The School That Reshaped How Buddhists Think About Mind

Asanga's Yogachara, also called Vijnanavada or the Mind Only school, became one of the two great philosophical schools of Indian Mahayana Buddhism, standing alongside and in creative tension with Madhyamaka, the school associated with Nagarjuna two centuries earlier. Where Madhyamaka concentrated on emptiness, the claim that no phenomenon possesses independent, inherent existence, Yogachara asked a different question: given that emptiness is true, how does ordinary experience arise at all, and what is actually doing the perceiving. Asanga's answer, elaborated with Vasubandhu across a body of systematic treatises, proposed a layered model of consciousness, including a foundational storehouse consciousness, alayavijnana, that carries the latent impressions of past action forward and gives rise to the appearance of a stable external world. The school's influence proved lasting far beyond India itself: Yogachara doctrine and vocabulary were carried into Chinese Buddhism, most directly through the pilgrim and translator Xuanzang, and from there into Japanese and Korean traditions of Buddhist philosophy, and its account of mind continues to be read today, including by scholars comparing it with modern philosophy of mind, as one of the most sophisticated psychological models Buddhist thought ever produced.