Yogācāra is one of the two schools of Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism. Its founding is ascribed to two brothers, Asaṅga and Vasubandhu, but its basic tenets and doctrines were already in circulation for at least a century before the brothers lived. In order to overcome the ignorance that prevented one from attaining liberation from the karmic rounds of birth and death, Yogācāra focused on the processes involved in cognition. Their sustained attention to issues such as cognition, consciousness, perception and epistemology, coupled with claims such as ‘external objects do not exist’ has led some to misinterpret Yogācāra as a form of metaphysical idealism. They did not focus on consciousness to assert it as ultimately real (Yogācāra claims consciousness is only conventionally real), but rather because it is the cause of the karmic problem they are seeking to eliminate. Yogācāra introduced several important new doctrines to Buddhism, including vijñaptimātra, three self-natures, three turnings of the dharma-wheel and a system of eight consciousnesses. Their close scrutiny of cognition spawned two important developments: an elaborate psychological therapeutic system mapping out the problems in cognition with antidotes to correct them and an earnest epistemological endeavour that led to some of the most sophisticated work on perception and logic ever engaged in by Buddhists or Indians. Although the founding of Yogācāra is traditionally ascribed to two half-brothers, Asaṅga and Vasubandhu (fourth–fifth century bc), most of its fundamental doctrines had already appeared in a number of scriptures a century or more earlier, most notably the Saṃdhinirmocanasūtra (Elucidating the Hidden Connections) (third–fourth century bc). Among the key Yogācāra concepts introduced in the Saṃdhinirmocanasūtra are the notions of ’only-cognition’ (vijñaptimātra), three self-natures (trisvabhāva), warehouse consciousness (ālayavijñāna), overturning the basis (āśrayaparāvṛtti) and the theory of eight consciousnesses. The Saṃdhinirmocanasūtra proclaimed its teachings to be the third turning of the wheel of dharma. Buddha lived around sixth–fifth century bc, but Mahāyāna Sūtra did not begin to appear probably until five hundred years later. New Mahāyāna Sūtra continued to be composed for many centuries. Indian Mahāyānists treated these Sūtras as documents which recorded actual discourses of the Buddha. By the third or fourth century a wide and sometimes incommensurate range of Buddhist doctrines had emerged, but whichever doctrines appeared in Sūtras could be ascribed to the authority of Buddha himself. According to the earliest Pāli Sutta, when Buddha became enlightened he turned the wheel of dharma, that is, began to teach the path to enlightenment. While Buddhists had always maintained that Buddha had geared specific teachings to the specific capacities of specific audiences, the Saṃdhinirmocanasūtra established the idea that Buddha had taught significantly different doctrines to different audiences according to their levels of understanding; and that these different doctrines led from provisional antidotes (pratipakṣa) for certain wrong views up to a comprehensive teaching that finally made explicit what was only implicit in the earlier teachings. In its view, the first two turnings of the wheel – the teachings of the Four Noble Truths in Nikāya and Abhidharma Buddhism and the teachings of the Madhyamaka school, respectively – had expressed the dharma through incomplete formulations that required further elucidation (neyārtha) to be properly understood and thus effective. The first turning, by emphasizing entities (such as dharmas and aggregates) while ’hiding’ emptiness, might lead one to hold a substantialistic view; the second turning, by emphasizing negation while ’hiding’ the positive qualities of the dharma, might be misconstrued as nihilism. The third turning was a middle way between these extremes that finally made everything explicit and definitive (nīthartha). In order to leave nothing hidden, the Yogācārins embarked on a massive, systematic synthesis of all the Buddhist teachings that had preceded them, scrutinizing and evaluating them down to the most trivial details in an attempt to formulate the definitive Buddhist teaching. Stated another way, to be effective all of Buddhism required a Yogācārin reinterpretation. Innovations in abhidharma analysis, logic, cosmology, meditation methods, psychology, philosophy and ethics are among their most important contributions. Asaṅga’s magnum opus, the Yogācārabhūmiśāstra (Treatise on the Stages of Yoga Practice), is a comprehensive encyclopedia of Buddhist terms and models, mapped out according to his Yogācārin view of how one progresses along the stages of the path to enlightenment.
