What is Cittamatra?
Cittamatra or Vijnanavada is a unique school of thought that developed within the philosophical systems of Buddhism, whose central notion is based on the primacy of the mind. It propounds a system advocating that no external things exist as entities separate or distinct from the observing mind. Therefore, what appears to our consciousness as external are nothing but projections or images, of our own inner experience reflected externally as objects.
The central thrust of the argument against the existence of external entities is, however, that if an external entity exists, then it should exists independently of the perceiving mind. This implies that such an object should possess an inherent quality which enables it to project its appearance to the consciousness and all perceptions are actually objective.
Hence, it naturally follows, that whatever impressions our senses register in relation to an object, should be valid and unmistaken, and therefore, correspond to factual reality. This, however, it not the case. Our perception of the world, an event or a person is very subjective.
The line of reasoning by the yogacara philosophers for the above proposition, in defense of Cittamatra and some well-known arguments are:
The reasoning of dream and reflection, as set forth by Asanga.
Vasubandhu’s intensive attacks on the partless particle theory.
Dignaga’s refutation of the theory that “particles” and “composites” are objective conditions of the sense of consciousness;
Dharmakriti’s refutation of the theory that external objects generate mind in an identical aspect;
The reasoning of the “simultaneous emergence of subject and object”;
I will be reading and analyzing each in turn (though won’t be doing in-depth analysis for the purpose of this research) with special focus on Asanga and Vasubandhu’s defense of the Cittamatra. Yogacara school of Buddhism is argued by many philosophers as idealistic and even compared with German idealism, I won’t be entertaining in this with Hegelian philosophy, but with the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger later. Although the primacy of consciousness is ignored even within different schools of Buddhist philosophical systems, it has recently gained some attention in the areas of empirical studies of the mind/consciousness, such as in cognitive sciences and quantum physics.
References:
Mind Only School and Buddhist Logic, Dialogue Series-1, a collection of seminar papers, edited by Doboom Tulku, New Delhi: Tibet House and Aditya Prakashan, 1990.
