Further Reflections on Yogācāra1
Recently, someone asked me again about Yogācāra, bringing me back to a field of Buddhist teachings I had long set aside.Buddhist ideas I had stopped thinking about for a long time. As I have noted before, Buddhist thought eventually differentiated into schools such as idealism, consciousness-only theory, and doctrines of tathāgatagarbha. . Even a person with a PhD degree in Buddhist studies may find these topics difficult to understand.
These are not merely about theoretical study, but also involve the issue of actual practice. As Mahayana Buddhists often say, “understanding these teachings takes countless lifetimes.”
Simply put, all the different schools of Buddhist thought are trying to help us find our "True Nature."
Since Buddhism doesn't have a "God," it seems to uses ideas like "Mind-Only", "Consciousness", and the "Buddha-Nature" to take the place of a higher, unseen power—something like an all-pervasive consciousness.
It feels as if people need to imagine an invisible master in order to feel secure. If that's true, wouldn't it be better to start by understanding ourselves?
But what is the "Self"? It's a very abstract idea. To really understand it, you need a lot of intellectual tools and knowledge.
The theories mentioned here have existed in India for a long time, and it takes even more study to sort them out.
The screenshot below is from The Anabasis of Alexander(p.202), which talks about Indian philosophy. For most people, understanding the various Eastern and Western philosophies—whether materialist or idealist—can take one to twenty years.
There is, however, a simple method. The Sixth Patriarch Huineng proposed: “Do not think of good; do not think of evil.”
The teachers in my study group find this hard to understand. I once illustrated it this way: when you face a student whom you believe once disliked you, if you are to educate them, can you forget the past and simply fulfill your responsibility as a teacher?
If you can balance your thoughts of good and bad in your mind, you are already moving toward this practice. When you can rise above good and bad, the state of “not thinking of good or evil” naturally appears. Using this approach to experience the self might be the quickest way.
Master Banji
AI Data: Yogācāra originated in India during the 4th–5th centuries and was established and promoted by Maitreya, Asaṅga, Vasubandhu, and other bodhisattvas. Based on earlier Buddhist teachings, it looks closely at how the mind works. It teaches that there are eight types of consciousness, especially the seventh (manas) and eighth (ālaya-vijñāna, the storehouse consciousness). These explain why people continue in rebirth and where all experiences come from. Main Ideas (The outside world is unreal; only mind is real. This is the “Mind-Only” view in Northern Buddhism.) |
Text from the Screenshot
…He stood on the stone steps, still dripping with water, completely shocked. Sachar commented on the story: “Skandar thought many years had passed, but it was actually only a moment.” So he said, “See? You’re only an idea.” The story Sachar told is a later version, and it likely came from a real meeting. Alexander met an Indian ascetic named Calanas in Taxila. Calanas became very interested in him and followed him all the way to Babylon. When Calanas knew he had an incurable illness, he sacrificed himself by climbing onto a funeral pyre and burning himself. This shows that Alexander had chances to talk with skeptics, rationalists, materialists, and other Indian thinkers of the time. They probably discussed famous questions in Indian philosophy. Alexander may have found the similarities between Indian and Greek ideas especially fascinating—for example, how the two traditions…
(From The Anabasis of Alexander, p. 202) (The words in bold in this screenshot are what Master Banji wants to highlight.) |
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