomenologists Lusthaus writes very sloppy. He mentions the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur
24 times, but spells the name only right once, 22 times as 'Ricouer' and once as 'Ricoueur'.
