Yogacara - The Mind the Buddha Hesitated to Teach

A Teaching Held Back

It is rare for a scripture to announce that it will not say something. The Saṁdhinirmocana Sutra does. After describing the deepest layer of the mind, the Buddha adds a verse.

阿陀那識甚深細 一切種子如瀑流 我於凡愚不開演 恐彼分別執為我

The ādāna consciousness is profound and subtle; it holds all seeds and flows like a torrent. I do not unfold it to the foolish, for fear that they will discriminate and grasp it as a self.

It is a sentence that teaches and withdraws the teaching at the same time. The moment you say that at the bottom of the mind there is something that holds everything and flows without end, the listener is tempted to think: there it is, the self I was looking for. The danger Buddhism ran into when it tried to describe the deepest place of the mind, after teaching non-self all along, sits in this one verse. The Mahayana school that dealt with this mind is Yogacara, also called Consciousness-Only (唯識).

A Name Meaning Attachment

The best-known name for this deep mind is the ālaya consciousness. Sanskrit ālaya means a place where things settle and accumulate: a store or a dwelling. But the word appears first in the early scriptures with another face, in the scene where the newly awakened Buddha hesitates over whether to teach.

Ālayarāmā kho panāyaṁ pajā ālayaratā ālayasammuditā.

These people like ālaya; they love it and enjoy it.

Here ālaya means clinging, attachment. Because people enjoy clinging, the principle of dependent origination is hard for them to see, and teaching would only be wearying, the Buddha reflects (MN 26, SN 6.1). Set the two scenes side by side and a strange symmetry appears. The Buddha of the early scriptures hesitates to speak because people delight in ālaya; the Buddha of the Saṁdhinirmocana holds back for fear people will grasp the ālaya consciousness as a self. The same word is clinging in one place and, in the other, the mind most likely to be clung to.

The early scriptures do speak of a continuing current of mind. The Dīgha Nikāya mentions a stream of consciousness (viññāṇasota) that is established in both this world and the next (DN 28). Yogacara was an attempt to give that current a structure.

Two Consciousnesses Beyond Six

Early Buddhism spoke of six consciousnesses: one knowing for each of the five senses of eye, ear, nose, tongue and body, and the mind consciousness (意識) that gathers and thinks about them. Yogacara added two layers beneath. Around the fourth to fifth century, the Indian brothers Asanga and Vasubandhu built this system, and Vasubandhu's Thirty Verses are its skeleton. They begin:

由假說我法 有種種相轉 彼依識所變 此能變唯三

Because we speak provisionally of self and of dharmas, various appearances roll forth; all of them rest on what consciousness transforms into. The transformers are only three.

The three are the consciousness that ripens into results, the consciousness that deliberates, and the consciousnesses that discern objects. The object-discerning ones are the first six; the deliberating one is the seventh, manas (末那識); the ripening one is the eighth, the ālaya consciousness. The verses go on to name the first transformer the ālaya consciousness and say it holds all seeds.

The Saṁdhinirmocana gives this consciousness three names with reasons. It is called ādāna because it follows the body and holds it together; ālaya because it is taken into and hidden in the body, sharing its safety and danger; and mind (心) because it gathers and accumulates forms, sounds, smells, tastes and touches and makes them grow. Holding, hiding, accumulating: the three names divide up what this consciousness does.

Seeds and Fragrance

What are the seeds (種子) the ālaya consciousness holds? The Cheng weishi lun, compiled by Xuanzang around the interpretation of Dharmapāla, defines them:

謂本識中親生自果 功能差別

The distinct capacities within the root consciousness that directly produce their own results.

A seed is not a thing but a capacity. Get angry once and a capacity for anger remains; be generous once and a capacity for generosity remains. Yogacara called the process by which these capacities are left in the ālaya consciousness perfuming (熏習). The Cheng weishi lun compares it to perfuming sesame (如熏苣蕂), an image usually explained as sesame stored with flowers so that the oil pressed from it carries their scent. Present mental activity soaks into the root consciousness and becomes the next seed.

Seen this way, karma is less a debt entered in a ledger than a scent that soaks into the body. When seeds meet conditions they blossom again as mental activity, and that activity leaves seeds again. With this cycle Yogacara explained how the results of action carry across time.

Flowing Like a Torrent

How is the ālaya consciousness different from a soul, then? The fourth of the Thirty Verses answers: it is ever turning, like a torrent, and is abandoned at the stage of the arhat (恒轉如瀑流 阿羅漢位捨). The Cheng weishi lun takes the phrase apart word by word.

