THE RISE AND DEVELOPMENT OF MAHAYANA BUDDHISM 93"store" or "granary" consciousness) that contains the seeds of past karma to-
gether with pure seeds that will eventually lead to Awakening. (The notion of
seeds here is borrowed from the Sautrantikas [see Section 3.2.4.]) The store-
consciousness accounts for personal continuity through death and other peri-
ods when the active consciousnesses are absent, although the Yogacarins deny
that it is a selfbecause it is ultimately empty.
According to the Lankavatara Sutra, the active levels of consciousness are
similar to waves on the ocean of the store-consciousness. Asanga and Va-
subandhu described the various levels as interacting in the following way:
When a person performs an action, seeds are deposited in the store-conscious-
ness where they are infused ("perfumed") with habitually ingrained attach-
ments to mental constructs. Thus matured, they give rise to a seamless flow of
experience on the dependent level in the form of the other levels of con-
sciousness and the objects they represent. Manas then creates the imaginary
level by making distinctions of grasper and graspable (knower and known) and
imposing other mental constructs on this flow. The resulting self/ other di-
chotomy sets the stage for craving with regard to the graspables. Craving in
turn gives rise to acts of will that deposit new seeds in the store-consciousness,
where they keep reproducing themselves from moment to moment until they
are matured and ready to begin the round again. Thus the doctrine of karma
and dependent co-arising is recast entirely as the workings of consciousness,
both in cause and effect.
Were it not for the pure seeds in the store-consciousness, there would be
no way out of this round. These pure seeds, however, can be matured by tra-
ditional Buddhist meditative practices, such as the foundations of mindfulness
(Strong EB, sec. 3.5.4), reformulated so as to focus them on dissolving the
boundary between self and others. This practice may be combined with other
techniques, such as the creation of mental images that then dissolve, to shatter
the tendency to hold to any mental constructs at all. Subsequently, other stages
oftranq4ility and insight meditation based on the Four Noble Truths lead fur-
ther and further into "signless cognition" until a point is reached where de-
filed dharmas are totally displaced by untainted dharmas and there occurs an
ifsraya-paravrtti (reversal of the basis of mind). This reversal is the salvational
goal ofYogacara, constituting a fundamental change of mental orientation.
The world remains the same, but the experience of the world is purified to
one of total emptiness. Even the analysis of the three svabhavas and the eight
consciousnesses is abandoned at that point, and all experience is left to its
suchness (Strong EB, sec. 4.3.3).
The early Yogacarin Sutras added a cosmological dimension to this analysis
of consciousness by equating the purified level of the store-consciousness with
a term they borrowed from one of the emptiness Sutras: tathagata-garbha (the
womb ofTathagatahood) (Strong EB, sec. 4.3.5). Garbha has a twofold gen-
eral meaning: first, the womb, and, by extension, an inner room, the calyx of
a lotus; and second, the womb's contents-that is, an embryo, fetus, child. In
the first sense, the purified store-consciousness is the womb where the
tathagata is conceived, nourished, and matured. The Prajfia-piframitif Sutras had