Extending the Indian Mahayana Tradition

While the Madhyamaka school believed everything had an empty existence, the Yogachara philosophers of the Indian Mahayana tradition proposed that the representations of consciousness alone (vijnapti matra) were real. Consciousness created our experience of samsara (cycle of life and death) until we attained nirvana (liberation). These experiences do not represent reality out there; instead, we should recognize that they were created by our mind. 

The half-brothers Asanga and Vasubandhu (4th-5th Century CE) were the main philosophers of the Yogachara school. Asanga wrote the Five Treatises of Maitreya, the Mahayanasamgraha and other key texts, while Vasubandhu systematized the school. Vasubandhu described how the six types of consciousness (sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell, and language and mental images) described by the Abhidhamma schools inadequately explained the transfer of karma from one life to another. So the philosophers added a seventh subconscious layer of consciousness (manas or mind) that attached to an eighth layer it assumed to be the actual self (atman), called the storehouse (alaya vijnana). The imprints of karma were made in this storehouse consciousness.    

The Yogachara philosophers also developed the concept of Three Natures (tri svabhava) and the notion of the five categories of human beings, ranging from those who had no capability to realize their innate enlightened Buddha Nature to those who fully did. 

While the Yogachara school believed in emptiness like the Madhyamaka philosophers, they differed in its interpretation: they believed that the mind had real existence and could be equated with emptiness. The Yogachara thinkers emphasized the practice of yoga meditation as the means to enlightenment. 

These beliefs, especially of storehouse consciousness, deeply influenced the Mahayana Buddhism of East Asia, along with other texts called the Tathagatagarbha sutras. These texts include the Tathagatagarbha Sutra (which first coined the term), the Mahayana Mahaparinirvana Sutra, the Ratnagotravibhaga, the famous Lankavatara Sutra, the Awakening of Faith in Mahayana (Chinese Dacheng qixin lun), the Buddha Nature Treatise and others. These sutras were composed in 200-550 CE in India, and were instrumental in developing Buddhist concepts related to the Self such as Buddha Nature and True Self that later became central to Ch’an, Zen and other Mahayana Buddhist schools in East Asia. In doing so, they marked a momentous turn in Buddhist philosophy toward the Self (Atman) doctrine of the Vedanta, although in slightly different ways. At the core of this philosophy was the belief that every sentient being had the capability to become a Buddha. 

The tathagatagarbha is seen as the eternal Self in some of these texts. However, the Lankavatara Sutra (also part of the Yogachara School) sought to clarify that this eternal Self was not the same as the Atman of the Vedas. When a disciple raised this concern, the Buddha supposedly answered that the Self referred to here was ultimately empty as compared to the substantial Atman. The creative conflict between Vedanta and Buddhism ceased after the 10th century CE when the Muslim conquests led to the departure of Buddhism almost completely from India. But Buddhism subsequently flourished for centuries in Sri Lanka, Tibet, China, Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia.