Do Cittamatrins accept forms, sounds and so forth?
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The generally held notion that the ‘mind only’ school denies the existence of anything other than the mind is questionable, Tsongkhapa, in his commentary on the Madhyamikavarata, negates this view of the yogacara position. He argues that the yogacara philosophers including the founder, Arya Asanga, accepts the forms, sounds and so forth. If this is so, and given that Cittamatrins refute any external entity, what is that they accept exactly? Is this simply Tsongkhapa misquoting Asanga or trying to reconcile the difference between these traditions?
Because it is quite explicit in cittamatra literature, their original position is the refutation of any external reality. The duality of subject and object relation is constructed by our ignorance, it is a delusional conception of the reality in the Samsara, the cyclic existence of human condition, conditioned by this utter ignorance about the true nature of reality. Dispelling this misconception of the subject and the object as separate entities is the path to the realization of the ultimate truth, the emptiness or shunyata.
However, what is still unsettling about this Cittamatra position is that it seems to contradict the fundamental Buddhist philosophical stand of consciousness and matter having separate and definite continuum. How could a matter and conscious experience of it cause from the same source/cause? In other words, the fundamental assumption that the consciousness that is experienced and the object that relates to, are of the same “substance”, doesn’t seem justified or at least sounds so.
The Cittamatra view is that the “external phenomenon is nothing more than the appearance of it to perception, just as dream objects are not the dream consciousness, and yet are also not separate entities independent of the experience, similarly, the objects of the world are not separate entities from the experiences associated with them”. They are absolutists in the sense that they posit the absolute existence of consciousness which may present some serious problems too!