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How Innovative is the ĀLAYAVIJÑĀNA by William S. Waldron • Karmic actions, within which vijñāna as cognition plays a central role, lead to continued existence within saṃsāra, the major medium of which is the unbroken stream of consciousness, of vijñāna. • And this unbroken stream creates, in turn, the very preconditions for such cognition to occur at all. But to see just how this is, we must examine the relationship between these two aspects of vijñāna as they are articulated within the twelve-member formula of the dependent co-arising (pratītya-samutpāda). 18 We should note that the mutual conditionality between these two aspects of vijñāna constitutes the central insight of the ālayavijñāna-based model of mind. AB. 'VIJÑĀNA' WITHIN THE 'PRATĪTYA-SAMUTPĀDA' SERIES Vijñāna has two essential places within the pratītya-samutpāda series, which correspond roughly to the two aspects described above. • First, vijñāna conditions the very development of a sentient body by descending into the mother's womb, thereby securing a foothold or support in a new life, wherein it may grow, increase, and multiply; 19 vijñāna thus constitutes one of the preconditions for any cognitive activity whatsoever. 20 Vijñāna at this point is directly conditioned by the saṃskāras, the formative forces of the past. 21 • Second, vijñāna is implicitly yet directly involved in the karmic activities that perpetuate saṃsāric life. The terms of the twelve-member pratītya-samutpāda series which directly succeed vijñāna and name-and-form (nāma-rūpa) delineate all of the essential elements of the cognitive processes and the affective responses to which they give rise: the six sense-spheres (ṣaḍāyatana) and sense-impression (sparśa) are essential preconditions for cognition to take place, 22 while the next factor, feeling (vedanā), is (along with apperception, saṃjñā) said to be its virtually inseparable concommitant. 23 Feeling and apperception, moreover, are themselves karmic activities (saṃskāra) of mind (citta) (M I 301: saññā ca vedanā cittasaṅkhāro). Thus, as Johansson (1979: 139) notes, every act of cognition is, or perhaps more precisely, <203> entails saṃskāras, formative karmic activities, and thus leads to further rebirth. 24 But the affective dimension outlined within the series of dependent co-arising is just as important: feeling gives rise to craving (tṛṣṇā) and grasping or 'appropriation' (upādāna), 25 affective attitudes or actions which lead directly toward renewed rebirth in the future. 26 These are followed by becoming (bhava) and birth (jāti), which have long been considered a second process of rebirth within the pratītya-samutpāda series by the traditional exegetes. As a link between one life and the next, this juncture will also be cited by the Yogācārins to support the existence of a specific type of mind, the same one that is conditioned by the saṃskārā earlier in the series in a parallel relationship, viz., the "ālaya" vijñāna. The pratītya-samutpāda series then depicts vijñāna as both (1) a principle of animate existence conditioned by the formative forces (saṃskārā) and subsisting throughout one's lifetime, and, implicitly, as

The task of "naturalizing mind" has been underway for some decades now and its assumptions either explicitly or implicitly underlie nearly all research in the brain sciences. "Naturalizing mind" refers to the attempt to understand how mind and mental phenomena work by reference to nothing but the material processes measurable, in principle, by the natural sciences. On the face of it, this is a promising direction. As technology keeps improving, so too does our ability to probe into neurological processes, revealing more and more about how the brain works. Unfortunately, the notion of "naturalization" carries with it certain philosophical assumptions about the relation between mind and matter that make it much more problematic than first appears. This is because the idea of "naturalization"-that the only relevant facts are material facts, and may well be the only real facts-is itself a vestige of Cartesian dualism. The usual version of this is "substance dualism," the idea that mind and matter are two distinct substances with ontologically distinct natures. This attempt to isolate the material part of experience from the mental part, however, in large part accounts for the intractable nature of the mind-body problem. We cannot readily put back together what we have posited as ontologically apart. If, as sub

The mind is neither within nor without, nor is it to be apprehended between the two. Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa-sūtra (30). The ways in which the relationship between mind and world have been considered for the last few hundred years in Western thought and science are being radically reconceived and ideas from a wide variety of sources are now being taken more seriously than ever. Philosophical perspectives from the Buddhist traditions of India are of particular interest because they have long addressed issues that are currently in contention: if we are not Cartesian subjects essentially alienated from our bodies and the material world, as many have previously accepted, then who and what are we? And what then is the status of the &quot; world &quot; we purportedly stood against? Or our perceptions of it? Or the consequences of actions within it? And if the line between self and world is not nearly as clear or hard and fast as we have assumed, where or what is it? We propose to address such...

It is no small task to understand this vast, variegated world we humans have carved out for ourselves on this small planet. How does one know where to begin, what to interrogate, and to what end? Events, however, have a way of imposing themselves. As the Cold War melts down and bitter ethnic and religious conflicts heat up the world over, as endless images of death and violence flash daily across the globe, the multiple faces of human evil and suffering stare steadfastly into our own, intimating, we fear, an inescapably inhumane reality. Our task then, our moral imperative, is as urgent today as it was when Albert Camus (1971, 11) expressed it nearly fifty years ago, just as many millions of murders ago: “One might think that a period which, within fifty years, uproots, enslaves, or kills seventy million human beings, should only, and forthwith, be condemned. But its guilt must also be understood.” This essay is an attempt to take this challenge seriously, an attempt to understand t...

There is a deep and underlying tension between two equally essential discourses within Indian Buddhist thought, a tension paralleled to a certain extent in psychology and cognitive science as well. One discourse treats the person as the autonomous agent of his or her own actions, of karma, and by implication the effective subject of samsara as well as the crucial locus of self-transformation. The second discourse treats even psychological processes as an impersonal play of cause and effect and denies the ultimate reality of any agent or subject, which is considered at best either a convenient fiction, as in cognitive science, or at worst the core illusion that keeps one caught in the cycle of compulsory behavioral patterns (samsara), as in most Buddhist perspectives. Though distinct, these two discourses are also closely intertwined, for the second only aims to analyze and describe, theoretically, how cognitive and emotional processes impersonally arise in order to serve, pragmatically, the ameliorative aims of the firstthe transformations that persons undergo in attaining understanding and freedom from cognitive obscurations and emotional obsessions. Indian Buddhist traditions distinguish these distinct

One of the fundamental distinctions in the modern academy is the difference between studying human life as people experience it and studying it in terms of impersonal causal processes—the so-called first- and third-person approaches. This dichotomy is reflected in the study of meditation, in which neuroscientists attempt to correlate their “objective” findings with the “subjective” reports of meditators. This very distinction, though, invites two extremes: either these discourses are ultimately incommensurable or one discourse—the subjective—should be reduced to the “true,” objective discourse. This chapter criticizes putatively pure subjectivity or objectivity from Buddhist philosophical perspectives, especially the non-duality of subject and object, and seeks to articulate a middle ground between reductionism and incommensurability.