In the idealist model of Yogācāra Buddhism, the mind is always prioritized, and the body is considered only secondary. If we follow the typical understanding of Yogācāra, the body is a creation of ālayavijñāna. Thus, the body may seem completely dependent on ālayavijñāna. This panel challenges this assumption and highlights the significance of the body in the Yogācāra tradition. At least in practical contexts, the body is very important. Nobody can live without a body. Meditative practice, in particular, involves both body and mind. This panel highlights a perspective often overlooked by researchers focused predominantly upon mind. The panel has three papers. The first sheds light on the relationship between ālayavijñāna and the body in early Indian texts. The second discusses the significance of sense faculties in the Yogācāra model of cognition. The third examines how the mind-body relationship centered on ālayavijñāna was transformed in a later Tibetan tradition.
If we follow the “idealist” understanding of the Yogācāra system, everything, including the body and the external world, arises from the seeds (bīja) retained in ālayavijñāna. In this model, the cardinal element seems to be ālayavijñāna, and the body is only secondary. This, however, is not the whole picture. According to the Yogācārabhūmi, one of the earliest extant sources of ālayavijñāna, ālayavijñāna stays in the body and keeps it alive. In this paper, I shall reexamine the significance of the body from the following four perspectives. (1) The exact relationship between ālayavijñāna and the body. (2) The relationship between bīja and the body. (3) The significance of ālayavijñāna as a bridge between the body and the mind in the context of transformation through meditative practice. (4) Comparison between the Yogācāra model of multi-layered consciousness and the multi-layered structure of the human nervous system taught by modern science.
“Categorization is a consequence of how we are embodied” (Lakoff, Johnson). Classical Yogācāra texts argue that our lived-worlds are based on our embodied sense faculties, which are structured by embedded categories (vikalpa). This departs from the later focus on Yogācāra as ‘mind-only’ (citta-mātra), as if ‘mind’ alone could account for perception of objects—a disembodied process that all but ignores our embodied sense faculties. But Yogācāra is also called vijñāna-vāda—cognitivism. Vijñāna (cognitive awareness) is classically analyzed in terms of the dynamic interaction (sparśa) between our embodied and categorically (vikalpa) structured sense faculties (indriya) and their respective stimuli. In short: without bodies, no perception, no objects. We will first examine the role of the sense faculties in early Buddhist analyses, in dialogue with findings in contemporary cognitive science, and then apply this approach to developed Yogācāra theories—providing a more embodied and parsimonious understanding of classical Yogācāra cognitive teachings.
In this paper, I address the relationship of body and mind through the work of a thirteenth-century Tibetan author exploring embodiment and appearances in tandem. Jetsün Drakpa Gyaltsen’s Commentary on the Inseparability of Saṃsāra and Nirvāṇa exemplifies the unique convergence of ritual and philosophical approaches characterizing the Lamdré or “Path and Fruit”— an esoteric system preserved by the Sakya tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. In guiding his reader to realize that all phenomena are included in both body and mind, Drakpa Gyaltsen grapples with the somewhat paradoxical way in which the body is both a product of the mind and its support. I illuminate ways in which his formulations of āśraya [Tib. rten] and ālaya [Tib. kun gzhi] are not only informed by tantric ritual and physiology but also converge with and diverge from Yogācāra approaches in significant ways, with attention to dynamics of reliance, pervasion and inclusion.
| Eyal Aviv | aviv@gwu.edu | View |