India · c. 4th c. CE – today
Yogācāra
What we experience as an outer world is a transformation of consciousness; liberation comes from seeing through the split between perceiving subject and perceived object.
Do we ever know objects, or only our own experience?
Meditators noticed how much the mind shapes what appears to it, and in Gandhāra in the 4th–5th centuries the brothers Asaṅga and Vasubandhu systematised this insight. They also wanted a positive account of mind to balance what some read as Madhyamaka’s purely negative emptiness.
In dreams we perceive places, people and even causal effects with no outer objects at all, so perception alone cannot prove a world beyond the mind. Vasubandhu adds that indivisible atoms are incoherent, so material objects cannot be built from them; it is simpler to explain experience by karmic ‘seeds’ ripening in a storehouse consciousness (ālaya-vijñāna).
- Appearances are ‘mere representation’ (vijñaptimātra).
- A storehouse consciousness carries karmic seeds.
- Experience has three natures: imagined, dependent, perfected.
Its analysis of consciousness passed to China through Xuanzang’s Weishi (Faxiang) school and to Tibet, and its theory of perception laid the ground for Dignāga’s epistemology.
Thinkers
c. 4th c. CEAsaṅgaCo-founder of Yogācāra, elder half-brother of Vasubandhuc. 4th–5th c. CEVasubandhuAbhidharma master who became Yogācāra’s great systematiserKey texts
Where it came from
Grew out ofEarly Buddhism & AbhidharmaYogācāra pushed the Abhidharma analysis of mind further, concluding that experience can be explained by consciousness alone.Reacted against
MadhyamakaYogācāra accepted emptiness but insisted that the flow of consciousness is in some sense real, to keep emptiness from being read as nihilism.
What it led to
Carried on byBuddhist epistemology (Pramāṇa school)Dignāga and Dharmakīrti worked largely within Yogācāra (and Sautrāntika) assumptions, grounding knowledge in momentary perception.Borrowed by
Chan / Zen BuddhismEarly Chan drew on mind-only texts such as the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra and on the teaching that a pure Buddha-nature underlies the mind.Opposed by
New ConfucianismXiong Shili’s New Treatise on Consciousness-Only began from Yogācāra and then rejected its split between true reality and changing phenomena.