Vinnanavada Buddhism

Vijnanavada Buddhism – the Ultimate in Indian Metaphysical Speculation.

R. Chandrasoma

Speculative Buddhist scholarship (as distinguished from the salvational and worshipful aspects of Buddhism) reached its peak in the period following the epochal work of Nagarjuna – widely regarded as one of the acutest minds among the religious thinkers of India. It is important to note here that the great schism between Indian Sanskritic Buddhism and the Pali-based ‘Southern Buddhism’ had already taken place and the two streams evolved during this period in tragic isolation. The Southern or Theravada school had no links with the fluxional pluralists of India (the Sarvastivadins) who developed subtle and consistent philosophies based on their reading of the earliest texts attributable to our Compassionate Teacher. Their writings (in Sanskrit) were destroyed by their Brahamanical competitors and we have to rely on Tibetan translations to get an inkling of the power and complex beauty of their thought. Arguably, it is a great pity that ‘Hinayana’ (or Theravada) Buddhism of the Pali school that flourished in Sri Lanka is generally taken as the standard formulation of early Buddhism despite its very evident lack of philosophical rigor in the discussion of basic issues in ontology and epistemology. Buddhagosha – the great name in Pali Buddhist scholarship - was an erudite compiler and systematizer but lacked the intellectual daring of his contemporaries in India. While the Pali Abidharma (the metaphysical part of the Buddhist expository triad of collections of sutras) is replete with lists and complex classifications, the presentation lacks consistency and clarity in the chains of deduction found therein. The ‘Patticca Samupada’ (doctrine of dependant origination) as formulated in the Pali works is a good example of the laxity that is characteristic of this genre of Buddhist writing. The confusion over the ‘dathu’ (universal elements). ‘skandhas’ (fluxional aggregates constituting persons) and ‘dharmas’( base ontological elements of the phenomenal flux) can hardly be overlooked by anyone making a careful study of the Pali texts. Let me hasten to add that these doubts and confusions arise from a misinterpretation of the pristine (oral) teaching of the Buddha - which suffers inevitable distortion when written down as argumentative schemata. That there is more than a touch of the ineffable in the message of our Sublime Teacher is a truism that all interpreters of the Buddha-word must concede.
Given the scarcity of authentic texts, the difficulties of interpretation and the intellectual penetration of the savants of the Sanskritic School, it was inevitable that their version of the Theravada metaphysic (as enunciated by the Sarvastivadins and the Vaibhasikas) attracted little critical scholarship in latter-day studies of Buddhism. This was certainly not the case during the time of Nagajuna (around the second century AD) - who directed the full force of his destructive dialectic against the metaphysical theses of the Sanskritic Theravadins. The doctrine of ‘dependant origination’ was minutely scrutinized and found to be riddled with logico-metaphysical fallacies. Using the technique of ‘reductio ad absurdum’ in a manner strongly reminiscent of that employed by the Greek thinkers Zeno and Parmenides, he found the concepts of ‘causal connection’, ‘flux’ and ‘substance’ to be irremediably contradictory. The doctrine of ‘Dharmas’ or ultimate fluxional elements was savaged by Nagarjuna. More damagingly he found the debate over ‘atman’ (i.e. the anatta stand of the Buddhists) futile and of little relevance to the spiritual life of the saint or arahat.
Given this flagrant rejection of the base-tenets of Buddhist metaphysics, it would come as no great surprise if someone jumped to the conclusion that Nargarjuna was an enemy of Buddhism. Not so – he was an ardent Buddhist and wrote devotional stanzas of great beauty in praise of the Enlightened One. How is this conflict resolved? He argued that it is the life of the Buddha (the Career of the Bodhisattva) that is our guide and inspiration in shortening our samsaric journey and in attaining the final goal of Nirvana.. The arguments (in the Buddhist corpus) were for the less gifted who lacked the spiritual insight necessary to see that all predications are contradictory and that the ultimate cannot have cognitive ‘handles’ – all descriptions of it are false. Emptiness is the essence of the world. It is only by the perfection of an intellectual intuition vouchsafed to the saint (prajna-paramita) that this all-encompassing Void (sunyata) can become manifest as a total transmogrification of the perspective of the seeker.
The doctrine of the Void was fiercely attacked by the contemporary Vedantists who dismissed it as a nihilist doctrine that led nowhere. Chief among them was Shankara, idolized as the champion of the Hindu philosophical revival. He was a passionate hater of the Buddhists despite the fact that his teacher, Gaudapala, was a Buddhist and that he was not averse to borrowing wholesale the dialectical techniques developed by the Madhyamika school of Buddhism of which Nagarjuna was the founder. Indeed, many see the ‘advaitya’ (non-dual) philosophy of Shankara as a form of absolutism directly inspired by the earlier Buddhist version authored by Nagarjuna. We shall not pursue this matter further as it involves the painful story of the extirpation of Buddhism from India by its implacable Hindu foes.