Drawing on the historical and intellectual contexts of the Treatise on Awakening Mahāyāna Faith’s composition and paying sustained attention to its interpretation in early commentaries, this new annotated translation of the classic makes its ideas available to English readers like never before. The introduction orients the reader with the main topics taken up in the Treatise and also provides a scholarly resource for students, teachers, and researchers. The Treatise succinctly addresses many of the doctrines of greatest importance to Buddhists in China between the fifth and seventh centuries, in an attempt to reconcile seemingly contradictory ideas in Buddhist texts introduced from India. One reason for the popularity of the Treatise is its compelling vision of how to realize why we are deluded and then follow a path to actualize our inherent buddhahood. “Awakening Mahāyāna Faith” refers to having the initial faith or trust that the Mahāyāna Buddhist path will work and is worth pursuing. It also provides a concise restatement of the complexities of the ten-stage path of bodhisattva (enlightened being) practice in Mahāyāna Buddhism. The Treatise quickly became a foundational text for East Asian Buddhism when it appeared in sixth-century China. It profoundly shaped the doctrines and practices of the major schools of Chinese Buddhism: Chan, Tiantai, Huayan, and to a lesser extent Pure Land. Conceptual structures derived from the Treatise became a shared resource for East Asian philosophers and religious theorists over centuries.
When Buddhism first entered China from India and Central Asia two thousand years ago, Chinese favourably disposed towards it tended to view it as a part or companion school of the native Chinese Huang–Lao Daoist tradition, a form of Daoism rooted in texts and practices attributed to Huangdi (the Yellow Emperor) and Laozi. Others, less accepting of this ‘foreign’ incursion from the ‘barbarous’ Western Countries, viewed Buddhism as an exotic and dangerous challenge to the social and ethical Chinese civil order. For several centuries, these two attitudes formed the crucible within which the Chinese understanding of Buddhism was fashioned, even as more and more missionaries arrived (predominantly from Central Asia) bringing additional texts, concepts, rituals, meditative disciplines and other practices. Buddhists and Daoists borrowed ideas, terminology, disciplines, cosmologies, institutional structures, literary genres and soteric models from each other, sometimes so profusely that today it can be difficult if not impossible at times to determine who was first to introduce a certain idea. Simultaneously, polemical and political attacks from hostile Chinese quarters forced Buddhists to respond with apologia and ultimately reshape Buddhism into something the Chinese would find not only inoffensive, but attractive. In the fifth century ad, Buddhism began to extricate itself from its quasi-Daoist pigeonhole by clarifying definitive differences between Buddhist and Daoist thought, shedding Daoist vocabulary and literary styles while developing new distinctively Buddhist terminology and genres. Curiously, despite the fact that Mahāyāna Buddhism had few adherents in Central Asia and was outnumbered by other Buddhist schools in India as well, in China Mahāyāna became the dominant form of Buddhism, so much so that few pejoratives were as stinging to a fellow Buddhist as labelling him ‘Hīnayāna’ (literally ‘Little Vehicle,’ a polemical term for non-Mahāyānic forms of Buddhism). By the sixth century, the Chinese had been introduced to a vast array of Buddhist theories and practices representing a wide range of Indian Buddhist schools. As the Chinese struggled to master these doctrines it became evident that, despite the fact that these schools were all supposed to express the One Dharma (Buddha’s Teaching), their teachings were not homogenous, and were frequently incommensurate. By the end of the sixth century, the most pressing issue facing Chinese Buddhists was how to harmonize the disparities between the various teachings. Responses to this issue produced the Sinitic Mahāyāna schools, that is, Buddhist schools that originated in China rather than India. The four Sinitic schools are Tiantai, Huayan, Chan and Pure Land (Jingtu). Issues these schools share in common include Buddha-nature, mind, emptiness, tathāgatagarbha, expedient means (upāya), overcoming birth and death (saṃsāra), and enlightenment.
As tempting as it is, I will decline the opportunity to give an edifying response to Rofessor Garner's systematic paper.I don't plan to take on Rorty or the various systematic bifurcations, such as the internalistiexternalist distinction, which reflect Western usage and style, if not substance. I'm primarily interested in the alleged mirroring of Western trends and categories by Eastern thought, which prof. Garner has undertaken to clarify for us. Hence I don't wish to critique the categories and distinctions brought into play as such -I'm sure they can be most useful in the appropriate contexts -1 only wish to question their appropriateness in reference to Ch'an. The brunt of Garner's analogy between East and West lies in his reading of Ch'an and Hui-Neng's poem, so I will mirror his concern and only address myself to Chuang Tzu and Lao T m briefly in conclusion. Garner draws an analogy between mirror, epistemology and representational thinking. Is an analogy a metaphor, a more specific type of trope, or a literal relation? Garner doesn't say, and frankly I was perplexed and wished we could have heard how analogical thinking deconstructs metaphorical thinking, assuming that they are distinguishable. NevertheIesa the analogy, which is not an equation but h o s t Seems to Serve as one, ars~rts that mirrwing, in v h e of reflecting external objects within itself as images, represents them (viz. representational thinking), which upon further reflection impels epistemological questions. According to Foucault, Representationalism is the epirteme or fundamental epistemic metaphor of Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Western Europe, and is not either the universal human stance or the sole instigative foundation of epistemological activity. There are thus other epistemic root metaphors or paradigms, but here we are Jothat of Chinese PRilomphy I2 ( I 98SJ 169-1 78
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