Chapter 1: The Formation of the School¶

This school has two names, and they divide the work between them. Yogācāra takes its name from contemplative practice: its encyclopedia is the Yogācārabhūmi, and what that work expounds are the seventeen grounds through which a yogācāra practitioner advances; before there were masters of treatises here there were contemplatives on the cushion. Consciousness-only takes its name from doctrine: that the three realms are consciousness-only is the banner the school ran up whenever it argued its case in public. One name records where it came from, the other what it maintains; it came from the meditation hall, and what it maintains went into the lecture hall. The order is worth fixing at the outset. The science of machinery this part has to audit rests at bottom upon the systematizing of contemplative experience, and is not an assemblage of speculation put together in a study.

The lineage runs three generations. Maitreya: on the old question of the attribution of the Five Treatises one sentence goes into the file and no more. Tradition speaks of an ascent to Tuṣita to receive instruction, modern scholars mostly read the account historically, and this part renders no verdict but uses the texts as they stand. Asaṅga laid down the framework and Vasubandhu brought it together. Vasubandhu came into the Mahāyāna out of the Kośa: the last chapter of Part 17 said that the Kośa is the closing scene of sectarian philosophy and the threshold of Mahāyāna philosophy; on the far side of that threshold stands this part.

The map of the literature has six items, and every base text used here is in Chinese. The Saṃdhinirmocana-sūtra, the manifesto; the Yogācārabhūmi, the encyclopedia; the Mahāyānasaṃgraha, the outline; the Viṃśatikā, the argument for outside consumption; the Triṃśikā, the programme of the system; the Cheng weishi lun, the summation in commentarial form, ten masters' expositions blended into one. Xuanzang's translation bureau brought the whole set across complete, and this part takes the new translations as its base text and keeps Paramārtha's older versions alongside for comparison. The line of the Shelun masters, which grew out of the divergence between the old translations and the new, has its signpost set up in Chapter 8.

The school's placing of itself with respect to Madhyamaka is written into the doctrinal classification of the three turnings in the Saṃdhinirmocana-sūtra. In the first period, for those of the hearers' vehicle, the Buddha "turned the wheel of the true dharma under the aspect of the four noble truths." In the second he taught emptiness, for those setting out toward the Mahāyāna. In the third, "universally, for all who set out in any of the vehicles," he "turned the wheel of the true dharma under an explicit aspect." Of the first two periods the sūtra says in its own assessment that they "are not of definitive meaning, and are the place where all disputes take their stand"; of the third, that it "is truly of definitive meaning."¹ One sentence of reading: the school takes itself to be not overturning the teaching of emptiness but supplying that teaching with a way of speaking, since the doctrine that all dharmas are without intrinsic nature must be parcelled out among the three natures before the intent comes into the open. Whether this self-understanding holds is the very question at issue in the dispute between emptiness and existence, and Chapter 7 opens the trial.

A statement of approach closes the chapter. This part is organized by the skeleton of the doctrine and not by the chronology of the literature, and each chapter marks the root texts it relies on. One question is held to throughout: whether this machinery can rest content in the status of a conventional posit. The measuring instruments are the theorem and the clauses of Part 18, marked as they are used, chapter by chapter.

References¶