.
Caveat Lector: Examples
of false or misleading statements to beware of:
(1) “The ' Mind Only School’ is a Mahayana school founded by Asanga.”
(2) “The Chittamatra ( Mind-Only) Philosophical School.”
(3) “[he]was influenced by the development of
Buddhist ‘idealism’, the Yogacara or Cittamatra tradition.”
(4) “Hsuan-tsang selected K‘uei-chi as the chief
transmitter of the Mind-Only Buddhism that he brought back from India
(5) “Ge-luk-ba scholars hold that even for the
Proponents of Mind-Only the Perfection of Widsom Sutras are the supreme of
sutras, even though their literal reading must be interpreted.”
Corrections:
(1) “ Mind-only” or cittamatra,
is not synonymous with Yogacara and is not a formal “school” in the manner of
the Yogacara school foundered by the half-brothers Asanga and Vasubandhu (or in
the manner of the Madhyamaka school founded by Nagarjuna, Aryadeva, and their
followers). Mind-only is an orientation or
perspective based on meditative realization whose coherence may be called a
movement or tradition, not a doctrinaire school. There is no “founder” of the
teaching of Mind-only awareness outside the Sutras.
(2) Mind-only is not
a philosophical school and is not “a philosophy” in any modern sense of the
word. The terms “doctrine” and “philosophy” just do not apply to Mind-only.
(3) Mind-only is not ‘idealism’
as that term is used in Western contexts.
Tibetan Buddhists, because of their emphasis on commentary over Sutra,
erroneously hold that there are only two major streams of philosophical thought
in Buddha Dharma: that of Madhyamaka and Cittamatra, and they mistakenly use
the name Cittamatra or Mind-only as a term for the Yogacara tradition and
teachings. Yogacara teachings are primarily Consciousness-only (Skt. vijnanamatra) and Conscious-data-only
(Skt. vijnaptimatra), and only
indirectly and tangentially connected to Mind-only.
(4) The Buddhism that Xuanzang (Hsuan-tsang, 596–664)
brought back with him from India
(5) Actually, Mind-only, i.e., cittamatra, is a core teaching of the One Vehicle (Skt. Ekayana) movement that appeared prior to
Asanga and Vasubandhu and is found in the One Vehicle sutras, such as the Lotus Sutra, Avatamsaka Sutra, Samdhinirmocana
Sutra, and Lankavatara Sutra, that
the Samdhinirmocana Sutra termed “the
Third Turning of the Wheel of the Dharma”. Thus, it is the One Vehicle Sutras
that are received as “the supreme sutras” for the proponents of Mind-only, not
the Prajnaparamita (Perfection of Wisdom or Transcendent Wisdom) Sutras. In
general, the Yogacara teachers who self-identified as such, with best
intentions, appropriated the Mind-only teachings from the One Vehicle sutras, but
they extracted them out of context to construct a separate system of doctrines
that emphasized their own commentarial schemes.
Clarifications:
I learned about “ Mind-only” (Skt. cittamatra, while some translators
capitalize the “-Only” I do not and follow the convention of other translators
such as D.T. Suzuki.) through the so-called “East Asian” Buddhism of China,
Korea, and Japan. In the Buddha Dharma that permeated China and flowed through to Korea and Japan
“I designate not giving birth to
antithetical conceptions and the complete realization that existence and
nonexistence are nothing but the manifestations of one’s own mind.” (Lankavatara Sutra)
“That, in the clear and pure mind
of one’s own nature yet there is contamination, is difficult to be able to
comprehend.” (Queen Srimala’s Lion’s Roar Sutra)
“The three realms are vacant and
false, and are only the doings of mind.”
(Dasubhumika-sutra, part
of the Avatamsaka Sutra)
“Since there is only the ultimate meaning of mind,
characteristics depend on the root emptiness, on objectless emptiness, on the
emptiness of one’s own essence, on the essenceless emptiness of one’s own
essence, and on the emptiness of the ultimate meaning, that sever those
characteristics of difficult cultivation and practice.” (Samdhinirmocana Sutra)
Though the designation seems to be lost to
modernity, Chan/Zen Buddhism was called the “Buddha Mind
School
"Not established by written words,
Transmitted separately outside the teaching,
Pointing straight to the human mind,
To see the nature and become Buddha.”
