The Yogācāra school of Buddhism is well known for maintaining that the sentient beings are divided by nature according to five different spiritual dispositions (
gotra
). These five spiritual ...dispositions are established as a pentad and explained in one of Xuanzang’s Chinese translations, but the Indian origin of the pertinent textual passage is debated. In the introductory part of this paper, it is argued that Xuanzang’s explanations of the five spiritual dispositions in themselves are, to a great extent, in line with the orthodox Indian Yogācāra doctrine, although such pentad is hardly mentioned. The second and main part of this paper discusses a textual passage of Sthiramati’s
Madhyāntavibhāgaṭīkā
in which he juxtaposes—without bias—the orthodox position and the diametrically opposed idea of the potential of all sentient beings to attain the state of a
buddha
. By examining other parts of his work, it is shown that the author clearly favors and approves of the orthodox position.
The Pātañjalayogaśāstra concludes with a description of the pinnacle of yoga practice: a state of samādhi called dharmamegha, cloud of dharma. Yet despite the structural importance of dharmamegha in ...the soteriology of Pātan̄jala yoga, the śāstra itself does not say much about this term. Where we do find dharmamegha discussed, however, is in Buddhist yogācāra, and more broadly in early Mahāyāna soteriology, where it represents the apex of attainment and the superlative statehood of a bodhisattva. Given the relative paucity of Brahmanical mentions of dharmamegha in the early common era, Patan̄jali appears to adopt this key metaphor from a Mahāyāna context—and to revise its primary meaning from fullness to emptiness. This article traces the early elaborations of dharmamegha in Buddhist texts, and, drawing on conceptual metaphor theory, lays out four arguments that each, in part, accounts for the stark contrast in how classical yoga and yogācāra employ the superlative metaphor of dharmamegha.
This paper examines Wu Bin’s (c. 1543–c. 1626) Ten Views of a Lingbi Rock (1610) from the perspective of Buddhist epistemological notions in seventeenth-century China. In studying a series of gazes ...focusing on a single object—a stone with a very complex surface—my discussion posits an act of excessive seeing as a process of making worlds. I take a theoretical cue from contemporaneous intellectual discourses, especially those that flourished with the revival of Yogācāra Buddhism in late Ming China. This paper will show how an art object comes into being in perceivable worlds interconnected by the individual’s sensory experiences. My study aims to inquire into the role of illusion as sensory experiences, phenomenological processes, and even notions of soteriological efficacy beyond formal artistic devices. To that end, this paper is the first attempt to situate Ten Views of a Lingbi Rock alongside Buddhist thoughts and artmaking.
The eleventh-century Indian Buddhist master Ratnākaraśānti presents a unique Yogācāra interpretation of tantric
maṇḍala
visualisation in the
*Guhyasamājamaṇḍalavidhiṭīkā
. In this text, he employs ...the neither-one-nor-many argument to assert that the qualities of the mind represented by the deities in the
maṇḍala
are neither the same nor different from the mind itself. He also provides five scenarios of meditation to explain the necessity of practising both the perfection method (
pāramitānaya
) and the mantra method (
mantranaya
) together in Mahāyāna. Ratnākaraśānti’s explanation exerts a significant influence on the works of later Buddhist masters in India and Tibet, with parts of it being reused in the
*Śrīherukopadeśanāmasvādhiṣṭhānakrama
by Śūnyasamādhivajra (c. the eleventh century), the eighteenth chapter of the
Āmnāyamañjarī
by Abhayākaragupta (from the late eleventh to the twelfth century) and the tantric compendium
sNgags rim chen mo
by the Tibetan master Tsong kha pa Blo bzang grags pa (1357–1419). This paper explores how Ratnākaraśānti’s explanation has been reused and modified in these subsequent works. While Śūnyasamādhivajra faithfully reproduced Ratnākaraśānti’s Yogācāra explanation, Abhayākaragupta modified it to align with his Madhyamaka view. Abhayākaragupta in turn influenced Tsong kha pa, who accepted Abhayākaragupta’s Madhyamaka modification in his works. This paper also engages with current scholarly discussions on textual reuse and the underlying reasons behind it. While Śūnyasamādhivajra and Abhayākaragupta assimilated Ratnākaraśānti’s explanation without acknowledgement, Tsong kha pa quoted the text by name and acknowledged Abhayākaragupta’s reuse of Ratnākaraśānti’s explanation. This paper concludes by discussing the factors that determine whether the reused text is acknowledged or not, and the possible reasons behind textual reuse.
