The Tree of Enlightenment
An Introduction to the Major Traditions of Buddhism
by Peter Della Santina
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Part Two
The Mahayana
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Chapter Nineteen
The Philosophy of Mind Only
The Mind Only school and the Middle Way school are the philosophical
backbone of
the Mahayana tradition. There are
several names by which the Mind Only
school is
known, the three
most popular being Chittamatra (school affirming Mind
Only),
Vijnanavada (school affirming consciousness), and Yogachara
(school
affirming the unity
of meditation and action). Yogachara
refers to the union of the
practice of meditation
(yoga) and conduct
(achara). The Mind Only school arose as an
independent and
identifiable philosophical tradition in the fourth century C.E.
Two brothers, Asanga and Vasubandhu, played a central role
in the
formulation and
popularization of the philosophy of this
school. They were born in
Northwest India, in
what is now
Pakistan. Through their writings and skill as teachers and
debaters,
they
popularized the Mind Only philosophy within a relatively short
time.
Both started out as
realistic pluralists, and in addition to his
many works on the Mind
Only philosophy,
Vasubandhu is well
known for his Abhidharmakosha, a collection of
Abhidharma
philosophy written from the standpoint of the Vaibhashika school.
These two great scholars were converted to Mahayana and together
produced a large
number of works defining, categorizing, and setting forth the Mind Only
philosophy.
Asanga is famous for his Stages of the Bodhisattva Path
(Bodhisattvabhumi),
Compendium of the Abhidharma (Abhidharmasamuchchaya),
written from the
Mahayana
or Mind Only viewpoint, and many commentaries on major works of the
Mind Only
school. Vasubandhu is renowned for his short treatises on Cognition
Only and a treatise
explaining the three natures of the Mind Only
philosophy.
Asanga's commentaries to a number of important texts of the Mind Only
school are
attributed by the Mahayana tradition to Lord Maitreya. Although modern
scholars have
attempted to identify Maitreya with a historical personality, the
Mahayana tradition has
no doubt that Maitreya is the future Buddha, now residing in Tushita
Heaven. The major
works of the Mind Only school attributed to him include the Distinction
of the Middle
from the Extremes (Madhyantavibhaga) and the Ornament of the Mahayana
(Mahayanasutralankara). They are said to have been transmitted by
Maitreya to Asanga,
who wrote them down and added commentaries. It is in this sense that a
large portion of
the textual foundation of the Mind Only philosophy is attributed to the
future Buddha
Maitreya.
Like the Middle Way philosophy, the Mind Only philosophy has its origin
in the earliest
tradition of Buddhism. For example, even according to the Theravada
canon, the Buddha
declared that mind is the creator of all things and referred to the
luminous and pure nature
of consciousness. The body of Mahayana sutras includes many discourses,
like the
Lankavatara Sutra, that deal at some length with the fundamental
principles of the Mind
Only philosophy. A long and weighty textual tradition thus precedes the
emergence of the
Mind Only tradition as an independent
philosophical school.
In addition to these textual anticipations in the canons of the
Hinayana and Mahayana
traditions, we find conceptual antecedents of the Mind Only philosophy
in the course of
the development of Buddhist thought. We all know that mind has been
extremely
important in Buddhism from the beginning. We need only remember the
Buddha's
affirmation of the creative role of the mind to realize what a central
place mind has in
Buddhist thought, or look at the thirty-seven factors conducive to
enlightenment to be
struck by how many of them have to do with the mind.
The central importance of mind continued in the Vaibhashika and
Sautrantika schools,
two realistic and pluralistic schools that flourished prior to the
emergence of the Middle
Way and Mind Only schools. The Vaibhashika took its name from
commentaries
composed during the Fourth Buddhist Council, in the first century C.E.
It is perhaps the
most atomistic, realistic, and pluralistic of the Indian schools, and
is even more pluralistic
and realistic than the Theravada school of Sri Lanka. The Vaibhashikas
advocated the
doctrine of the two natures of factors (dharmas)--the phenomenal nature
and the eternal
nature. This eternal nature has sometimes been likened to Plato's
doctrine of ideas in
Greek philosophy.
