92 CHAPTER FOURenough to loosen one's attachments to views; one needs to practice medita-
tion, including dhyana, as well. Because meditation is primarily a self-admin-
istered cure, one needs a comprehensive right view of the causes of suffering
to act as a working hypothesis in administering the cure properly. Thus the
Yogacarins took over the Abhidharma enterprise, adding new categories and
working out advances in formal logic so as to create what they viewed as a
more effective presentation of right view.
On the other hand, the Yogacarins accepted the Madhyamika assertion,
which can be traced back to the Sutra Pitaka, that views are valuable only to
the extent that they induce one to attain a state in which all views are aban-
doned. In this sense, they retained the doctrine of emptiness, both as a per-
ceptual mode-ultimate freedom from views-and as an attribute of dharmas.
They also accepted the Madhyamika teaching on the role of mind in creating
an illusory reality. Here again, there are antecedents in the Sutra Pitaka, in
particular the first verse of the Dhammapada: "All dharmas are preceded by
mind (manas), chieftained by mind, made of mind" (Dhp.1). Neither the Ab-
hidharmists nor the Madhyamikas, however, had ever satisfactorily worked
out the mechanics of how the mind gave rise to dharmas, and this was pre-
cisely what the Yogacarins proposed to do.
Asanga and Vasubandhu adopted from the Sandhinirmocana Sutra an analy-
sis of reality into three characteristics: the parini$panna (perfected or accom-
plished), the paratantra (dependent or relative), and the parikalpita (imaginary
or mentally constructed). The perfected level is identical with suchness and
other characterizations of emptiness as a mode of perception; the dependent
level corresponds to dharmas in their Abhidharma sense; and the imaginary
level denotes the act of assigning names and concepts, such as the subject/ ob-
ject distinction, to dharmas on the dependent level, thus giving shape to every-
day experience. An analogy might be made with a stereogram: The perfected
level corresponds to the blank paper on which the stereogram is printed; the
dependent level, to the two-dimensional patterns printed on the paper; and
the imaginary level, to the three-dimensional image that appears when one
focuses one's eyes in front of the pattern or behind it. These levels the
Yogacarins called the three svabhavas, or own-natures, although in actuality
they are three levels of emptiness. The perfected level is the ultimate absence
of own-nature; dharmas on the dependent level are empty occurrences; and
the concepts applied at the imaginary level are empty characteristics. The pur-
pose of the practice is to cleanse the imaginary level from the dependent level
so as to leave the perfected. In terms of our analogy, this would be equivalent
to focusing direction on the two-dimensional pattern rather than in front or
behind it, and then letting the ink fade from the paper when one sees that
there is nothing of any substance to it. To accomplish this cleansing, however,
one needs an analysis of how the imaginary and dependent levels are created
to begin with.
Here the Yogacarin analysis posited eight levels of consciousness: seven ac-
tive levels-manas (mind) and the six levels of consciousness appropriate to
the six senses (see Section 1.4.3)-and an iilaya-vijfiii~:ta (subliminal, passive