Guide to This Part¶

Where this part stands. It opens out from Part I, Part 6, on Yogācāra. What the two preceding parts hand over is quite specific. From Part 17 comes the seed line: the transformation and differentiation of the continuum cannot carry the fruit of action, memory and liberation, and a deeper foundation must be found for the seed. From Chapter 3 of Part 19 comes the line of convergence: the conventional level has been refitted with a theory of consciousness, and a frontal inspection is owed. The question of this part is therefore not what consciousness-only says, but whether, having taken on this work, the machinery can rest content in the status of a conventional posit. If seeds, the storehouse consciousness and self-cognition (svasaṃvedana) are all registered and transacting their business within names and conventions, then this is the most complete science of conventional machinery in all of Buddhist philosophy; if any one of them is raised into a really existent basis possessed of intrinsic nature, the machine of Part 18 goes off. All eight chapters lie within the range of that one question.

Scale and format. A treatment in brief, on the same format as Parts 16, 17 and 19; the grounds have already been given in the guide to Part 19 and in the guide to Part II. One further rule is laid down for this part alone: the skeleton is drawn up at full-treatment scale. Yogācāra would deserve a volume to itself. As written here each item walks only the trunk, and if the part is later expanded into a full treatment the same items are thickened without any change to the architecture.

The state of the materials. The reverse of Part 19: this is the part best served of all by the Chinese literature. Xuanzang's translation bureau carried nearly the whole patrimony of the school over into Chinese (the Saṃdhinirmocana-sūtra, the Yogācārabhūmi, the Mahāyānasaṃgraha, the Viṃśatikā, the Triṃśikā, the Cheng weishi lun), so that root texts and commentaries stand present as a system; and beside them Paramārtha's older line of translations serves for comparison. The materials are too many rather than too few. In a treatment in brief the responsibility for cutting falls upon the choice of items, and the warrant for that choice is the interfaces: whatever answers a question put by an earlier part, or supplies something a later part will use, goes in, and the rest is entered on the outline and left there.

How the eight chapters run. Chapter 1, the formation of the school: lineage, the map of the texts, and the school's self-placement in the doctrinal classification of the three turnings. Chapter 2, the three natures: the central semantics of this school. Chapter 3, the storehouse consciousness: the legislating of a storehouse, and the formal taking over of the seed line. Chapter 4, the eight consciousnesses at work: structure and mental factors, tabled against Part 14. Chapter 5, consciousness-only, no external object: the core argument of the Viṃśatikā, and the second engagement on the battlefield of the atom opened in Part 15. Chapter 6, the transformation of the basis: the stages of the path and its fruit, the practical side cashed out. Chapter 7, the dispute between emptiness and existence: Bhāviveka and Dharmapāla, with the passage of the Karatalaratna on the Masters of Correspondence read line by line, and the boundary drawn in Part 19 brought to open trial. Chapter 8, verdict and handoff.