Thus, the One Vehicle tradition found in Tiantai, Huayen, and Zen were the expressions of the Mind-only tradition. For example, Chan/Zen Master Huangbo Xiyun (J. Obaku Kiun) (d. c. 850) said in the Synopsis of the Dharma of Transmitting Mind of Zen Master Duanji of Huangbo Mountain (黃檗山斷際禪師傳心法要) written by his lay disciple Pei Xiu (797-870), a government official and member of the Chinese literati:
"Not established by written words,
Transmitted separately outside the teaching,
Pointing straight to the human mind,
To see the nature and become Buddha.”
Thus, the One Vehicle tradition found in Tiantai, Huayen, and Zen were the expressions of the Mind-only tradition. For example, Chan/Zen Master Huangbo Xiyun (J. Obaku Kiun) (d. c. 850) said in the Synopsis of the Dharma of Transmitting Mind of Zen Master Duanji of Huangbo Mountain (黃檗山斷際禪師傳心法要) written by his lay disciple Pei Xiu (797-870), a government official and member of the Chinese literati:
The Tathagata appeared in the
world and wanted to explain the True Dharma of the One Vehicle, however the
multitude of beings did not believe and raised slanders, sinking in the sea of
sufferings. If he did not explain at
all, however, he’d fall into stingy greed, and not serve as the subtle Way of
universal renunciation for the multitude of beings. He proceeded to establish the expediency of
explaining there are three vehicles. For the vehicles there is great and small;
for attainment there is shallow and deep. All are not the original Dharma. For this reason it was said, “There is only
the Way of the One Vehicle, two or more however, are not true.” So, in the end, because he had not yet displayed
the Dharma of the One Mind, he called Kasyapa to share the Dharma seat and
separately handed over the One Mind, going away from words to explain the
Dharma. The Dharma of this One Branch decrees a distinguished practice. If you are able to agree with those who
awaken, then you arrive at the Buddha stage! (My translation from [T48n2012Ap0382b03
to T48n2012Ap0382b09])
This distinction seemed straight forward to me with
the Yogacara School
However, when I came into contact with Tibetan
Buddhist teachings there was an immediate cognitive dissonance and frustration
with their use of the term “ Mind-only.” The Tibetan traditions are derived
from post-seventh century Indian Buddhism that had morphed into a Doctrinaire
Buddhism based on Treatises over Sutras on the one hand and Tantric Buddhism on
the other. While Chinese Buddhism is derived from pre-eighth century Indian
Buddhism that was primarily Sutra based.
For example, wanting to learn what the Tibetan
teachings are on Mind-only entailed, I picked up Jeffrey Hopkins’ Emptiness in the Mind-Only School of
Buddhism and was completely shocked to see that they use the label “ Mind-only”
erroneously for the Yogacara teachings and do not have a distinct awareness or
acknowledgement of Mind-only as a different tradition from Yogacara. This erroneous designation is found in other
books describing Tibetan Buddhism such as the generalist survey Mahayana Buddhism, The Doctrinal Foundations
by Paul Williams. Caveat Lector: Williams does not advise the reader that he is
presenting Mahayana Buddhism from his Tibetan Buddhist perspective, so that
unacknowledged standpoint makes his presentation of Yogacara as Mind-only into
an expression Tibetan Buddhist prejudice. Reading these books using the label “ Mind-Only”
when they mean Yogacara was nearly nauseating to me, in the sense of creating a
vertigo sensation where many times on nearly every page I have to do a mental
translation to read “Yogacara” or “ Consciousness-only” when they write “ Mind-only.”