The Sautrantika takes its name from the fact that it wanted to return
to the original
teachings of the Buddha contained in the sutras. This is the school
that rejected the
authenticity of the Abhidharma. The Sautrantikas are interesting
philosophically because
they emphasized the role of conceptualization, or discrimination
(vikalpa). They rejected
the independent, objective reality of many of the factors the
Vaibhashikas accepted,
ascribing these dharmas to the functioning of discrimination or
imagination. This goes
some way toward the standpoint of the Mind Only school, which
eventually denied the
objective reality of all objects and affirmed the sole reality of
mind.
In addition, the Sautrantikas formulated a very interesting theory of
perception. They
believed that we never really know external objects directly and that
what we perceive--
what we take to be an external object (for example, the cup in front of
me)--is a mental
reflection or representation of that object, so that the
process of
perception is the process
of perceiving mental reflections of external objects. The Sautrantikas
claimed that these
mental representations are the effects of external objects.
Consequently, they held that we
know of the existence of external objects by inference. The mental
images or reflections
of an external object are evidence of that object's existence, although
we cannot know it
directly.
This theory is very similar to John Locke's representative theory of
perception. What I
find important about this view is that if it is accepted, it leaves the
status of the external
world in a very precarious position, since we would never know objects
in
themselves but
only the objectified contents of our consciousness. By thus emphasizing
the role of
conceptualization or imagination, this philosophical development of the
Sautrantikas
anticipates the full-fledged mentalist philosophy of the Mind Only
school, which claims
that the apparently real objects of the world are none other than mind.
There are a number of lines along which the Mind Only
philosophy
developed its
doctrine of the primacy of consciousness.
Its adherents were convinced
that objects
depend on mind for their
nature and being. First, the school put
forward the view that a
single object appears differently to different sentient beings. This
argument is worked out
with respect to the six realms of existence.
For example, a cup of milk
appears to us as
milk, but it would
appear as nectar to the gods, as molten iron to hell
beings, and as
pus
or blood to hungry ghosts. A single object appears differently
to
different beings in
samsara according to their respective karma.
In other words, an object
appears in
different forms according to
the conditioned, subjective state of the
mind. We can see this
even
without reference to the six realms. For example, a woman may
appear as an object
of sexual attraction to a man, a heap of meat
to a wolf, and a skeleton
to an Arhat. This is
the first argument the
Mind Only school used in support of its
subjectivist view of
experience.
Second, the Mind Only school made extensive use of the
analogy of
dreaming, arguing
that in dreams the mind creates and
projects a world which, for all
intents and purposes, it
experiences
as real as long as the dream state prevails. If we look at
Vasubandhu's
Twenty Verses on Cognition Only we can see how
he rejects several
objections to this
argument by analogy. For
example, opponents of this view said that
dream experience is
not
collective the way waking experience is, to which Vasubandhu
countered that we do
experience events in common with the other
figures in a given dream.
Opponents also
said that dream
experience is not effective and does not have the power
to bring
about
real effects, yet Vasubandhu showed, by using the example
of nocturnal
emission, that
this is not so. In short, if we look closely
at dream experience, we
will be forced to admit
that, as long as we
are in a dream state, there are no reasonable
grounds on which we
can
distinguish it from waking experience.
It is interesting to note that this analogy has received some
support
in recent years from
the evidence of experiments in the
field of sensory deprivation. These
experiments place
volunteers in
situations where they are cut off from all sensory
stimuli; some
subjects
then begin to create, out of their own minds, an entire
three-dimensional universe. It
would follow that the Mind Only
argument developed on the analogy of
dream
experience has a
certain amount of cogency.
Third, the Mind Only school rejected the independent
existence of
objects by exposing
the infinite divisibility of matter.
This is another early conceptual
conclusion reached by
the
Buddhist tradition that has recently been confirmed by scientific
discoveries. Mind
Only philosophers argued that the notion of an
atom--an irreducible
unit of matter--is
impossible. They argued this
on the grounds of the necessity of the
combination or
collection of
atoms in order to produce a mass, an extended material
object.
