Chapter Three: Storehouse Consciousness—Legislating the Storehouse¶

The reasons for legislation first. Essay Seventeen hands over a specific list of five jobs: karmic results must cross time; memory must have somewhere to reside; at death there must be a bearer for rebirth-linking; in the attainment of cessation there must be a mind that does not leave the body; and defiled and pure seeds must have somewhere to persist. The Treasury assigns these jobs to distinctive transformations of a continuum. This holds up logically, but cannot withstand the further question: in what do these distinctive transformations take place? The Compendium of the Mahāyāna answers at its opening, placing the answer first among its ten excellences: ‘Namely, storehouse consciousness, called the basis of the knowable.’ It is named mind ‘because seeds perfumed by various dharmas accumulate in it.’¹ The storehouse is thus legislated into being: the place where all seeds are perfumed, held, and made manifest.

Three names, three functions. Fascicle one of the Sūtra Unraveling the Deep Intent gives this consciousness three names, each recording a function: ‘This consciousness is also called appropriating consciousness, ādāna. Why? Because it follows and maintains the body. It is also called storehouse consciousness, ālaya. Why? Because it takes up the body, stores and conceals within it, and shares its safety and peril. It is also called mind, citta. Why? Because through this consciousness, colors, sounds, smells, tastes, tangibles, and so forth accumulate and grow.’² Ādāna records maintenance, keeping the body and seeds from dispersing. Ālaya records storing, concealment, and shared safety and peril, binding the consciousness to a sentient being’s individual existence. Mind records accumulation and growth, the buildup through perfuming. One consciousness holds three jobs; its names are job descriptions.

The commentary supplies another scheme of three aspects, with emphases different from those of the three names. A table makes them clearest.

The commentary’s words are: ‘Because this consciousness has the meanings of storing, being stored, and being grasped as a store: it and defilement condition each other, and sentient beings grasp it as their inner self. This displays the own aspect of the first transforming consciousness’; ‘Because this is the maturation-result of wholesome and unwholesome karma that projects existence in the various realms, destinies, and modes of birth, it is called maturation … This displays the result aspect of the first transforming consciousness’; and ‘Because it can maintain the seeds of all dharmas so that they are not lost, it is called all-seeds … This displays the cause aspect of the first transforming consciousness.’³ Within the three aspects, being grasped as a store requires a separate note. What is grasped is this consciousness; what grasps it is manas, which Chapter Four takes up. The storehouse does not take itself to be a self; the consciousness next door identifies it as a self.

On the same page as the legislation is something rare: a warning label. A verse in the Sūtra Unraveling the Deep Intent: ‘Appropriating consciousness is profoundly subtle; / with all its seeds, it is like a rushing stream. / I do not expound it to the ordinary and foolish, / lest they discriminate it and grasp it as a self.’⁴ The legislator anticipates what this consciousness will most readily be read as: a self, a permanent foundation. The label’s testimony must be read on three separate sides. First, awareness: in Essay Eighteen’s language, the text itself foresees the risk of elevation to E3 and writes the risk into the promulgation procedure. Across a comprehensive examination of the schools, this is a rare stroke. Second, disavowal: the same sentence can be read as a disclaimer posted in advance. Posting a label is cheap; what the label says does not change the machine’s shape. The third side lies in the boundary-drawing grammar of the two Chinese characters 凡愚, ‘ordinary and foolish.’ Whoever reads this consciousness as a self falls, by the verse’s own classification, into that category. An objection thus has a destination assigned in advance. The label already contains a use that preclassifies critics as ordinary and foolish. Whether later readers use it this way is another matter; the grammar is there first. Beyond these three sides is one immovable piece of testimony: the seven Chinese characters 恐彼分别执为我, ‘lest they discriminate it and grasp it as a self,’ amount to an admission that this consciousness’s own appearance invites such a reading. Warning and adverse self-description occur in the same sentence. This book’s record accordingly divides the work. The label proves that the legislator knows what the machine looks like. Whether it stops a reading belongs to reception history; whether it changes the machine belongs to the functional level, taken up at this chapter’s end and in Chapter Eight. The same sūtra later adds a further move: only when bodhisattvas inwardly and individually ‘do not see ālaya, do not see storehouse consciousness, as things are’ are they called skilled in the ultimate.² This consciousness itself is also among what is not seen. Two lines of defense are drawn: one against ordinary and foolish people’s grasping at a self, the other against bodhisattvas’ grasping at dharmas.