Though I personally came to this understanding of the Tibetan usage of “ Mind-only” relatively late, as I had mostly ignored Tibetan Buddhism until a couple years ago, this problem was acknowledged in a paper from the journal Philosophy East and West, volume 27, No.1, January 1977, by Whalen Lai titled “The Meaning of ‘ Mind-only’ (wei-hsin): An analysis of a sinitic Mahayana phenomenon.” His paper begins:
Modern Japanese Buddhologists,
following a distinction that was evident already in the T'ang Buddhist circles,
speak of a Mind-Only (Sanskrit: Cittamatra)
school usually covering Zen and Hua-yen as being distinct from, and superior to,
the Consciousness-Only (Sanskrit: Vijnaptimatra)
tradition, represented by the Wei-shih school (Fa-hsing) of Hsuan-tsang's
followers.(1) This distinction between the so-called Wei-hsin (Mind-Only) and Wei-shih
(Consciousness-Only) is often assumed to be self-evident. However, there is, in
Indian Buddhism, only one term, Yogacara or Vijnaptimatra,
covering these two distinct branches in China India or Tibet
Yes, in my studies of Mind-only from the Chinese,
Korean, and Japanese Buddhist perspective , I too learned that Mind-Only is “other
than and superior to Consciousness-Only.” While I agree with Lai on many
points, especially the acknowledgement of the problem, I don’t agree with much
of his analysis (as he tries to make the problem out to be a translation issue
and not a systems issue), and I think that he too misunderstands the Indian sources
for Mind-only when he denies their existence. The problem seems to lie in the distinction
between placing primary reliance on the Sutras themselves or on the Treatises (Shastras) of the Indian doctrinal
masters, and as followed by the Tibetan masters of doctrinal scholasticism,
that interpret the Sutras. When Lai
says, “There is no sharp distinction made in India
D.T. Suzuki refers to this problem in his Studies of the Lankavatara Sutra:
There
is one thing in the foregoing account given by Tao-hsiian of the history of the
Lankavatara that requires notice: that there was another school in the
study of the sutra than the one transmitted by [Bodhi]Dharma and Hui-k'e. This
was the school of
Yogacara
The doctrine expounded in the Lankavatara and
also in the Avatamsaka-sutra is known as the Cittamatra and never as the
Vijnanamatra or Vijnaptimatra as in the Yogacara school of Asanga
Suzuki adds in the introduction to his translation of the Lankavatara Sutra:
This is the point where the Lanka
comes in contact with the Yogacara school. The Yogacara is essentially
psychological standing in contrast in this respect to the Madhyamaka school
which is epistemological. But the Alayavijnana of the Yogacara is not the same
as that of the Lanka and the Awakening
of Faith. The former conceives the Alaya to be purity itself with nothing
defiled in it whereas the Lanka and the Awakening make it the
cause of purity and defilement. Further, the Yogacara upholds the theory of
Vijnaptimatra and not that of Cittamatra, which belongs to the Lanka,
Avatamsaka, and Awakening of Faith. The difference is this:
According to the Vijnaptimatra, the world is nothing but ideas, there are no
realities behind them; but the Cittamatra states that there is nothing but
Citta, Mind, in the world and that the world is the objectification of Mind.
The one is pure idealism and the other idealistic realism. To realise the
Cittamatra is the object of the Lanka, and this is done when
Discrimination is discarded, that is, when a state of non-discrimination is
attained in one's spiritual life. Discrimination is a logical term and belongs
to the intellect. Thus we see that the end of the religious discipline is to go
beyond intellectualism, for to discriminate, to divide, is the function of the
intellect. Logic does not lead one to self-realisation.
The problem
of confusionof terms can be traced at least back to Vasubandhu who at times failed
to clearly distinguish the difference between Consciousness-Only (vijnanamatra) and Mind-only (cittamatra). Though in his Thirty Verses he appears to distinguish Consciousness-only (vijnanamatra) from Conscious-data-only (vijnaptimatra) without mentioning Mind-only, and in his The Teaching of the Three Own-Beings he
does mention Mind-only in a manner that can be construed as being superior to
Consciousness-only (vijnanamatra)
from Conscious-data-only (vijnaptimatra),
the followers of the Yogacara school in general tend to overlook these
distinctions and be comfortable with the confusion caused by conflation of the
terms. For example, Vasubandhu begins his
“Twenty Verses and Commentary”
stating:
In the Great Vehicle, the three
realms of existence are determined as being perception-only [vijnaptimatra]. As it is said in the [Dasa-bhumika section of the Avatamsaka]
sutra, “The three realms of existence are citta-only.” Citta, manas,
conscousness, and perceptions are synonyms.” (Stefen Anacker translation in Seven Works of Vasubandhu, p. 161,
brackets added by me.)
