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Mahayana Buddhist Philosophy EAS
468 L. Priestley Carr
Hall 405 Tues., Thu. 3-4 Today we’ll talk briefly about Yogacara. He
won’t talk of its history or texts. All we need is a couple of the main
doctrines. Particularly on how the Yogacara
understanding of consciousness comes from Abhidharmic
and pre-Abhdharmic conceptions. Yogacara
is just as hard to pin down as Madhyamaka. It’s
hard to find things to day that are not open to discussion. They deny there
is anything external to consciousness. In some sense, all of our experience
is similar to a dream. There isn’t a reality external to consciousness of
which the dream consists or where it occurs. The external reality which they
deny was never as clearly external as what we call the material world. All
Buddhists thought of the sensible qualities of things, what the Western
tradition called the secondary qualities (West), as really existing out
there, along with the 4 material elements. Whereas we think of color as a
sensible quality that we generate with our brains, they thought of color as
something really out there that you perceive with your eyes. So their
external reality already to a certain extent overlapped what we think of as
the internal world of experience. To the extent there is an argument against
the existence of a reality outside of consciousness, it comes down to this:
All of our experience necessarily consists of consciousness in various forms.
A purely extramental reality is by definition
outside of our mental world. If it should turn out that we can make sense of
our experience without appealing to the existence of things existing outside
of consciousness, then the notion of these things outside of consciousness
becomes superfluous. We don’t need to suppose they are there, so by the
application of Occam’s Razor we slice them away.
The principle of the razor is not merely intellectual economy. It goes
deeper. If something is not a given in your experience, doesn’t have to be
assumed to make sense of your experience, not only is it superfluous, you
have no grounds for asserting that it exists. Something like this is how they
thought of that side of the question. It’s likely this grew from the
recognition that what concerns the Buddhist is the internal world of
experience, that’s what counts. The further move to denying anything besides
that has the advantage from their standpoint that there is anything real out
there to be attached to. That our unreal self can possess unreal things is as
absurd as the attachment that a dream persona can have for the things in a
dream. There’s still the question of whether we can make sense of experience
without assuming there is anything out there beyond our experience that is
the cause of our experience. To explain how that could be managed, the Yogacara offered an analysis of conscious which was based
on the old analysis of the world into the 18 dhatu-s from the early sutras. Dhatu has several different meanings. Also
“realm”. The tri-dhatu
and tri-loka
correlate, the triple realm and the triple world. “Element”: these are the
elements that our functioning world is made up of. This is reasonably
self-explanatory. It goes back to analysis that was meant to show the
impermanence of consciousness, because consciousness arises from the contact phassa between visible shapes and the eye,
etc. When you have contact, that kind of consciousness arises, but without
the contact, you no longer have that kind of consciousness. You have six
consciousnesses, the mind as a kind of common sense that takes as its object
all dharmas, everything you can be conscious of. It
has the function of integrating the experiences of these other
consciousnesses. They will tell us strictly speaking consciousness is
consciousness, but the difference kinds of consciousness are distinguished
according to the particular faculty involved. What happens if we get rid of
all outside of consciousness? The 5 physical senses (organs) as anything
material disappear. There will still be a capacity in consciousness to have
visual consciousness, etc., but there will not be any physical organ,
excepted as represented in various consciousnesses. For example, I can touch
my own ear and see the eyes of others. There is only a representation in my
visual and tactile experience of formations associated with certain kinds of
consciousness. These on the right hand side will be present not as things out
there but rather as forms of consciousness. This is based on the experience
of dreams, when you see things but there is no external object you are
seeing. And also deriving from the exercise of the imagination, particularly
in meditation, where you can visualize forms without a material counterpart.
In this case, consciousness is generating its own objects. That means where
these are thought of as external, we can get rid of these as well. That
leaves us with all of this. Dharmas we could leave
in to the extent that dharmas include forms of
consciousness, but any dharmas supposed to be
outside of consciousness go as well. That leaves us with 7 forms of
consciousness. Mind stays because mind is an aspect of consciousness. We can
now move mind down under these. In eye consciousness, visual consciousness,
you will have the whole world of visual experience organized around a
viewpoint. The visual consciousness itself is organized that way but doesn’t
include this realization that visual consciousness is organized that way. You
just have a field of colors and shapes which can be interpreted through our
power of perception as organized around a point from which you see things.
The organization will not be there to be recognized in visual consciousness,
but other forms of consciousness may become aware of this organization. And
so on for the other consciousnesses. Each of these on the face of it is
completely separate, unrelated to each other. Colors are utterly unlike
flavors. They seem to be separate closed worlds. We know that they are not,
because we experience them simultaneously. All occur within the same realm of
consciousness. Even though they seem distinct, they have some kind of
community within the person. Beyond that, they are coordinated with each
other. We learn this from an early age. In visual consciousness there is a
patch of white. There is a tactile awareness which is matched by this color
moving over to this one, which we identify with picking up a piece of chalk.