This paper considers Jñānaśrīmitra’s defense of manifestation (
prakāśa
) as the criterion of ultimate existence (
paramārthasat
). In the first section, "
Asatkhyāti
and
Adhyavasāya
: making sense ...of manifestation as the criterion of the real
", I show the way that, in response to Ratnākaraśānti’s Nirākāravāda, Jñānaśrīmitra argues for a sharp distinction between manifestation and determination (
adhyavasāya
) in an effort to establish that the manifestation of something unreal (
alīka
,
asat
) is incoherent. The unreal, he thinks, is only ever determined; it is never manifest to consciousness, properly speaking. In the second section, “
To be manifest is to be locked away in a single awareness-event
”, I turn to one of the consequences of this view that Jñānaśrīmitra embraces: what manifests is only what appears in a single moment of conscious awareness. In the third section, “
The scope of neither-one-nor-many: Jñānaśrīmitra’s Interpretation of PV 3.220–221
”, I consider one of the problems this raises: how is it that an appearance with mutually opposed parts (a so-called
citrākāra
, for instance a variegated butterfly’s wing that is both blue and yellow) manifests in one and the same unitary moment of awareness? Jñānaśrīmitra solves this problem by appealing to the nature of manifestation and its distinction from determination: what is manifest, even if it is variegated, is nondual and indivisible; distinctions arise only on the basis of determination. I trace the details of this solution in the context of his discussion of an important pair of verses from Dharmakīrti. Finally, in the last section, “
The marvelous nonduality of variegated awareness-events
”, I turn to the surprising buddhological consequences of this solution.
This paper examines the topic of Yogācāra idealism through a little studied Buddhist meditation manual, the so-called ‘Yogalehrbuch’ or ‘Qizil Yoga Manual’, a primarily Buddhist Sarvāstivāda ...Abhidharma text with Mahāyāna Yogācāra strands. What does this unique Central Asian text say about Buddhist meditation practices called
yogācāra
or
yoga
? It centres on methods of vivid visualization that are somewhat specific to the Central Asian region of Kucha on the Silk Road. To understand the Manual’s practice and definition of yogic meditation, this paper considers how some of the hyper-real visualizations in the
dhātuprayoga
section relate the mind to reality and whether Yogācāra meditation can be said to propose idealism as a metaphysical theory about the nature of reality. The paper also asks whether neurocognitive research insights can be useful in understanding what some regard as a ‘hallucination-like’ quality of some visualizations, which destabilise distinctions between appearances and reality. Furthermore, it argues that analyzing the materiality of meditation, particularly the environment of the cave, helps us to better understand the text’s techniques of yogic visualization. The paper concludes that the ‘Qizil Yoga Manual’ facilitates soteriological idealism and suggests that factoring in the material contexts of meditation is useful, both in deciphering the text’s meditation methods and in discussing the metaphysical theory of idealism.
In this essay, I investigate how Chinese Yogācāra scholars of the Tang 唐 dynasty explicated and supplemented the theory of apoha (exclusion) propounded by the Indian Buddhist epistemologist Dignāga ...陳那, according to which a nominal word functions by excluding everything other than its own referent. I first present a brief exposition of the theory. Then, I show that although they had very limited access to Dignāga’s theory, Kuiji 窺基 and Shentai 神泰 provide constructive and significant explanations that supplement the theory. I also show that the term
zhequan
遮詮 (excluding expression) has been construed in Chinese Buddhism in at least three different senses to mean: (1) an expression that both excludes and signifies, (2) an expression that merely excludes and does not signify, and (3) a negative expression that merely excludes. The notion of apoha is related to the first two senses but not the third.
In the first part of this paper I critically examine some of the main interpretations of "classical" Yogācāra philosophy of Maitreya(nātha), Asaṅga and Vasubandhu. Among these interpretations, based ...on extant textual and contextual data, I consider philologically unlikely both metaphysical-idealistic readings, which ascribe to these authors the view that ultimate reality is a mental or subjective stuff, and epistemological-idealistic readings which advocate that either Yogācāra suspends judgment on the existence of the extramental or that it maintains that the extramental exists in itself and ultimately. Instead, I consider more likely the thesis that classical Yogācāra upholds an epistemological idealism that, while admitting epistemological priority of the mental over the extramental, rules out the ultimate existence of both the former and the latter. This exclusion, however, does not amount to the exclusion of every metaphysics, but rather to the adoption of a metaphysics of emptiness conceived, in fact, as absence of the mental/extramental (or subject/object) dichotomy. In the second part of the paper this reading of classical Yogācāra is compared with the interpretation of Nāgārjuna's philosophy that I elsewhere called "realistic antimetaphysical", and I reach the conclusion that, while with respect to epistemology between early Madhyamaka and classical Yogācāra there is continuity, regarding metaphysics these two schools are deeply distinct and discontinuous: while Nāgārjuna conceives of emptiness as an extinction of any metaphysical view, Yogācāra emptiness actually presents itself as a metaphysical point of view.
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