We can see from this excerpt that
Vasubandhu can blithely gloss over the very important distinctions between the
terms mind (citta), cognition (manas), consciousness (vijnana), and perceptions (vijnapti, i.e., conscious-data, not
perception samjna). Mind , consciousness, and conscious-data have
all had the term “-only” (matra)
attached to them in various teachings, while manas never has “-only” attached to it in that way. Thus, any
approach to understanding Mind-only (cittamatra)
must begin by distinguishing it from Conscousness-only (vijnanamatra) and Conscious-data-only (vijnaptimatra) which is exactly what the Yogacara teachers Asanga
and Vasubandhu fail to adequately do. Instead Vasubandhu uses the terms mostly as
synonyms because of, it seems, his preference for the terms Consciousness-only
and Conscious-data-only which he uses much more frequently than Mind-only. However,
while I think this “error of synonyms” is Vasubandhu’s greatest weakness, it
should not suggest that I think any less of Vasubandhu’s great works overall.
A further discussion of the
differences between these three “-onlys” of Mind-only, Consciousness-only, and Conscious-data-only will have to wait for a subsequent
post. For now, the important point is that Mind-only is inclusive of
consciousness, and conscious-data but that the other two are not inclusive of
mind in the sense of all things are only manifestations of mind. From the Mind-only
perspective, mind is the ocean, consciousness is the dynamic surface of the
ocean, and conscious-data are the apparently individual peaks of the waves on
the ocean. Thus, to say that either the
peaks of the waves or the moving surface of the ocean are synonymous with the
ocean is an absurdity. They too are the ocean, and they are not separate from
the ocean, but they not the round fullness that includes the profound depths of
the complete ocean.
This leads us to the question of
where genuine Mind-only teaching is to be found in the Tibetan doctrinal
systems that mistakenly call the Yogacara “ Mind-only.” It is found in two places. First it is hidden
in the doctrinal discussion of the so-called Tathagatagarbha texts, which is actually a misnomer when applied to
the One Vehicle texts. Tathagatagarbha
means the “Inner Tathagata” of each person and is an interesting word composed
of three elements thus (tatha), come
(agata), and inner (garbha). “Tathagata,” the
“Thus-come-one,” or “One who comes as thusness”, is the self-referential term
used in the Sutras by the Buddha instead of the first-person pronoun “I.” Without going into too much explanation, I
translate garbha as “inner” to render
the term Tathagatagarbha as “the
Inner Tathagata” in the sense of the psychological term the Inner Child. Garbha
has several connotations, such as fetus, womb, matrix, and sanctum sanctorum, i.e., a very private or secret place. The garbha
of the tathagata is the private place
or buried seed within each of us from where our Buddha Nature is germinated and
brought forth. In other words, it is the
essence of our own mind’s most personal being that is identical with Buddha in
the sense of Mind is Buddha.
The scholars’ conflation of the
Tathagatagarbha teaching with the teachings of the One Vehicle Sutras, and thus
obscuring the One Vehicle teachings, is the second most important reason (after
the confusion of synonyms) that Mind-only has not been sufficiently analyzed in
the doctrine-oriented scholarship of both Tibetan monastic colleges and Western
academies. This is because the scholars
(both of old and today, in both Tibet and the West) prefer to extract and
appropriate specific teachings out of the One Vehicle Sutras to create
doctrinal systems to ply against each other.
However, the primary purpose (paramartha) of the One Vehicle Sutras is
found in their synthesis and syncretism of the Buddha Dharma. So when the One
Vehicle Sutras, like Queen Srimala’s
Lion’s Roar Sutra and the Lankavatara
Sutra address the various topics like the Eight Consciousnesses, the Three
Own-natures, the Four Noble Truths, the Five skandhas, Emptiness (sunyata), Dharmakaya, Tathagatagarbha, etc. it is not listing them in order
to be extracted by various schools, but listing them as notions already
variously taught within the Buddha Dharma that must be synthesized and
syncretised in order to personally know and see the Tathagata’s awareness as the
inclusive, whole or compete teaching (圓教)
known as the Third Turning of the Wheel of the Dharma.
