The Foundations of Buddhism

The Mahiiyiina

'something' (either mind or matter), but simply as the way things

are: 'thusness' (tathatii).^46

Modern scholars have disagreed on the question of whether

Y ogacara constitutes a true philosophical 'idealism', asserting that

the mind only is real and that the external material world is un-

real. The argument essentially turns, as Griffiths has neatly put

it, on the question of whether Y ogacara is primarily making an

epistemological point (that all we have access to is mental rep-

resentation) or an ontological one (that mental representation

is all that exists).^47 Certainly Yogacara starts from the premiss

that the world we know, the world we live in, is strictly a mental

world: everything comes to us in the form of 'information' or 'ideas'

(vijnapti). Apart from vijnapti there is no world, th~re is no

experience. Equally certainly it is saying more than that simply

in practice, de facto, we are trapped in our own private mental

world unable to know whether or not there is in reality an exter-

nal world that corresponds to our ideas about it, to our percep~

tions of it. Y ogacara is not a doctrine of solipsism. Vasubandhu's

Vilrtsatikii thus attempts to argue that, although objects do not

exist out there apart from our perceptions of them, nevertheless

similar past karma results in the sharing of common experiences

in the present. But these experiences are simply the products of

the workings of consciousness, amounting to the arising of sim~

ilar pieces of information in different streams of consciousness.
We are, as it were, dreaming similar dreams; and just as the pieces
of information that come to us in a dream lack independent objects;
so do the direct perceptions of our wakeful state:
Thus people are hypnotized with a sleep arising from impressions left
by the habit of false ways of thought, and, as in a dream, when they see
things that are unreal, so long as they do not wake up they do not under•
stand their non-existence. When, however, they wake up by acquiring
the transcendent knowledge which is beyond thought and opposed to
that same sleep, then, by the realization of the purified ordinary aware,
ness that is gained as a consequence, they understand the non-existence
of the objects of the senses.^48

Yogacara thus does not appear to be agnostic about the nature

of the external world. Rather it claims to present an account of