Yogachara

Madhyamaka answers what things ultimately are by arguing that nothing has an intrinsic nature to be found. Yogachara, the other great school of Indian Mahayana philosophy, takes a different route to a related conclusion: rather than dismantling the question through dialectic, it offers a positive account of how experience of an external world gets constructed, and where the construction can be undone.

Associated chiefly with the brothers Asanga and Vasubandhu, active around the fourth or fifth century, the school is also called Vijnanavada, the doctrine of consciousness, or Cittamatra, mind only, names pointing at its central claim, that ordinary experience of an external world is consciousness appearing to itself as subject and object. Vasubandhu's Thirty Verses lays out a model of eight consciousnesses, from the five senses and a coordinating mental consciousness, through a deluded consciousness mistaking part of the deeper mind for a permanent self, down to the alayavijnana, the storehouse consciousness, where every action leaves a seed, bija, that ripens into a later experience, Yogachara's account of karma without a fixed self to carry it.

Yogachara and Madhyamaka argued for centuries. Madhyamaka commentators read the storehouse consciousness as smuggling back a fixed entity emptiness was built to rule out. Yogachara answered that emptiness with no account of how experience arises, and is reversed through practice, is description without a mechanism. Neither side persuaded the other, and both carried the disagreement into Tibet and East Asia. Undisputed is its other legacy: a logical wing, built by Dignaga and then Dharmakirti, that became standard equipment for Buddhist philosophy across Asia.

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.