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The Revolution of the Basis and Yogachara's Path to Buddhahood

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The Revolution of the Basis and Yogachara's Path to Buddhahood

Yogachara's elaborate map of eight consciousnesses is not offered as description for its own sake; the school built it to explain a transformation practitioners are meant to undergo, ashraya-paravritti, the revolution of the basis, in which the entire deluded structure of ordinary experience is converted, rather than simply abandoned, into the awakened functioning of a buddha. Each of the eight consciousnesses has its own distorted way of operating in an unawakened being and its own transformed function once the revolution occurs. The five sense consciousnesses become a wisdom that accomplishes what needs doing, acting spontaneously without self concern. The sixth, ordinary discriminating consciousness, becomes the wisdom of marvelous observation, perceiving particulars clearly without the distortion self interest previously introduced. The seventh, the deluded consciousness Yogachara identifies as the source of the felt sense of a fixed, separate self, becomes the wisdom of equality, in which self and other are no longer experienced as fundamentally opposed. The eighth, the alayavijnana or storehouse consciousness where karmic seeds are held and ripen, becomes the great mirror wisdom, reflecting all things exactly as they are without the storehouse's previous role of generating a distorted, self centered version of experience. Nothing is discarded in this account; the same eight functions that construct ordinary delusion are the very functions that, transformed rather than destroyed, constitute awakening, which is why Yogachara treats its detailed psychology as a practical map of the path.

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