The six qualities of seeds: reading the operating rules clause by clause. The six qualities are the school’s definition of seeds and one of this essay’s most important pieces of evidence. Each is transcribed and explained below.

The source’s word ‘exclude’ must be read clause by clause. To exclude is to bar or rule out, the ‘exclusion’ of negative expression in Buddhist logic. An exclusion clause only specifies which reading a definition bars; it adds no affirmative account of what the thing is. Momentary cessation excludes permanent dharmas, with an exceptionally clear reason: ‘This excludes permanent dharmas, because what is permanent does not change and cannot be said to have a productive function.’ Awaiting multiple conditions excludes a natural cause: ‘This excludes the non-Buddhist claim that a natural cause, without awaiting multiple conditions, constantly produces its fruit all at once.’ Inducing its own fruit excludes one cause producing all results.⁵ Together these three meet the three conditions of D2 in Essay Eighteen head-on: invariance, independence from anything else, and independent accomplishment. The legislator personally bars all three conditions of own-nature: by definition, seeds cannot be bearers of own-nature. It is a fact that the clauses are written into the definition; the level at which they take effect must be recorded separately. Two level names are established here as this book’s measuring instruments. The level of claims concerns how the text names its components, makes promises about them, and prohibits readings of them. The functional level concerns the jobs the components actually perform in the machine. Every exclusion in the six qualities works at the level of claims: it stipulates that seeds must not be called permanent dharmas, natural causes, or sole causes. The functional level asks what seeds are hired to do. The five jobs at this chapter’s opening—carrying karmic results across time, housing memory, bearing rebirth-linking, maintaining mind in the attainment of cessation, and allowing defilement and purity to persist—are precisely the old posts left vacant when the doctrine of no-self dismissed the pudgala. Both the dispute with the Vātsīputrīyas in Chapter Five of Essay Five in Part I and the formal entities in Chapter Four of Essay Fifteen concern contesting or filling these posts. The theory of seeds takes over all the business of the old posts; the six qualities are a supplementary code issued to the new employee. Every rule can be checked, but whether the code changes the shape of the job is another matter. Reading momentary cessation together with constant continuation makes this clearest: at the level of claims, cessation occurs every moment; at the functional level, a continuum of one kind persists up to the final stage. The name of impermanence and the job of running all the way through coexist on the same page. Adding this name changes none of the machine’s behavior. The scope of the clauses’ defense must therefore be recorded narrowly and accurately. They can defeat the charge that ‘the school acknowledges own-nature’: compliance at the level of claims is there in the source. They cannot defeat the further question, ‘Does this machine still operate in the shape of the job assigned to own-nature?’ That question belongs to the functional level. This chapter registers the case; Chapter Eight will hear it. A mirror here also faces Chapter Five. If the argument against external objects elevates ‘external objects are unnecessary in the explanation’ into ‘external objects do not actually exist,’ it treats dispensability as proof. Chapter Five judges this a slippage; Vasubandhu’s own text safeguards itself by excluding without affirmatively establishing. If the six qualities elevate ‘the definition does not call it own-nature’ into ‘the machine performs no job of own-nature,’ they treat clauses as proof—the same slippage in the opposite direction. The rule of criticism is the same: dispensability cannot prove existence or nonexistence; clauses cannot prove what jobs are performed.

The remaining three qualities each have their duties. Coexistence with the fruit requires seeds and manifestations to be simultaneous; cause and effect may not be displaced. Constant continuation requires a continuum of one kind to persist to the final stage, distinguishing seeds from active consciousnesses. Determination of nature requires wholesome seeds to produce wholesome fruits, closing the route taken by other schools in which ‘a cause of one nature produces a result of another nature.’ The commentary ends with a restriction: ‘Only the differentiated efficacies within the fundamental consciousness possess these six qualities and constitute seeds; nothing else does. External grains, wheat, and so forth are transformations of consciousness, provisionally given the name seed; they are not real seeds.’⁵ Ordinary wheat seeds merely borrow the name; true seeds exist only within the fundamental consciousness. This restriction deserves attention: it turns ‘seed’ from a metaphor into a technical term, explicitly dismissing the source of the metaphor.

