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Yogācāra
Yogācāra — “yoga practice” — is the Indian Mahāyāna Buddhist school that grew out of meditators’ analysis of experience, systematised in the fourth to fifth centuries CE by the half-brothers Asaṅga and Vasubandhu of Gandhāra. Its central observation is that whatever we encounter, we encounter as mental presentation: objects are never given apart from the cognition that presents them — vijñapti-mātra, “representation-only.” Around that observation the school built the most detailed model of mind in classical Buddhist philosophy: eight consciousnesses, a subliminal storehouse carrying the residue of all past experience, and an account of how every experience conditions the experience to come. The school is also called Vijñānavāda, the doctrine of consciousness, and — in later Tibetan classification — Cittamātra, “mind-only.”
The school and its texts
The doctrinal roots are earlier than the founders: the Saṃdhinirmocana-sūtra (c. 2nd–3rd century CE) is the school’s charter text. The systematic corpus came with Asaṅga — the Mahāyānasaṃgraha and Abhidharmasamuccaya, along with the massive, layered Yogācārabhūmi compilation traditionally attributed to him — and with Vasubandhu, whose Viṃśatikā (Twenty Verses), Triṃśikā (Thirty Verses), and Trisvabhāvanirdeśa are the school’s most studied statements. Tradition ascribes a further set of treatises to the celestial bodhisattva Maitreya, received by Asaṅga in visionary encounter; modern scholarship holds the authorship and dating of much of this corpus open, including the once-current, now generally rejected hypothesis of two separate Vasubandhus.
The analysis of experience
Representation-only (vijñapti-mātra). What is ever given is cognition presenting; an object apart from its presentation is never encountered. Whether this denies external matter outright — a metaphysical idealism — or brackets it as epistemically inaccessible is the central dispute in the school’s modern reading: the phenomenological reading (Lusthaus) takes classical Yogācāra as an indictment of how consciousness constructs its world rather than an ontology of mind as the only substance, while other scholars, and the school’s classical Madhyamaka opponents, read it as idealism proper. The dispute is unresolved and belongs to any honest account.
The eight consciousnesses. The five sense consciousnesses and the mental consciousness (mano-vijñāna) run on the surface. Beneath them the school posits an afflicted mind (kliṣṭa-manas), which mistakes the deepest layer for a self — and that deepest layer, the ālaya-vijñāna or storehouse consciousness: a subliminal, continuously flowing level of mind carrying the karmic residue of all past experience, the school’s answer to how continuity and karma work without a self.
Seeds and perfuming (bīja, vāsanā). Every intentional act deposits seeds in the storehouse; the seeds perfume the mental stream and later ripen as new experience, which deposits new seeds in turn. Experience conditions future experience in a continuous feedback loop — each perception arising already conditioned by the sediment of what came before.
The three natures (trisvabhāva). Experience can be read three ways at once: as the constructed nature (parikalpita) — the falsely projected world of subjects confronting objects; as the dependent nature (paratantra) — the causal flow of arising cognition itself; and as the perfected nature (pariniṣpanna) — the dependent flow empty of the constructed split.
Grasper and grasped (grāhaka-grāhya). The split of experience into a grasping subject and a grasped object is itself a fabrication imposed on non-dual arising. Ordinary experience appears dual; its real character is not — and awakening is the falling-away of the bifurcation, the “transformation of the basis” (āśraya-parāvṛtti).
Transmission and debates
The Chinese transmission fractured internally before it settled. Paramārtha’s sixth-century translations founded the older Shelun school and added a ninth consciousness — the amalavijñāna, an immaculate consciousness above the storehouse — a move the later transmission rejected: Xuanzang (602–664) studied at Nālandā, retranslated the corpus, and compiled the Cheng Weishi Lun, the synthetic commentary from which the East Asian schools grew — Fǎxiàng in China, Beopsang in Korea, Hossō in Japan, the last still extant at Kōfuku-ji and Yakushi-ji. The old-Yogācāra/new-Yogācāra split is a dispute inside the school about what the deepest layer of mind is, not a footnote of translation history. Within India the school’s great opponent was Madhyamaka: Candrakīrti attacked Yogācāra as subjective idealism and rejected the storehouse consciousness as a covert substantialism undermining emptiness. Śāntarakṣita (8th century) built the synthesis — mind-only as the best account of the conventional, emptiness as ultimate — in which form the material entered Tibet. There the storehouse material fed the biggest fight of Tibetan scholasticism: the rangtong/shentong controversy. The Jonang school’s shentong (“empty of other”) position, systematised by Dolpopa, drew on Yogācāra and buddha-nature material to hold that ultimate mind is empty of everything other than itself but not of its own nature — which the dominant Gelug rangtong reading condemned as covert substantialism, the same charge Candrakīrti had pressed; the Jonang school was eventually suppressed, and the controversy still divides Tibetan philosophy. The Buddhist epistemological school of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti also grew from Yogācāra soil.
Modern readings
Two lines dominate the school’s sympathetic modern reception: the comparison with Husserlian phenomenology (Lusthaus, Buddhist Phenomenology, 2002) — the analysis of experience as constituted presentation read alongside Husserl’s constitution — and the cognitive-science interest in the storehouse as a classical model of the unconscious and of memory as conditioning (Waldron, The Buddhist Unconscious, 2003). The modern attack came from inside Buddhist studies: the Critical Buddhism movement of Hakamaya Noriaki and Matsumoto Shirō (Japan, 1980s–90s) charged the storehouse and buddha-nature doctrines with being dhātu-vāda — a substantialist ground-doctrine incompatible with dependent origination, and so not Buddhism at all. The charge lands on precisely the point Candrakīrti attacked thirteen centuries earlier; whether the storehouse is a covert self is the school’s most durable dispute, prosecuted in every era of its reception.
See also: Madhyamaka · Candrakīrti · Nāgārjuna · Abhinavagupta · Phenomenology · Husserl