Chapter 3: The Storehouse Consciousness¶

The grounds for the legislation come first. The task list handed over by Part 17 is quite specific: the fruit of action has to reach across time; memory has to have somewhere to lodge; at the end of a life there has to be a bearer for the linking of the next birth; in the attainment of cessation there has to be a mind that does not leave the body; and the seeds, defiled and pure alike, have to have something to follow along with. The Kośa carries this load with the transformation and differentiation of the continuum, and the load holds so far as logic goes but does not hold under pressing: in whom does the transformation and differentiation take place? The Mahāyānasaṃgraha answers on its opening page, entering the matter as the first of its ten superiorities: "namely the storehouse consciousness, which is called the substance of the basis of the knowable"; and mind has its name "because it is the accumulation of the seeds perfumed by all manner of dharmas."¹ On these grounds the storehouse is legislated: the place where all seeds are received in perfuming, the place where they are held, and the place out of which they come forth into activity.

On the same page of the legislation stands a rare thing: a warning label. The verse of the Saṃdhinirmocana-sūtra reads, "The appropriating consciousness is deep and subtle, and all its seeds are like a torrent. I have not expounded it to the foolish and ignorant, lest they discriminate and seize it as a self."² The legislator announces in advance what this consciousness is most liable to be read as: a self, a permanent basis. It is not expounded to the foolish because the legislator knows which clause of this law is the one most easily broken. Put in the words of Part 18: the text foresaw for itself the risk of an E3 reading, and wrote that risk into the procedure of promulgation.

The doctrine of seeds is the storehouse's charter of business, and all six of its articles are on record. "First, momentary cessation: as soon as the substance has arisen it must cease without interval," with the express gloss, "this excludes permanent dharmas, which being permanent undergo no transformation." Second, co-presence with the fruit. Third, constant continuance. Fourth, determinacy of nature. "Fifth, awaiting the assemblage of conditions." "Sixth, drawing forth its own fruit," glossed "this excludes the non-Buddhist doctrine that a single cause alone produces every fruit."³ The observation that matters most in this part is to be made upon this charter. Of the six articles, momentary cessation excludes permanence, and answers exactly to the second condition of intrinsic nature; awaiting the assemblage of conditions excludes awaiting nothing, and answers exactly to the first; and drawing forth its own fruit excludes the single sole cause. The legislator shut the three conditions of D2 out of doors with his own hands, and a seed is by definition incapable of being a thing possessed of intrinsic nature. This is not a defence the present book mounts on the school's behalf; it is a set of clauses against intrinsic nature that the school wrote into its own definition.

The look of the storehouse as a whole is given in one line of the Triṃśikā: "constantly turning like a torrent; at the stage of the arhat it is relinquished."⁴ Constantly, and therefore not annihilated; turning, and therefore not permanent; a torrent, and therefore a stream of successive events and not one thing; relinquished at the stage of the arhat, and therefore this central registry is not even a standing institution. The difference from a soul is clear from this. To be perfumed, to be capable of turning, to admit of being given up: every one of these is something a bearer of intrinsic nature is by definition unable to do. What the ālaya stands upon is precisely its failure to meet the conditions of D2.

One stroke to close. Storehouse or basis, Chapter 8 gives the overall verdict; but the direction in which the evidence points may be recorded now. Every article of the legislation is written toward the side of conventional positing, and what the warning label guards against is precisely a reading toward the other side. Whoever in later ages read the ālaya as a true self or a permanent mind was breaking, before he broke any clause of the present book, the plain text of the legislator himself.

References¶