some thoughts on yogācāra
Feb. 13th, 2024 07:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cattasallaYogācāra interests me. It seems like a development in Buddhist philosophy that was inevitable as soon as Abhidharma became more about reifying than an aid for teaching and understanding, which needed to pass through the Madhyamaka phase (which then also became more about reifying, but reifying absence rather than presence as Derrida might have it) and come out the other end as Yogācāra. I really mean just the earlier Yogācāra material, too, not the later studies that reified it as an idealist position. My sources for this are the excellent work of William Waldron (The Buddhist Unconscious and Making Sense of Mind Only), as well as the work of Tagawa Shun'ei (Living Yogācāra) and Ben Connelly's Inside Vasubandhu's Yogacara (the latter two I found less satisfying but still worth reading). I have also been reading over translations of the Saṃdhinirmocana Sūtra and other translations of Vasubandhu's Thirty Verses. The former I find more puzzling and seems to be referring to Mahāyāna philosophical concepts which I am unfamiliar with, but the latter seems concise and clear and even inspiring.
I should add that I don't think any of this philosophical apparatus is really all that necessary if you just stick close to the practice as outlined in the EBTs. But once speculations and theorizing and highly technical elaborating on the basic doctrines therein begins, you almost need Mahāyāna philosophy.
So I have a few thoughts. First, the "basis consciousness", more popularly known as the "storehouse consciousness". The monastics at the Hillside Hermitage teach about what they call the "periphery" and how to discern the periphery. This comes through clearly on their teachings on mindfulness of body, wherein they point out that a sense can never sense itself, for example, the eye cannot see itself, therefore the body-sense can't sense the body, but instead senses bodily sensations. The two are to be distinguished, and the body is fundamentally unknowable. But we can know its effects on our experience...the arising of lust and craving, for example. We can feel the pressure it exerts on us when we engage in renunciation and restraint (especially for those of us for whom desire is our dominant affliction!). This idea suffuses their teachings on yoniso manasikāra and satipaṭṭhāna, as well. My take on this is that this peripheral thing that influences our experience, even giving rise to the objects and features of our experience, is the same thing as what the storehouse consciousness is referring to. It is fundamentally unknowable directly, and we can only know it by the effects it has on our conscious experience. It is a repository of all of our habitual structures, our cognitive scheme, the physiology of our perceptual systems, everything that shapes our experience that is not directly part of the experience. As such it is not a thing itself, but a process, a continuous transformation, and "storehouse consciousness" is just a convenient way to label it.
Then there's the I-maker, the me-maker, the part that does the grasping and identifying, that relates everything to a self, either by identifying with it or by appropriating it as a possession (i.e., takes a percept as "my" percept, one that belongs to a perceiving self that is separate from the percept). This seems quite straightforwardly to me as the manas.
And finally there's the realm of sense-consciousness itself (by which I mean all six senses, so both physical and mental things). For a nonenlightened person such as myself, anything that makes it to my actual sensual experience has first been transformed by the storehouse consciousness, given various determinations and limitations because of that, then gets processed by the I-maker and related to a self in some capacity, and then finally becomes something I actually experience.
I am not entirely clear on what "reversal of the basis" is, other than it's something that happens when you do objectless meditation (such as animitta cetosamādhi, which is my central meditation practice) and has something to do with clearing out or purifying the storehouse consciousness. This is not a thing that makes sense to me. I also admit a very weak grasp on the "three realities" teaching, although that one I find somewhat more intriguing.
I should add that I don't think any of this philosophical apparatus is really all that necessary if you just stick close to the practice as outlined in the EBTs. But once speculations and theorizing and highly technical elaborating on the basic doctrines therein begins, you almost need Mahāyāna philosophy.
So I have a few thoughts. First, the "basis consciousness", more popularly known as the "storehouse consciousness". The monastics at the Hillside Hermitage teach about what they call the "periphery" and how to discern the periphery. This comes through clearly on their teachings on mindfulness of body, wherein they point out that a sense can never sense itself, for example, the eye cannot see itself, therefore the body-sense can't sense the body, but instead senses bodily sensations. The two are to be distinguished, and the body is fundamentally unknowable. But we can know its effects on our experience...the arising of lust and craving, for example. We can feel the pressure it exerts on us when we engage in renunciation and restraint (especially for those of us for whom desire is our dominant affliction!). This idea suffuses their teachings on yoniso manasikāra and satipaṭṭhāna, as well. My take on this is that this peripheral thing that influences our experience, even giving rise to the objects and features of our experience, is the same thing as what the storehouse consciousness is referring to. It is fundamentally unknowable directly, and we can only know it by the effects it has on our conscious experience. It is a repository of all of our habitual structures, our cognitive scheme, the physiology of our perceptual systems, everything that shapes our experience that is not directly part of the experience. As such it is not a thing itself, but a process, a continuous transformation, and "storehouse consciousness" is just a convenient way to label it.
Then there's the I-maker, the me-maker, the part that does the grasping and identifying, that relates everything to a self, either by identifying with it or by appropriating it as a possession (i.e., takes a percept as "my" percept, one that belongs to a perceiving self that is separate from the percept). This seems quite straightforwardly to me as the manas.
And finally there's the realm of sense-consciousness itself (by which I mean all six senses, so both physical and mental things). For a nonenlightened person such as myself, anything that makes it to my actual sensual experience has first been transformed by the storehouse consciousness, given various determinations and limitations because of that, then gets processed by the I-maker and related to a self in some capacity, and then finally becomes something I actually experience.
I am not entirely clear on what "reversal of the basis" is, other than it's something that happens when you do objectless meditation (such as animitta cetosamādhi, which is my central meditation practice) and has something to do with clearing out or purifying the storehouse consciousness. This is not a thing that makes sense to me. I also admit a very weak grasp on the "three realities" teaching, although that one I find somewhat more intriguing.