Living Yogacara

An Introduction to Consciousness-Only Buddhism

Tagawa Shun'ei, Charles Muller

• Publisher: Wisdom Publications
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780861718955
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophies orientales

Yogacara is an influential school of Buddhist philosophy and psychology that stems from the early Indian Mahayana Buddhist tradition. The Yogacara view is based on the fundamental truth that there is nothing in the realm of human experience that is not interpreted by and dependent upon the mind.Yogacara Buddhism was unable to sustain the same level of popularity as other Buddhist schools in India, Tibet, and East Asia, but its teachings on the nature of consciousness profoundly impacted the successive developments of Buddhism. Yogacara served as the basis for the development of the doctrines of karma and liberation in many other schools.In this refreshingly accessible study, Tagawa Shun'ei makes sense of Yogacara's subtleties and complexities with insight and clarity. He shows us that Yogacara masters comprehend and express everyday experiences that we all take for granted, yet struggle to explain. Eloquent and approachable, Living Yogacara deepens the reader's understanding of the development of Buddhism's interpretation of the human psyche.

Chapter One: Yogācāra Is...

NOTHING BUT THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

I built my hut amid the throng of men,

But there is no din of carriages or horses.

You ask me how this can be?

When the heart is remote, the earth stands aloof.

Plucking chrysanthemums by the eastern hedge,

I see afar the southern hills;

The mountain air is fine at sunset;

Flying birds return home in flocks.

In this return lies real meaning;

I want to explain it, but I lose the words.

Tao Yuanming, “Drinking Wine”

It might be surprising that I choose to open up this discussion with Tao Yuanming’s poem “Drinking Wine.”¹ However, seeing that we are going to engage ourselves with Yogācāra Buddhism from the perspective of its relevance in dealing with our daily lives, I would like to take this poem as our point of departure.

I was in my second year of high school when I was first introduced to this Chinese poem. Since that time, I have continued to re-read it from time to time, and whenever I do, a proverb comes to mind, which goes: “The great recluse hides himself in the city markets; the minor recluse hides in the deep mountains.” Our teacher, Mr. U., also taught us this proverb for the purpose of drawing out the meaning of the poem. I remember having been somewhat puzzled by its meaning at the time, but later on, after entering into the world of Buddhism, its meaning became increasingly clear.

While it is indeed the case that anyone who is practicing meditation in a Buddha-hall is seeking enlightenment as some sort of distant goal, the fact is that the temples, practice centers, and the Buddhist path do not exist for any purpose other than for us to fully understand ourselves exactly as we are here and now. Where we are now, as shown in Tao Yuanming’s poem—the hut in the midst of the world of people—is precisely our practice center, and so it doesn’t do us any good to try to escape from it. We should think about the Buddha-path and the meditation hall in the way of the great recluse who “withdraws to the city streets.” This is the main reason this poem resonates with me, and thus I continue to re-read it.

But there is also another reason.

Tao Yuanming has told us that in the noisy world of men—living in the middle of the city—he hears no noisy traffic. He has, in answering his own question, arrived at a conclusion: “when the mind is remote, the earth stands aloof.” I take “When the mind is remote” to mean that the mind is distantly removed from its attachments. So what is this world of ours, when viewed by the person who has a “remote mind”? Whether it be someone who boisterously takes the lead in worldly affairs, or, on the other hand, the spiritually-attuned person who is profoundly aware of the pitfalls of deep attachment to one’s ego—both of these people are, after all, overwhelmed by, and washed along in the flow of daily affairs. However, we can be certain that they are perceiving their circumstances along the way in a quite different manner.

The great recluse Tao Yuanming tells us that he is removed from the clamor of the world of men. But how about us? We ordinary people frequently seek to be able to escape from day-to-day living in the way of the lesser recluse, who goes deep in the mountains to be alone. If we really think it through, we can say that while we live in the same world, each person sees things in his or her own way, and there is a sense in which each one of us is in fact living in his own world. This fact is very interesting to take into account as we accumulate the experiences of daily living, yet from another perspective, it can also be a bit scary.

Given the admonition of Tao Yuanming about “distancing the mind,” what we need to consider is whether such “distancing” is actually a function of our own minds, and if so, if it is a fundamental, innate function—or perhaps even the mind’s basic character? The Yogācāra teachings that we will discuss constitute the form of Buddhism that has taken under the deepest consideration these problems regarding the composition and function of our mind.