And then the sound when we drop it. The piece of chalk is manifest through
several consciousnesses. It’s the mind consciousness that integrates, which
brings these together so that we have the experience of a relatively unified
world, a world for each one of us, because we all have a system of
consciousness organized around a point in the individual consciousness. Here
is my point, and there is relative to me: your viewpoint. So far so good. There are some obvious problems. What happens in
sleep? If you dream, perhaps all the consciousnesses are functioning in a
high quality dream. But when you wake up, your waking consciousness doesn’t
just pick off from where it left off. You go to sleep and some snowflakes are
falling. In the morning the snow is deep. We know that it snowed all night
while we were unconscious. So how to make sense of un-consciousness here? The
consistency and coherence on such a vast scale in our waking experience, the
way in which something will present itself to us unexpectedly and then we can
gradually find out how that is related to other events, and eventually to
events we have already experienced, so that we see a vast coherence there of
which we were unaware. There are good reasons for supposing an external world that our
consciousness reflects. From a Buddhist standpoint, how do you make sense of
death and rebirth? How does that work? If there is a real interruption of the
5 aggregates, how do you get the continuity to the next existence.
So to make sense of this, they do find it necessary to posit something
further, but not something outside of consciousness. This is what they call
the storehouse consciousness. This is said to be the repository of all the
seeds of all possible experiences. Seeds are potentialities. If all of these
are forms of consciousness and they change in coherent ways, then there is
some reason for these coherent changes, these developments, and the reason is
partly to be found in the storehouse consciousness. There are potentialities
in this consciousness which become activated and so manifest themselves as
this or that kind of experience. The storehouse consciousness contains the
seeds of all possible experiences, because all possible experiences are forms
of consciousness. And the storehouse consciousness is what produces, so it
must have the capacity to produce all kinds of consciousness, everything from
the experience of being a god to being a hell-bound being. And everything in
between, our experience as human beings and the circumscribed experience of
an earthworm. This goes toward explaining how we can have coherent forms
expressing themselves in our various consciousnesses in a coordinated way.
Still doesn’t explain entirely why these forms and not some others. Why are
we all experiencing this room, this lecture, at this point? Well, since the
storehouse contains the potentialities for all kinds of experience—different
versions of Yogacara handle this in different
ways—all possible experiences are implicit in the storehouse consciousness.
So there must be something else that determines which potentialities become
actualized at any given time. This is the function served by karma. After
all, karma puts us here, in this life rather than some other. It must be
karma that actualizes some potentialities rather than others. Karma comes
from the mind, which is why it is also known as the “afflicted mental
consciousness”. There are two kinds of mind consciousness, the one that
involves the afflictions, and the one that doesn’t. Craving and attachment,
the samskaras that provide the karmic impulse are
in the mind. The craving is based on ignorance, on misunderstanding. The
misunderstanding is a misinterpretation of all of this. The storehouse
consciousness, of which we are only dimly aware of as something deep in our
consciousness—all of these which seem of something external to us, especially
visual and tactile consciousness. So that on the basis of our experiences of
these consciousnesses, the transformation of these consciousnesses out of the
storehouse consciousness, we suppose or assume that we have a self based on a
dim awareness of the storehouse consciousness, and that there are external
objects which are based on the 5 external consciousnesses. Based on this
misunderstanding by which the structure of consciousness organized around
particular viewpoints and suggesting two poles, perceiver and perceived, comes the basis for the misunderstanding that there is a
self and things out there that you can become attached to. So, what happens
basically is that the misunderstanding of this becomes the basis for craving
and attachment in the mind. This has an affect on the storehouse
consciousness, so it produces new forms, the character of the craving and so
forth affects the kinds of transformations that occur. Those transformations
are again misunderstood, generating more craving, which generates further
forms. What you have is a feedback system, rather similar to someone who is
dreaming and the dream as it unfolds excites the person, and the excitement
generates feelings that affect dream consciousness, producing more dream, whose character is determined by the nature of the
dream before. If the dream is pleasant, it may generate feelings of craving,
and that will generate a dream in one experiences deprivation and want. One
dreams violence and that resonates in one’s mind. So that one dreams of being
attacked and injured. The general pattern is that what goes out from the
dreaming subject comes back out of the dream world in a later stage in the
dream. That is to describe the operation of karma. Another way of describing:
It’s as if one has an ongoing hallucination, in which on hallucinates in
response to previous hallucinations. It suggests very effectively how samsara functions like a vicious circle. The things we
don’t like in samsara produce reactions that bring
more of what we don’t like. What’s needed is first of all to have reactions
that tend to generate pleasant but not unpleasant feelings, but eventually
the goal is to cease generating the feelings altogether. Now one question that stands out is how it is that we all have the
same kind of experience when we’re together in the same place. If all of this
is generated by the individual consciousness of each one of us. In the Yogacara the storehouse seems to be individual, not
cosmic. So where does this coordination comes from?