恒言遮斷 轉表非常 猶如瀑流 因果法爾

Ever (恒) rules out interruption; turning (轉) shows impermanence. Like a torrent, cause and effect are naturally so.

The water pouring down a waterfall is never the same water for an instant, yet the flow does not break. Because a result arises every moment it is not cut off; because a cause ceases every moment it is not permanent. The ālaya consciousness is not something unchanging but a current that changes without breaking. This was the Mahayana answer to the question that non-self always raises: who receives karma, who is reborn? And even that current is abandoned at arhatship.

The Mind That Grasps It as Self

Now it is clear what the Saṁdhinirmocana feared. Yogacara built that fear into its system. The seventh consciousness, manas, does exactly that work. The Cheng weishi lun asks what manas takes as its object and answers:

應知此意但緣藏識見分非餘 彼無始來一類相續似常一故 恒與諸法為所依故 此唯執彼為自內我

This mind takes only the seeing aspect of the store consciousness as its object, nothing else, because that has continued in one kind since beginningless time, appearing permanent and single, and is always the basis on which all dharmas rely. This mind grasps only that as an inner self.

Something that flows without breaking looks, from a distance, like a single thing that stays the same. Manas grasps that appearance and takes it for me. This self-attachment, which does not switch off in sleep and does not rest even in dreamless sleep, colors every judgment before it is made. In Yogacara, non-self does not end with the declaration that there is no self. It shows how the machinery that produces a self runs inside the mind.

Is There Really Nothing Outside?

The name Consciousness-Only suggests the claim that there is no outside world, only my mind. It is often misread that way. Vasubandhu's Twenty Verses set out the claim at the start:

內識生時似外境現 如有眩瞖見髮蠅等 此中都無少分實義

When inner consciousness arises it appears as if it were an outer object, as a person with an eye disease sees hairs or flies. In this there is not the slightest real thing.

The objection comes at once. If there are no outer objects, why are things seen only at fixed places and times, and why do many people see the same thing? Vasubandhu brings in dreams and hungry ghosts. Even in dreams, villages and gardens are not seen just anywhere but in definite places. And hungry ghosts, receiving the same fruit from the same karma, together see the same river, which for them is a river full of pus. One river, seen as water by humans and as pus by ghosts. That the world is seen in common is not evidence that something is out there, he argues, but evidence that the seers share the same seeds.

This is not solipsism. What Yogacara denies is not the world but a world that exists in a fixed form of its own, independent of mind. The seventeenth of the Thirty Verses says: the consciousnesses transform into the discriminating and the discriminated; therefore those do not exist; therefore all is consciousness only. The seeing side and the seen side both branch off from consciousness.

Three Natures

Yogacara organized this relation as three natures. What the mind constructs by pervasive imagination is the imagined nature (遍計所執性); what arises depending on various conditions is the dependent nature (依他起性); and the dependent nature, always free of that construction, is the perfected nature (圓成實性). The traditional illustration is a rope in the dark. Seeing the rope as a snake is the imagined; the rope made of straw and twisting is the dependent; seeing what is made of conditions as it is, once the snake has vanished, is the perfected.

The Thirty Verses say the perfected and the dependent are neither different nor the same. Just as impermanence is not found apart from impermanent things, you cannot see the perfected without seeing the dependent. Here Yogacara meets emptiness. Where Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka said that nothing has a fixed self-nature, Yogacara asked from the side of the mind why things nevertheless look so solid to us. The two schools argued for a long time, and the view that they explained the same emptiness from different directions is just as old.

Wonch'ŭk in Chang'an

Yogacara flourished in seventh-century China. Xuanzang, back from India, retranslated its treatises, and his disciple Kuiji carried his interpretation into the Faxiang school. At the same time, at Ximing Monastery in Chang'an, lived Wonch'ŭk (圓測), known as a monk from Silla. His Commentary on the Saṁdhinirmocana Sutra explains the ādāna of the verse above like this:

梵云阿陀那 此翻名執持 謂由此識隨逐於身 執受色根令不失壞 故說此識名為執持

What Sanskrit calls ādāna is translated here as holding. This consciousness follows the body and holds the sense faculties so that they do not decay; therefore it is called holding.

The Song-dynasty Biographies of Eminent Monks tells a story about him. When Xuanzang was lecturing Kuiji on the newly translated treatise on consciousness-only, Wonch'ŭk bribed the gatekeeper, listened in secret, and before the lectures ended rang the bell at Ximing Monastery to gather the assembly and lecture on consciousness-only first. The story reads as a tradition colored by Kuiji's side, but Wonch'ŭk's surviving writings show his interpretation was independent enough to stand against Kuiji's. His commentary was translated into Tibetan as well.