Perfuming: four qualities each for the perfumed and the perfumer. If there are seeds, there must be a procedure for depositing them. The commentary establishes eight further clauses for this. The four qualities of the perfumed are: ‘First, stability’—a continuum of one kind from beginning to end, capable of holding habitual impressions; this excludes active consciousnesses, sound, and wind. ‘Second, ethical indeterminacy’—evenness without opposition; this excludes the forceful wholesome and defiled. ‘Third, susceptibility to perfuming’—autonomous and not impermeable by nature; this excludes mental factors and unconditioned dharmas. ‘Fourth, conjunction with the perfumer’—at the same time and place, neither identical nor separate; this excludes another’s body and earlier or later moments. The four qualities of the perfumer fit these: ‘First, arising and ceasing’—excluding the unconditioned; ‘second, superior function’—excluding the weakness of maturation consciousness and its mental factors; ‘third, increase and decrease’—excluding the perfected wholesome dharmas of buddhahood; and ‘fourth, operating in conjunction with the perfumed.’⁶

Taken together, the two sets of four eligibility rules narrow the candidates down to a single selection: only maturation consciousness can be perfumed; only the seven active consciousnesses and their mental factors can perfume. One self-limitation here deserves separate weighing. The second requirement for the perfumed is ethical indeterminacy, and the commentary immediately draws a consequence: ‘Hence the Tathāgata’s pure eighth consciousness carries only old seeds; it does not newly receive perfuming.’ The third requirement for the perfumer is increase and decrease, and the commentary likewise immediately concludes that the perfected wholesome dharmas of buddhahood ‘neither increase nor decrease, and so cannot perfume. If they could perfume, they would not be perfected; earlier and later buddhahood would then differ in superiority and inferiority.’⁶ Once the definitions are fixed, buddhahood is excluded from this machine’s intake. The system shows its seriousness in allowing its own highest stage to be constrained by its definitions.

The commentary sums up the operation of perfuming with two analogies: ‘The three dharmas are in turn causes and effects simultaneously, as a wick produces a flame and the flame produces a charred wick, and as bundles of reeds support one another. Cause and effect are simultaneous; this principle is unshaken.’⁶ A wick produces a flame, which chars the wick; bundles of reeds stand by leaning on each other. Both analogies require simultaneous mutual conditioning, rather than successive production. This has the same tendency as the co-arising condition among Essay Fourteen’s twenty-four conditions and can be compared with the coexistent cause among Essay Fifteen’s six causes and four conditions. The three traditions give highly consistent answers on simultaneous mutual conditioning; they differ only in the level at which they place it.

Innate and newly perfumed: a dispute within the school. On where seeds come from, the commentary lists three positions. This is one of the few places in this essay where several views are presented together, and it deserves to be read in full.

The first holds that all seeds are innate: ‘All seeds exist by original nature; they are not born from perfuming. The force of perfuming can only make them grow.’ It cites three pieces of evidence. First, the sūtras say that sentient beings have had ‘various elements since beginningless time, like a cluster of akṣa fruits, existing by the nature of things.’ Second, distinctions among the five spiritual lineages require seeds that exist by the nature of things as their basis. Third, the Treatise on the Stages of Yoga Practitioners says that possession of the three uncontaminated faculties in hell ‘is as seeds, not as manifestations.’⁷ The second position holds that all seeds are produced by perfuming: ‘Seeds are all born through perfuming.’ Its reason is straightforward. Since seeds are another name for habitual impressions, and habitual impressions must arise through perfuming, they are ‘like the fragrance of sesame, born from its being perfumed by flowers.’ Differences of spiritual lineage are instead established through the presence or absence of obstacles, independently of whether uncontaminated seeds exist.⁷ The third combines the two: ‘Seeds each have two kinds. First, the innate … These are called seeds abiding in original nature. Second, the newly arisen … These are called seeds accomplished through habituation.’⁷

The third is the text’s settled position, and its reason is also written into the source. If seeds were solely innate, the active consciousnesses could not serve as causal conditions for storehouse consciousness. The mutual causation of the scriptural statement ‘Dharmas stand thus toward the storehouse consciousness, and consciousness likewise toward dharmas’ would then fail.⁷ This reason is worth recording: it starts from the mechanism’s consistency, not from scriptural testimony. All three positions share the same set of scriptural evidence; they differ over where to place the procedure of perfuming. The author adopts the combined account to preserve causation in both directions between active consciousnesses and the storehouse.

