Yogācāra
Making consciousness the seat of illusion and of liberation alike: what we take for things belongs to representation.
c. 350 – c. 700 · living tradition
A school of Mahāyāna Buddhism whose great systematizers were and , in India around the fourth and fifth centuries, drawing on earlier sources such as the Saṃdhinirmocana Sūtra. Its name means "practice of yoga", that is, Buddhist contemplative discipline, whose experience it analyses. It takes up the taught by and articulates it in the doctrine of the : the imagined nature (things as we project them), the dependent nature (the conditioned stream of consciousness) and the perfected nature (the dependent emptied of the imagined). Liberation consists in undoing the duality of subject and object, not in making ordinary consciousness an ultimate substance. The logicians and , often associated with the school, renewed Indian epistemology. In China, transmitted it in the sixth century, then in the seventh, who founded a school of it. Its "idealism" can be read in two ways, as a metaphysical thesis (nothing exists outside the mind) or as an analysis of experience, and the debate still divides scholars. It is still studied in Tibetan curricula.
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Justification
To explain the continuity of experience without a permanent self, the school posits a (ālayavijñāna): a conditioned stream in which the traces (vāsanā) of actions are deposited, ensuring causal continuity from one life to the next without a permanent subject. In keeping with , this stream is not a self; it is the afflicted mind that wrongly takes it for an I.
Vasubandhu, Triṃśikā (Thirty Verses), 2-7 · Saṃdhinirmocana Sūtra, V
Justification
starts from dreams: in them we see objects that are located, lasting and causally effective, without any external object. Nothing therefore requires us to posit things outside consciousness. He adds that atoms, invoked to ground the external world, are incoherent: they can be conceived neither with parts nor without. Everything is (vijñaptimātra). The thesis is explicit; its classification as metaphysical idealism remains disputed.
Vasubandhu, Viṃśatikā (Twenty Verses), 2-4 (dreams) and 11-15 (atoms) · Asaṅga, Mahāyānasaṃgraha, II
Lineages
See on the friezeAll lineages↑ Influences received
- ReinterpretsMadhyamakaYogācāra takes up Madhyamaka's emptiness but refuses to read it as sheer nothingness: the doctrine of the three natures distinguishes what is imagined, what depends on something else and what is perfected, and grants …Read
↓ Influence exerted
- transmitted byChan / ZenEarly Chan claimed the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, a text close to Yogācāra, and kept from that school the idea that awakening consists in recognizing the nature of the mind.Read
- challenged byCandrakīrtiIn the Madhyamakāvatāra, Candrakīrti refutes the Yogācāra thesis at length: if one denies the external object, one must also deny a consciousness that would exist by itself.Read