non-referential consciousness; the apparent world is merely “consciousness
representing itself to itself” (Griffiths, 1986: 102).
Asanga approached the epistemological issue from the point of view of the
Madhyamika doctrine of emptiness, which allowed him to assert the emptiness
of the external world; at a deeper level consciousness too is void, although
the voidness of the phenomenal levels are, so to speak, derivative of it. The
early formulators of Yogacara may well have had no intention of going
beyond Madhyamika. Nevertheless, Yogacara already was moving beyond
Madhyamika’s omni-skepticism and anti-metaphysical stance. Yogacara was
a full-fledged scholasticism; it extended the Abhidharma texts which Mad-
hyamika had repudiated.
Yogacara represents the penetration of Mahayana into the core of the
traditional scholasticizing monasteries and the abandoning of its lay roots
which took place around this time. Asanga was concerned mainly to provide
a systematic guide to meditation techniques, and to describe how the world
appears as ideas in meditative experience, rather than actually to deny the
existence of objects (as distinct from asserting their voidness) or to stress the
foundational role of consciousness (Nagao, 1991; Willis, 1979). As its name
implies, Yogacara was the specialty of the professional meditators; and their
technical tradition too had grown scholastic over the generations. Whereas
the Theravadins and Sarvastivadins had recognized 3 samadhis, the Prajña-
paramita-sutras recognized 152 trances or “doorways to nirvana”; the
Avatamsaka-sutra, completed contemporaneously with Asanga around 350
c.e. (Nakamura, 1980: 194–195), listed 250. Trance states themselves were
ranked and became criteria for levels of salvation, and thus for social ranking
among the monks. The differentiation of meditative levels paralleled the infla-
tion of ranks within the community; the Sthaviras had recognized 3 categories
of enlightenment, whereas the later Abhidharmists categorized dozens of kinds
of Arhats and Never-Returners, and Yogacarins such as Asanga described as
many as 50 ranks at the Mahayana super-level of Boddhisattvas.^36 Ontology
differentiated correspondingly; by the 700s, late Buddhist scholasticism was
dividing ultimate nothingness into 16 types under 4 headings. Yogacara could
not help becoming philosophically innovative as it sought to explain the
differences among meditative ranks. Whereas Madhyamika emphasized salva-
tion through a simplifying, skeptical wisdom, Yogacara made salvation de-
pendent on a very complex training process of mastering many refinements of
meditation simultaneously with their philosophical basis.
However loyal and traditionalist the originators of Yogacara may have
been, their position was soon being interpreted as a distinctive school of
full-fledged idealism, Vijñanavada, consciousness-theory. It acquired a promi-
nent position in the attention space, as the opposite of Sarvastivadin realism,
External and Internal Politics: India • 223