The Yogācāra project, which attempts to accurately map out the concrete structure of our minds, develops as the result of coming to a profound understanding of the relationship between ourselves and the myriad objects in our environment, and then correlating these with the basic teachings of Śākyamuni Buddha. The central tenet of Yogācāra is usually said to be that of “consciousness-only,” which means, more precisely, “nothing but the transformations of consciousness.”

The characterization “nothing but the transformations of consciousness” can be further as “nothing but that which has been transformed by consciousness.” I am afraid, however, that starting off with this kind of arcane approach is probably not very helpful for newcomers to this topic, so I’d like to step back and take a gentler approach for a moment.

At the clapping of hands,

The carp come swimming for food;

The birds fly away in fright, and

A maiden comes carrying tea—

Sarusawa Pond.

This is a line of Japanese tanka poetry, which expresses distinct ways of interpreting a particular event, based on a few traditional Japanese images. If one claps one’s hands the carp (which are conditioned to come for feeding at the clap of the hands) will come swimming to the water’s edge for food; birds, on the other hand, will fly away in fright. Yet again, to the waitress in the traveler’s inn, it is a notification that the guest wants tea.

Sarusawa Pond (Monkey Marsh Pond) lies in the middle of a famous tourist area in Nara. It is said that this verse was written because there are so many travelers inns (ryokan) in that area, but it is also well known as a place where one can, from the water’s edge, look up at the impressing figure of the five-story pagoda of Kōfukuji temple.

Yogācāra is the doctrine of the Hossō (Ch. Faxiang) school, one of the six schools of the southern (Nara) court, and Kōfukuji is the long-flourishing headquarters for the study of Hossō teachings. Therefore, this tanka line which at first glance does not appear to say anything out of the ordinary, actually is a direct expression of the essence of the Yogācāra way of thinking.

The subject of the verse is the extremely simple action of “clapping the hands.” This verse shows that despite the singular character of this action, and the singular character of the sound that is generated, its meaning can be dramatically different depending upon the individual conditions of the receiver of the sound.

On the other hand, we can all call to mind the case of seeing the same thing many times over and over. Everyone has had the experience of having their impression of a particular object change depending upon their feelings or conditions at a given moment. This is because the object is seen under the influence of the mental state of that moment. Of course, at the time when we are looking at something, we are generally not aware of the way our feelings are being projected into the situation.

Seen in this way, our so-called cognition, or the action of discerning the meaning of things as they are perceived by us, is never in any case a perception of the external world exactly as it is, but rather a world that can only be apprehended via its interface with our present mental state. In other words, it is nothing other than our own mind that constructs things and determines their content. This is the meaning of “consciousness-only,” or “nothing but the transformations of consciousness.” And, if we turn this around, we ourselves are nothing other than things that dwell in a world defined by the limits of that which is knowable by the functions of our own mind.

There is a sense in which this can actually seem pretty scary. Why? Because if there is abundance in my mind, I’ll be able to experience life dwelling in a world of abundance; but on the other hand, if there is poverty in my mind, there will be no recourse except for me to reside in a world of poverty. If I have no recourse but to finish my days in poverty, this would indeed be a sad human limitation. However, the notion of “nothing but the transformations of consciousness” teaches us accurately about the mode of the reality we experience. Because of this, we can develop a deep awareness that we have no recourse but to continually and repeatedly reflect on ourselves. The effort of trying to live life with this kind of earnest reflection can be understood to be the practice of Yogācāra Buddhism.

THE FOUR ASPECTS OF COGNITION AND THE THREE KINDS OF OBJECTS

As we have broached the topic of consciousness-only and nothing but the transformations of consciousness through this poetic imagery, I would like to proceed by providing a few further examples from daily experience that will hopefully shed further light on these notions.

We are, in the midst of our day-to-day affairs, continuously experiencing the mental functions of seeing, hearing, and thinking, assuming all the while that we are directly seeing, hearing, and understanding the external world. But careful analysis makes it quite clear that this cannot actually be the case. According to Yogācāra Buddhism, what we actually perceive are images of the things of the external world as they are transformed by our own consciousness, and reflected onto our own mind. This being so, the things of the world that we are seeing and hearing cannot be the world exactly as it is. All of the things around us are the transformations by our own consciousnesses. This is the basic Yogācāra approach to understanding the relationship between ourselves and our environment.

