Essay Twenty: Yogācāra in Brief—Guide¶

Where this essay stands. This essay develops Essay Six, ‘Yogācāra,’ in Part I. The two preceding essays leave it quite specific work. Essay Seventeen hands over the problem of seeds: distinctive transformations of a continuum cannot carry karmic results, memory, and liberation; seeds need a deeper foundation. Chapter Three of Essay Nineteen hands over the convergence of the schools: the conventional level has already been refitted with a theory of consciousness, and a direct examination is due. The question here is therefore not what consciousness-only says, but whether its machinery, having taken on these jobs, can accept the status of a designation. If seeds, storehouse consciousness, and self-cognition all register and work within ordinary conventions, this is Buddhist philosophy’s most complete account of conventional mechanisms. If any one of them is elevated into a foundation with real own-nature, the adjudicating machinery of Essay Eighteen will sound the alarm. All eight chapters remain within this question.

Length and specification. The title still says ‘in brief.’ Its principle of selection is the same as that of Essays Sixteen, Seventeen, and Nineteen: select by the connections, including whatever answers an earlier essay’s question or supplies a later essay’s needs. The reasons were explained in the guides to Essay Nineteen and to Part II. Its size, however, now differs from those other brief treatments. The rule when this essay was established was to construct its outline to the specification of a detailed treatment and later expand it under the existing headings. That provision has now been used: all eight chapters have been expanded in place, from more than seven thousand to more than forty thousand Chinese characters, without changing their number or structure. ‘Brief’ thus needs a further explanation: the selection of material is limited, but the depth of treatment now follows the detailed specification. Further expansion will draw on the lists of deferred topics at the ends of the chapters.

The actual state of the sources. In contrast to Essay Nineteen, this essay has the fullest Chinese documentation. Xuanzang’s translation workshop rendered almost the school’s entire holdings into Chinese: the Sūtra Unraveling the Deep Intent, Treatise on the Stages of Yoga Practitioners, Compendium of the Mahāyāna, Twenty Verses, Thirty Verses, and Establishment of Consciousness-Only. Root texts and commentaries are available as a system; Paramārtha’s earlier translations provide a comparison. The problem is too much material, not too little. A brief treatment must therefore take responsibility for selection, guided by the connections: include what answers an earlier essay’s question or serves a later essay, and list the rest for future treatment.

The route through eight chapters. Chapter One, the formation of the school: lineage, a map of the literature, and its account of its own position through the classification of the teachings into three periods. Chapter Two, the three natures: the school’s central semantics. Chapter Three, storehouse consciousness: legislating the storehouse and formally taking over the problem of seeds. Chapter Four, the eight consciousnesses at work: structure and mental factors, compared with Essay Fourteen. Chapter Five, consciousness-only and the absence of external objects: the core arguments of the Twenty Verses, and the second treatment of atoms after Essay Fifteen. Chapter Six, transformation of the basis: the stages of the path and its fruit, where the practical promises are fulfilled. Chapter Seven, the dispute over emptiness and existence: Bhāviveka and Dharmapāla, a sentence-by-sentence comparison of the passages on the Yogācāra theorists in the Treatise on the Jewel in the Palm, and a direct hearing on the boundary drawn in Essay Nineteen. Chapter Eight, verdict and handoff.

A record of the expansion. The additions to each chapter’s framework are recorded here for reference. Chapter One adds the complete list of seventeen stages and the judgment that ‘an encyclopedia’s table of contents is itself a worldview’; the six-text map of the literature; the procedure of combining ten commentaries in the Establishment of Consciousness-Only and the resulting rule for quotation; and the three full passages classifying the teachings into three periods, with three readings. Chapter Two adds the complete table of the three absences of own-nature; the dilemma of the perfected nature’s being neither different nor nondifferent from the dependent; the connection between the three natures and the two truths; and the emptiness verse from the Discrimination between the Middle and the Extremes. Chapter Three adds the three aspects and three names of storehouse consciousness; a clause-by-clause reading of the six qualities of seeds and eight qualities of perfuming; the three positions in the dispute over innate and newly perfumed seeds; and a comparison between the argument form ‘apart from this, it cannot be found’ and Chapter Four of Essay Fifteen. Chapter Four adds coexistent bases; the criteria for the six groups of mental factors and the four universalities; a cell-by-cell comparison with the fifty-two mental factors of the southern tradition; and the argument stopping the regress in the four-aspect theory. Chapter Five adds the objections throughout the Twenty Verses: four objections and four replies; the single hell analogy and the dilemma over karmic power; teaching with a hidden intent and the text’s own clauses against reification; the three forms of external objects and three refutations of atoms; the refutation of the real unity of blue and other colors; and a table of seven epistemological objections. It also adds three points of comparison with Chapter Six of Essay Fifteen. Chapter Six adds the entry requirement of two kinds of spiritual lineage; the table of five stages and the self-restraint imposed at the stage of preparation; a word-by-word analysis of transformation of the basis—the basis is the dependently arisen, and transformation is abandonment and acquisition upon this same basis; the clause against reification ‘provisionally called newly pure’; a comparison of the two obstacles and the two fruits of transformation of the basis; and the defining passages on the four wisdoms and the way their correspondences are inferred. Chapter Seven adds a sentence-by-sentence comparison of the two passages on the ‘Yogācāra theorists’ in the two fascicles of the Treatise on the Jewel in the Palm; the four lines of reply in the second fascicle’s dispute over suchness and the objection concerning the non-Buddhists’ self; and a grading of the evidence for the quality of its transcription. Chapter Eight’s verdict has been filled in consistently with the completed seven chapters: twelve clauses against own-nature, tabulated and divided into three types; three open cases in a table; a resolution of the dispute over emptiness and existence; six contributions; and the overall verdict, ‘The text is safe; its readings need not be.’ Each chapter also ends with a list of topics from which future expansion will draw.