And second, from my reading of Hopkins Great Middle Way Hopkins
For instance, he [Shay] considered
separate passages of the Sutra Unraveling
the Thought [Samdhinirmocana Sutra],
usually considered to be Mind-Only [i.e., Yogacara] to present the views of Mind-Only
and the Great Middle Way, the latter being concordant with Ultimate Mind-Only,
or Supermundane Mind-Only, which is beyond consciousness.” (Hopkins, p. 51.)
The terms Ultimate Mind-Only, or
Supermundane Mind-Only appear to refer to the real Mind-only, not to Yogacara’s
“ Mind-only,” as Shay notes his Ultimate Mind-Only is beyond the Consciousness-only of the Yogacara. This
concordance of “Ultimate Mind-Only” with the “Great Middle Way Hopkins
Thus Shay-rap-gyel-tsen’s synthesis
was by no means a collage drawing a little from here and a little from there
and disregarding the rest. Rather, he had a comprehensive, thorough, and
overarching perspective born from careful analysis. For him, others had just
not seen what the texts themselves were saying and, instead of that, red into
the classical texts the views of single systems. (Hopkins
This exactly describes my own
observations of the usual scholarly systems built upon material extracted and
appropriated into doctrinal teachings outside the context of the Sutras. One point the previous quotation seems to
overlook is that Shay’s perspective was not actually just “born from careful
analysis.” Elsewhere Hopkins Hopkins
His view of “other emptiness,”
based largely on his profound understanding of the Kalachakra Tantra and commentary by Kalki Pundarika and bolstered
by the Lion’s Roar of Shrimaladevi Sutra,
and so forth, was received with amazement and shock. (Hopkins
This reference to Queen Srimala’s Lion’s Roar Sutra is more evidence that Shay was taking the perspective of the One Vehicle, as the One Vehicle is the central teaching of that Sutra. The reference to the Kalachakra [Wheel of Time] Tantra indicates the profound meditation techniques of this method of Tantra. “Other emptiness” refers to the label used to indicate Shay’s challenge to the Yogacara model of seeing phenomenal things (dharmas) as having an inherent self-nature, so that while dharmas are ultimately empty, they are not empty of self-characteristics . Under the rubric of “other emptiness,” Shay “taught that conventional phenomena are self-empty, in the sense that they lack any self-nature, whereas the ultimate is other-empty, in the sense that it is empty of the relative but has its own self-nature.” (
The nuances of this
“other-emptiness” verses “self-emptiness” debate are too convoluted to detail
here, .As stated earlier, Hopkins’ book details the attempt by the Gelug-ba
school’s founder Dzong-ka-ba to refute Shay’s teachings in the Mind-Only
section of Dzong-ka-ba’s treatise The
Essence of Eloquence. However, as I
read Hopkins translation and synopsis of the text, Dzong-ka-pa does not present
persuasive arguments against Shay’s teaching of other-emptiness nor does
Dzong-ka-pa present a clear rationalization for the validity of his separation
of systems when contrasted to the One Vehicle’s and Shay’s syncretic approach. Dzong-ka-ba fails to refute Shay’s accurate
presentation of the relationship of the Three Own-nature (trisvabhava) and agues unsuccessfully in favor of the Yogacara
misinterpretation. Based on Hopkins
book, Dzong-ka-ba’s doctrinal analysis appears to be mostly logical fallacies
of smoke and mirrors, relying on intellectual wordiness and being oblivious to
Shay’s (and Zen’s) necessity of actual meditation methods taking one beyond
words to generate one’s own realization that all things are only manifestation
of mind, which is the genuine Mind-Only teaching.
So be alert
to the use of the term “ Mind-only,” and when you see it be sure to distinguish
if it is being used wrongly as the synonym of the Yogacara school or correctly
as label for the genuine Mind-only teachings of the One Vehicle school.