We assume that we are sensing and seeing the scenery of the mountains in the distance and clouds in the sky that spread out before us in the way that these things actually exist. We also prefer to think that we are accurately recognizing the people and events surrounding us as we carry out our daily lives. When someone happens to point out that our view lacks objectivity and is off the mark, we don’t like it.

However, if we think it through, even though the mountain we are presently seeing is a single entity, upon reflection it should become clear to us that we are actually seeing the mountain via the medium of the outward-going projection of various mental conditions that are specific to us as individuals. Rather than seeing the mountain as it really is, what I am actually seeing is a mountain that is colored and altered by my own mind.

It is said that a painter picks up the brush upon the feeling of being moved by the power of the scene of the mountain that stands before him. When we look at the scenes of Mt. Fuji painted by famous Japanese artists such as Hayashitake and Ryuzaburo Umehara, even though theoretically speaking we should see in their respective works the same exact image of the mountain, the Mt. Fuji that ends up being painted on the canvas contains a wide range of distortions.

Concerning this, Nakagawa Kazumasa (a famous living Japanese artist) has written that the work of the painter is to “fix” what is moved in his mind, while the mind that receives this deep impression “undoes” the shape. If this is the case, then we can say that the distorted image of Mt. Fuji that is painted onto the canvas is one that has been transformed in the painter’s mind according to the received impression, and this is what the painter has fixated upon.

Although these kinds of artistic distortions may not be readily apparent while we are in the process of carrying out our daily lives, it is nonetheless the case that while we are in the midst of our daily activities, we are, just like these painters, perceiving all the things we must come in contact with differently according to our various mental states. And we can take it a step further and say that we are also transforming and perceiving things in the way that provides the greatest convenience for the carrying out of our life. According to Yogācāra, this is a stark fact of our existence.

Because our mind is actually working like an agent that manifests all objects of cognition, the Yogācāras, rather than simply calling it “mind,” call it “the mind that transforms” or “the mind as agent of transformation.” In the same vein, because our cognitive objects (or “objective realm”) are things that are in fact manifested by the mind-as-agent-of-transformation, they are called “transformed objects,” rather than simply “objects.”

To explain the functions of the subjectively transforming mind and objectively transformed objects in a coherent system, Yogācāra developed the teaching of the four aspects of cognition and the three kinds of objects. The explanation of the four aspects of cognition clarifies the function of the mind in its role as transforming subject, and the explanation of the three kinds of objects clarifies the character of the objects that are transformed. Within these theories, the Yogācāras carry out a hair-splitting analysis in regard to our cognitive functioning. This kind of subtle analysis is a bit hard to get the first time around, but efforts made toward understanding it are truly worthwhile, since once one has gotten this, it can be said that one has penetrated the core principle of Yogācāra. Therefore the saying, “if one understands the four aspects of cognition and three kinds of objects, the mastery of Yogācāra is half accomplished.”

The Four Aspects of Cognition

The theory of the four aspects of cognition, which clarifies the action of the “mind that acts as agent of transformation” tells us that the processes of our cognitive function can be divided into four parts. These are: (1) the objective aspect; (2) subjective aspect; (3) witnessing aspect; and (4) re-witnessing aspect.

In the process of the cognition of any given object, the first step is the mental function of perceiving the object and then determining what it is. In general, it is understood that this is an external object (something outside the mind). It is normally assumed that this...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Publisher’s Acknowledgment
• Table of Contents
• Translator’s Introduction
• Foreword
• Chapter One: Yogācāra Is...
• Chapter Two: The Structure of the Mind
• Chapter Three: The Functions of the Mind
• Chapter Four: Building Up Experience in the Latent Area of the Mind
• Chapter Five: The Production of Things
• Chapter Six: The Deep Self Absorbed in Selfishness
• Chapter Seven: The Variously Assessing Mind
• Chapter Eight: The Function of the Five Senses
• Chapter Nine: Who Am I?
• Chapter Ten: The Distance to Buddhahood
• Conclusion: Yogācāra Today
• Afterword
• Suggestions for Further Study
• Notes
• About the Author
• About Wisdom Publications
• Copyright