YOGĀCHĀRA (Yogācāra), Skt., lit. “application of yoga” (also called the Vijñānavāda, lit. “the School That Teaches Knowing”); school of Mahāyāna Buddhism founded by Maitreyanātha, Asanga, and Vasubandhu.
According to the central notion of the Yogāchāra, everything experienceable is “mind only” (chittamātra); things exist only as processes of knowing, not as “objects”; outside the knowing process they have no reality. The “external world” is thus “purely mind.” Just as there are no things qua objects, there is also no subject who experiences. Perception is a process of creative imagination that produces apparently outer objects. This process is explained with the help of the concept of the “storehouse consciousness” (ālaya-vijñāna). In addition the teaching of the three bodies of a buddha (trikāya) took its definitive form in the Yogāchāra. Apart from the founders, important representatives of the school were Sthiramati and Dharmapāla, both of whom originated new currents within the Yogāchāra school (Fa-hsiang school, Hossō school).
The name of the Yogāchāra school stems from the fact that its followers placed particular value on the practice of “yoga,” which here is used in a quite general way to mean meditative practice that perfects all the qualities of a future buddha, a bodhisattva.
The mechanism of the arising of the external world is explained in the Yogāchāra in the following manner: In the ālaya-vijñāna, which is the ground of knowledge and the storehouse of all previous impressions, seeds (bīja) develop, which produce mental phenomena. As the storehouse of all seeds, the ālaya-vijñāna is the determining factor for the process of ripening (vipāka) by which the Yogāchāra explains the development of karma. In the storehouse consciousness, the seeds affect each other in such a way that their interaction creates the deception that something really exists.
The ālaya-vijñāna is often compared to a stream, the water of which perpetually renews itself and after the death of an individual being continues to flow, providing continuity from one existence to the next.
The individual forms of sense consciousness are produced by the activity of the seeds and the mind (manas). The latter is “tainted” and is considered the main factor in the arising of subjectivity. It creates the illusion of an I, or ego, where in fact only psychological phenomena exist, that is, only experience, no experiencing subject. That which is knowable by the mind phenomena is of threefold nature: conceptualized (parikalpita), dependent (paratantra), and perfect (parinishpanna). The conceptualized phenomena are mere imagination, false conceptions. They are dependent because they arise in dependence upon other factors. They are perfect in their true or ultimate nature, which is emptiness (shūnyatā), also known as “suchness” (tathatā). The characteristic of “suchness” is non duality. Realization of this true nature is enlightenment (bodhi). It is immanent in all things. “Suchness” is sometimes also called the buddhā-self; on this account the Yogāchāra was accused of substantialism.
The path to liberation in the Yogāchāra, in continuance of ancient Buddhism, is divided into four stages and presumes practice of the pāramitās and concentration (samādhi): (1) preliminary path-here the bodhisattva undertakes the teaching of “mind only”; (2) path of seeing (darshana-mārga) in this stage the bodhisattva gains a realistic understanding of the teaching, attains knowledge beyond concepts, and enters upon the first- of the ten stages (bhūmi) of the development of a bodhisattva, realizing higher intuitive knowledge, in which subject and object are one; on the path of seeing, the elimination of the defilements (klesha) begins as well as the “conversion of the ground”; (3) path of meditation (bhāvanā-mārga): here the bodhisattva passes successively through the ten stages and develops the insight already attained further; liberation from defilements and “conversion of the ground” continue; (4) path of fulfillment in this last stage all defilements are eliminated and the “conversion of he ground” is completed, putting an end to the cycle of existence (samsāra); the bodhisattva has actualized the “body of the great order” (dharmakāya, trikāya).
The Yogāchāra school reached its zenith in the 6th century. A center of the school was the monastic university Nālandā in northern India. There Dharmapāla taught an absolute idealism and concentrated on the doctrine of “nothing but conception.” Along with the school of Nālandā existed the school of Valabhī, which was founded by Gunamati and had its most important representative in Sthiramati. The latter advocated a moderate idealism and attempted to reconcile the teaching of the Yogāchāra with that of Nāgārjuna. The focal point of his thought was the notion of emptiness (shūnyatā). A rapprochement of Yogāchāra thought with that of the Sautrāntikas produced the logical epistemology school of Dignāga and his student Dharmakīrti.
Opponents of the Yogāchāra were the followers of the Mādhyamika school, which fiercely criticized the Yogāchāra system, in which it saw a revival of substantialistic thought.
Source: The Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion: Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Zen. Shambhala Publications, Inc.
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