The atom was thought to be unitary and indivisible, and was
therefore
held to be without
parts, yet it was thought that objects
(like a cup or a table) are
collections of atoms that
form extended
objects. Objects acquire mass through the collecting
together of
countless
atoms in an assembly. If atoms are indivisible and without
parts, then
it will be
impossible for them to assemble together.
However, if atoms assemble,
as they must, to
form extended
material objects, then each atom must have at least six
distinguishable
parts: an upper part, a lower part, and an eastern,
southern, western,
and northern part.
By means of this argument,
Vasubandhu and other Mind Only philosophers
established
the
concept of the infinite divisibility of the atom. This conclusion
has
been verified by
modern physics, so once again we have an early
analytical conception
that has been
confirmed experimentally by
discoveries of modern science. The atom as
well as its
components
have been shown to be reducible to even smaller components,
and
we have
finally arrived at a point in time when there is precious little
evidence of any ultimate
element of matter.
Through these arguments rejecting the existence of material
objects,
Mind Only
philosophers established the relativity of
subject and object, the
identity of the objects of
consciousness with
consciousness itself. They revealed what we might
call the
nonduality
of the subject and object of consciousness--of
consciousness and its
contents.
I want now to touch upon a
conception which appears in the Lankavatara
Sutra and to
which
Vasubandhu devoted one of his more famous works, the
Exposition
of the Three
Natures. This is a doctrine very important
to Mind Only philosophy,
namely, the doctrine
of the three natures,
or levels, of reality: (1) the illusory or
imputed nature (parikalpita),
(2) the dependent or relative nature (paratantra), and (3) the
perfected or accomplished
nature (parinishpanna).
These three natures may be likened respectively to (a) the
mistaken
belief that water
exists in a mirage; (b) the appearance
itself of the mirage, dependent
on atmospheric
causes and
conditions; and (c) the empty nature of the mirage, inasmuch
as it is
conditioned, relative, and dependent on causes and conditions. The
belief that water
exists in the mirage is utterly false and is similar to
the illusory
nature. The simple
appearance of the mirage relative to
causes and conditions is similar
to the dependent
nature. The empty
character of the mirage, inasmuch as it is dependent
and
conditioned,
is similar to the perfected nature.
It is necessary to draw particular attention to the second of the
three
natures, the
dependent nature, because it is this nature that is
central in the Mind
Only philosophy,
insofar as it is concerned with
liberation and emancipation. The
dependent nature is
identical with
mind, and particularly with the storehouse
consciousness, which we
iscussed in our consideration of the Lankavatara Sutra (see
Chapter
17). What this
means is that in this dependent nature we
have, on the one hand, the
potential to produce
the illusory prison
of samsara and, on the other, the potential for the
liberation of
nirvana.
I have said that the storehouse consciousness was termed
by the
Tibetans 'the all-base
consciousness,' and that in that sense it
is the root of samsara and
nirvana. Here, too, we
can see, on the
one hand, how the dependent nature, if it is
objectified by
discrimination
of an external object, results in the fabrication by
mind of an
external world, which is
samsara. If the mind
discriminates an external object--bifurcates this
dependent nature
into subject and object--then we have the creation of the illusory
nature, that is to say,
the imposition of false ideas (such as the idea
of the existence of
water in a mirage, or of
the self and other): in a
word, we have samsara.
On the other hand, if this dependent nature, which is identical
with
the storehouse
consciousness, is purified of discriminating
thought and the emptiness
of subject and
object is realized, then the
storehouse consciousness results in the
perfected nature; it
results
in freedom. The dependent nature is therefore the central
nature of
the three. If
played upon by discrimination, it becomes illusion,
samsara; if played
upon by the
knowledge of the abandonment of
duality, it becomes nirvana.