The dispute directly affects this essay’s question. The all-innate reading is the most dangerous: seeds that exist by the nature of things and are not born of perfuming stand only half a step from ‘standing without dependence on anything else.’ The author’s combined account blocks that half-step. Although seeds abiding in original nature exist by the nature of things, they must still be ‘newly activated by defiled and pure perfuming’ and remain under the jurisdiction of the six qualities. The choice of position bears directly on accepting the status of a designation; the author chooses the one least likely to cross the boundary.

The form of the argument for existence: a point of comparison in this chapter. The commentary argues for the storehouse’s existence in a highly uniform syntax, which we can call the ‘apart from this, it cannot be found’ form. In the section on its result aspect: ‘Apart from this, no superior maturation-result in constant continuity can be found among the life faculty, group homogeneity, and the like.’ In the section on its cause aspect: ‘Apart from this, no other dharma can be found that can comprehensively maintain the seeds of all dharmas.’³ In the section on the four nutriments in fascicle four: ‘Those who maintain that there is no eighth consciousness—on what nutriment do they rely?’⁸ All three use one mold: identify a function that must have a bearer, show that no one on the existing list can perform it, and establish someone who can.

This form deserves a direct comparison with Chapter Four of Essay Fifteen. The Sarvāstivādins created acquisition, nonmanifest matter, the life faculty, and group homogeneity to handle ‘continuation,’ using precisely the same move: something needs a bearer; existing dharmas cannot do the job; therefore a separate dharma is established. Essay Fifteen weighed this move and judged it the introduction and return of formal entities. Consciousness-only here uses the same argument form but produces a consciousness. The form is the same; the quality need not be. The difference lies in the clauses that come with what is created. Acquisition and nonmanifest matter are established as really existent dharmas, whereas the same treatise fixes the storehouse as momentarily ceasing, awaiting multiple conditions, susceptible to perfuming, and abandoned at the arhat stage. The same technique creates something that fails the conditions of own-nature: this is precisely the verdict Chapter Eight will deliver. This passage also settles an outstanding case from Essay Fifteen. The set of difficulties in its Chapter Four receives a solution here that clears the inventory of entities while retaining every function.

The storehouse as a whole. One line from the Thirty Verses: ‘Constantly transforming like a rushing stream, it is abandoned at the arhat stage.’⁹ Constant, hence not annihilated; transforming, hence not permanent; a rushing stream, hence a continuum of events, not a thing; abandoned at the arhat stage, hence even this general office is not a permanent institution. The difference from a spiritual self is clear: it receives perfuming, can transform, and is abandoned—all things that a bearer of own-nature is, by definition, unable to do. But this distinction must be marked by level. That the storehouse establishes itself through failing the conditions of D2 is the actual situation at the level of claims. At the functional level, it occupies precisely the position for which the vocabulary of D2 was originally devised: the bearer that spans past, present, and future, holds seeds, and shares the safety and peril of an individual existence through one lifetime. The clauses also require grading. Receiving perfuming really changes its state and delivers a functional result. Abandonment at a stage, under the commentary’s detailed rules, abandons the name, not the underlying consciousness; Chapter Four quotes the passage. Its delivery is halved. Momentary cessation, in relation to a continuum of one kind, operates only in the naming. This chapter registers the tension between claims and jobs; Chapter Eight delivers the overall verdict.

A closing entry. Storehouse or foundation: Chapter Eight will deliver the overall verdict. Record the direction of the evidence first. All the legislative clauses are written toward designation; the warning label guards against reading in the other direction. The file at the level of claims is complete. The functional level forms a separate volume: the job description of the theory of seeds matches the shape of the pudgala’s old posts, and the clauses divide into those that deliver functions and those that operate only in naming. The two volumes are submitted separately. Later readers who take the storehouse as a true self or permanent mind violate the legislator’s own text before they violate this book’s clauses. The legislator’s text controls names; whether it controls the jobs is Chapter Eight’s central issue. One further case is registered at the same time. The ‘apart from this, it cannot be found’ argument form itself can establish only the necessity of a functional position, not the real existence of its bearer. The commentary uses it to establish the storehouse more cautiously than the Sarvāstivādins use it for acquisition and nonmanifest matter, but the form’s limit is the same. This case goes to Chapter Eight alongside the perfected in Chapter Two and ‘can establish itself’ in Chapter Four.

References¶