The best explanation Priestley has seen is that it comes from the similarity
of our karma. It’s not easy to see what other explanation could be offered.
Priestley doesn’t find it all that convincing. He can see similar karma
leading us to similar experiences of studying philosophy, but when it comes
to the exact distribution of chalk dust on the blackboard, but “I cannot buy
it”. How could karma be capable of that kind of precision in determining a
common reality for us? Perhaps this failure to believe in this capability of
karma comes from a lack of imagination. Or a deficiency in the understanding
of karma. Still, this seems deeply unsatisfactory at this point. There’s
another problem, that it is not remotely convincing that there is no reality
external to consciousness. Priestley suspects that how convincing one finds
this first off depends on how firmly one has one’s feet on the ground. What version of Yogacara are you expounding? Well, it’s slippery in the same way Madhyamaka
is, and there are disagreements. But are these real disagreements? Or are the
disagreers arguing at cross purposes? Anyway, he’s
talking about Xuanzang and Dharmapala’s
philosophy, whose ideas impacted Fazang (the author
of The Discourse of the Golden Lion)’s understanding. Some scholars argue that for these people there really is an external
world, but when Priestley looks at the texts this does not seem to be what
they are saying. The Yogacara use the same metaphors—mirror,
magical illusion, flowers in the sky—as the Madhyamakas,
but they use them for different meanings. This is a major problem for
interpretation. These metaphors are susceptible to different interpretations,
and it’s hard to know which interpretation is intended in any specific
instance. “A picture is worth a thousand words, but that’s not always a good
thing.” From Stephen Pinker’s How the Mind Works. It comes down to the fact that some things only a picture can do or a
picture can do better. The same goes for texts. They can be complementary. Priestley when he first learned this stuff was in his 20s. The world
is like a dream? Sounded pretty good to him. But then, in retrospect, he
doesn’t feel that his feet were very firmly on the ground. He was probably in
his mid to late 20s. It took awhile to get the feet solidly on the ground. He
says that as a preface to the observation that people have trouble thinking
this is remotely possible due to a lack of imagination. Immediate acceptance
or rejection can both proceed from a deficiency. What one needs to imagine is
something like a dream that has all of the vividness and concreteness of our
waking experience. People sometimes say that dreams aren’t like that. But
sometimes dreams can be pretty good. What you begin to reflect on it,
anything you experience in waking life could occur in a dream. At that point
one gets a sense of how this could after all make sense. When you don’t grasp
it very well, you feel everything is getting dreamy and vague. That’s not so
healthy. When you understand it more appropriately, you retain all the
vividness and clarity and concreteness of all of this, but also see it as
dreamlike in the sense that it is just consciousness, transformations of
consciousness. All the colors are forms of consciousness, as are the shapes,
as is the resistance you feel when you press the table. If you die, that’s
the end of a dream so to speak, and when you’re born that’s the start of
another. What about the Buddha’s transformations, or passing through walls? Is
magic explained by the idea that everything is consciousness? What about the
whole corpus of Buddhist doctrine? If the laws that govern the arising of forms of consciousness from the
storehouse are the same as the laws that are thought to govern our material
universe, then there’s no justification for the Buddha’s miracles. Priestley: It’s swallow the first idea and the rest follows.
We shouldn’t be so quick to swallow or not to swallow. When the whole thing
is interpreted in terms of atomic consciousnesses, then it’s very tough to
understand how it can work, but if we think of as consciousnesses as
non-different the way everything else is, then something different emerges,
something that is much closer to Huayan. The main Madhyamaka objection is that they
seem to be saying that consciousness itself is real. The general position in Madhyamaka is that it matters not if you think there are
external objects or not conventionally speaking. But if you say consciousness
itself is real, then you’ve got yourself into trouble. There are places where
it sounds in Yogacara that they are affirming that
consciousness isn’t real in the long run, but there are other places where
they seem to be saying that it is real in the wrong run, in contrast to
everything else. Still not straightforward. We’ll run into the 3 natures in the Golden Lion. The middle one, the paratantra svabhava, dependent
existence. That’s the one the Yogacara accepts as
real. If we look again at the Nagarjuna hymn, verse
45, it says that the paratantra exists. That line
is a quotation from Lankavatara sutra. We like to
think that Nagarjuna’s understanding of that would
be that it exists only in some conventional way. But it does say vidyate. Another detail that may be important. A
commentary on a work by Vasubhandhu says that
consciousness exists as a substance because it’s dependently originated.
Being substantial normally means that it has svabhava.
Madhyamakas ran into this and thought, “this can’t
be right.” So at least some of the disagreement is about that. Eventually
there were syntheses, with Yogacara seen as a
useful modification of ordinary conventional truth that could take you
farther to the realization of emptiness. Unofficial notes by Darryl Sterk |
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