It is interesting to note that this dependent nature is also the
source
of the
phenomenalizing activity of the enlightened beings. In
other words, the
dependent nature,
or storehouse consciousness,
supplies the potential for the emanation
of all forms, the
forms of
the terrestrial dimension and those of the celestial
dimension--the
heavenly
Bodhisattvas like Manjushri and Avalokiteshvara, who
work for the
enlightenment of all
sentient beings.
You will recall that, in the example of the mirage, it is the
notion of
the existence of water
that belongs to the illusory nature;
the mere appearance of the mirage
as a pure,
conditioned
phenomenon belongs to the dependent nature. We might
interpret
this in
terms of experience--that is, the experience of subject and
object as
different. The notion
that an external object exists
independent of consciousness, or mind,
belongs to the realm
of the
illusory nature, whereas the appearance of phenomena without the
mistaken
notions of their objectivity and independence belongs to
the dependent
nature.
This dependent nature is thus intrinsically pure and can
function in an
altruistic way for
the liberation of others. It is in this
sense that the three natures in
the Mind Only system
correspond to
the three dimensions of Buddhahood: the illusory nature
corresponds to the
terrestrial dimension, the dependent nature to
the celestial dimension,
and the perfected
nature to the
transcendental dimension. Therefore, when Buddhas appear
as
objective
historical personalities, this is the appearance of the
dependent
nature--in the guise of
subject-object duality--in the
sphere of the illusory nature. When
Buddhas appear free
from the
duality of subject and object, in the ideal form of celestial
Bodhisattvas like
Manjushri and Avalokiteshvara, this is an
appearance of the celestial
dimension, of the
dependent nature free
from the illusion of subject-object duality.
I would like to conclude by underlining what I believe to be
the very
close
correspondence between the philosophies of Mind
Only and the Middle
Way. You will
recall that we have the
conceptions of samsara and nirvana in the
Middle Way
philosophy,
just as we do in the whole of Buddhist thought. In
addition, we
have two
pedagogical concepts--those of conventional truth and
ultimate truth,
which refer
respectively to samsara and nirvana.
What is it in the philosophy of the Middle Way that mediates
between
conventional truth
and ultimate truth, between samsara
and nirvana? How is it that
eventually we have an
identity, or
non-differentiation, of samsara and nirvana professed in
the Middle
Way
school? If we look at the Middle Way philosophy, we find
that
interdependent
origination is the principle that unites
conventional and ultimate
truth, samsara and
nirvana. In the
Mulamadhyamakakarika, Nagarjuna says that if we take
interdependent
origination as the relationship between cause and
effect, we have
samsara, but if we take
interdependent origination
as non-causal--as emptiness--we have
nirvana. The link
between
cause and effect, between karma and its consequences, is
conceptualization or
imagination. Nagarjuna says clearly that
imagination is responsible for
the connection
between cause and
effect. This, in general, is the scheme we find in
the Middle Way
school.
When we look at the Mind Only philosophy, we see that it
runs parallel
to that of the
Middle Way. The conventional truth in
the Middle Way philosophy is
similar to the
illusory nature of Mind
Only philosophy, and in both systems this
corresponds to cause
and effect, to samsara. The ultimate truth in the Middle Way
philosophy
is similar to the
perfected nature in the Mind Only
philosophy, and in both systems this
corresponds to
emptiness,
nonduality, non-origination, and nirvana. What in the Middle
Way
school is
interdependent origination--the link between samsara and
nirvana--is
the dependent
nature in the Mind Only school.
Mind is of the utmost importance to both interdependent
origination and
the dependent
nature. Mind is the essence of both.
In both systems we have the
conventional, samsaric,
illusory reality on the one hand, and the ultimate, nirvanic, perfected
reality on the other;
mediating between the two is the principle of relativity, the principle
of dependence,
which is of the essence of mind. In Chapter 20 we will further explore
the parallelism
between the Middle Way philosophy and the Mind Only philosophy. We will
then try to
apply the combined vision of these philosophies to the practice of the
Mahayana path.
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Contents
|
01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11
| 12 | 13
| 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41
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Update : 11-05-2002