Wonhyo Wakes in a Tomb

Around the same time, Wonhyo of Silla stopped on his way to Tang China with Uisang. The Song Biographies, in its life of Uisang, records the night. Sheltering from rain, they slept comfortably in an earthen hollow, and at daybreak found they were beside the bones of an old tomb. The next night, staying in the same spot, they were plagued by ghosts. Wonhyo sighed:

心生故種種法生 心滅故龕墳不二 又三界唯心 萬法唯識 心外無法 胡用別求 我不入唐

Because the mind arises, all kinds of dharmas arise; because the mind ceases, the hollow and the tomb are not two. The three realms are mind only; the myriad dharmas are consciousness only. There is no dharma outside the mind, so why seek elsewhere? I will not go to Tang.

The well-known version in which he drinks water from a skull is not in this record. That version appears in the Linjian lu of the Song monk Huihong. The first part of Wonhyo's words leans on a line from the Awakening of Faith: when the mind arises all kinds of dharmas arise, and when the mind ceases all kinds of dharmas cease. The Awakening of Faith reached the same place by a different road. It describes the arising-and-ceasing side of mind this way:

依如來藏故有生滅心 所謂不生不滅與生滅和合 非一非異 名為阿梨耶識

Because of the tathāgatagarbha there is a mind that arises and ceases. What neither arises nor ceases, merged with what arises and ceases, neither one nor different, is called the ālaya consciousness.

The Awakening of Faith transcribed ālaya as aliye (阿梨耶), Xuanzang as alaiye (阿賴耶). The difference is more than spelling. Yogacara's ālaya consciousness is a deluded consciousness, a current in which seeds and their manifestations produce each other; the Awakening of Faith's ālaya has the unarising tathāgatagarbha merged into it. Wonhyo read both roads, and Korean Buddhism has largely understood the mind along the road of the Awakening of Faith.

Where Consciousness Turns into Wisdom

Yogacara does not end as a pathology of mind. Its last chapter is transformation. The Cheng weishi lun says each of the eight consciousnesses turns into a wisdom. The ālaya consciousness becomes the great mirror wisdom (大圓鏡智) that reflects everything as it is; manas becomes the wisdom of equality (平等性智) that sees self and other as equal; mind consciousness becomes the wisdom of wondrous observation (妙觀察智); and the five sense consciousnesses become the wisdom that accomplishes what is to be done (成所作智).

智雖非識 而依識轉 識為主故 說轉識得

Wisdom is not consciousness, but it turns in dependence on consciousness; because consciousness is primary, we say it is attained by transforming consciousness.

That the manas which grasped at self becomes the wisdom of equality throws the whole of Yogacara into reverse light. The machinery of self-attachment is not destroyed; something else arises in the place where it ran. The storehouse that held every seed becomes a mirror that reflects everything.

What Do You Look At, Sitting?

The school's own name, Yogācāra, means those who practice yoga; Consciousness-Only describes its doctrine, Yogācāra its people. Its representative treatise is the Yogācārabhūmi, the stages of the yoga practitioner. From the start, Yogacara was not desk theory but an ordering of what people sitting and watching the mind had seen.

Seen with that eye, there are things to do in daily life. If a remark sets off anger reflexively, notice how quickly and how familiarly the reaction rose. That familiarity is a seed. And know that pouring fuel on that anger now will soak the same seed in once more. What you repeat makes the next you. Another is to look, just beneath the feeling of being hurt, at what the self that seems to have been hurt is. Manas does not rest, but the moment you see that what it holds is a current, its grip loosens a little.

Where the twelve links say consciousness and name-and-form condition each other, Yogacara dug down in eight layers. That depth gives it a reputation for difficulty, but the question is the same as at the beginning: when what exists, does suffering exist?

The Mind the Buddha Hesitated to Teach

The Buddha of the early scriptures hesitated because people enjoyed clinging; the Buddha of the Saṁdhinirmocana held back for fear people would cling to the deep layer of the mind. Both spoke in the end. Hesitation did not end in silence; it became careful teaching.

What remains for someone who learns of the ālaya consciousness is not to make it a self. The mind that holds every seed and flows like a torrent is not my deepest identity but the field that shows what I am planting each moment. What the Buddha worried about was fencing that field off as mine. As long as the field is seen as a field, the mind has already taken a step toward the mirror.