The absolutism of the Mahyamika school was attacked from another quarter – albeit this time to refine it and make it more palatable to mainstream Buddhism. The Yogacara school of dynamic idealism (Vijnanavada) was developed by two encyclopedic scholars – Asanga and Vasubandhu. Their subtle thinking on the profoundest issues of metaphysics received its final polish in the hands of India’s greatest logicians, Dignaga and Dharmakirti. Let us try to put into words the essence of their thought. While Nagarjuna pictured the ultimate as the Void (sunyata), the Vijnanavadins declared that ‘Consciousness’ (vijnana) was the base-stuff of the world. Recall that the ‘father’ of modern philosophy (Descartes) using his celebrated method of doubt, found that the 'I' that doubts is the very foundation of the given. (Cogito, ergo sum). Among others, Bertrand Russell found this a fallacious conclusion – it is the state of thought or conscious awareness that is absolutely fundamental. The notion of an ‘I’ or ego is a secondary foisting, a mental artifact. The Vijnanavadins, in consonance with standard Buddhist thinking rejected the notion of an autonomous perceiver but accepted the fact that ‘consciousness’ cannot be explained away by dialectical arguments of the kind so brilliantly used by the disciples of Nagajuna. The Vijnanavadins argued that the Void being necessarily inert, featureless and unfathomable, cannot be the basis of the observed dynamism of the phenomenal world. They pointed out that a generalized and universal consciousness (vijnana) was the ontological ultimate by any method of reckoning and that the Madhyamika concept of the Void must be replaced by an all-encompassing stuff of the world that is none other than a Universal Consciousness (Alaya Vijnana). Note that consciousness as an individual perspective (as in Berkleyan idealism) is replaced by an all-pervading ‘conscious field’. A unique feature that distinguishes the Buddhist vijnanavada doctrine from the vulgar brands of idealism was its ‘storehouse’ capacity (Tathagata-garbha). It was an active generator of illusory perspectives by virtue of its inner dynamism. The ‘vacuum fluctuations’ of this Universal Consciousness created persons and perceived things, cats and dogs, Gods and Devils and the rest of the world-stuff as an expression of its inherent activity. The highest wisdom of the saint is to see that the phenomenal flux of which he is a part is a Grand Illusion or ‘hologram’ that is taken for the real until the expulsion of the masking ignorance (avidya) regarding the true nature of things. Liberation from this illusive bondage (moksha) is through an inner vision of the ‘suchness’(tathata) of the world - its generative field of world-mocking consciousness. In reaching this highest state of understanding, he dissolves himself in the anonymity of the Absolute.
The Vedantists led by Shankara directed their heaviest fire at the Vijnanavdins. How can a pure universal stuff generate diversity? The perceiver and the perceived which are diametrically opposed in nature cannot have the same root. Causal action and temporal history cannot be based on absolute homogeneity. These objections (to which a reply is given below) can be raised with equal pungency against the ‘advaitya’ doctrine of Shankara. How did the One (Brahman) which is the unshakeable unitary base of the world generate fish and fowl? It is no good saying that all this is an illusion – we can ask what caused the illusion - leading to an infinite regress. What is the meaning of spiritual purification (on which there a great ho-ha in Hindu religion) if the self is none other than the One? Are Illusion and Evil excrescences indwelling in the One?
Let us return to the Universal Consciousness of the Vijnanavadins. The problem of the genesis of minds and perceived things from a seemingly passive and unstructured pabulum is best clarified by analogy with a similar problem facing physicists and cosmologists. The ‘vacuum state’ of quantum physics is truly empty but seethes with quantum fluctuations (‘vibes’) that can give rise to anything ranging from a fundamental particle such as an electron to a whole universe. It is the ‘alaya vijnana’ of the Buddhists. It stores a potential that is unlimited and unpredictable. An innate ‘movement’ (we use this term for want of a better word) causes an illusion of dynamic activity that is manifested in seemingly miraculous ways. Such things as humans and galaxies are the result - convincingly real but in actuality no more than froth in a sea of nothingness. The famous contemporary physicist John Wheeler sees the physical world as a phantom based on the sporadic appearance of conscious minds (perceivers) in a sea of vacuum fluctuations. The appearance of minds creates a complementary world for its apperception. However, both world and mind are mere ephemeral ‘twists’ in nothingness.
It would be wrong to impute to the great scholars of Early Buddhism the kind of thinking that is current in today’s physics. Yet the similarity is striking. While the Vedantists see their Brahman under every bush, the far-sighted Buddhists see the world as a phantasmagoric epiphenomenon on a world-stuff that is dimensionally and predicatively unaccountable. It is neither matter nor mind (as ordinarily conceived) – it is the Dharmakaya (doctrinal body) of the Mahayanists.
A word of advice may not be out of place at this juncture – a strange world-view or philosophy is truly grasped by putting ones mind in resonance with the novel, re-creating in oneself the congeries of thinking that agitated the mind of the innovator. Trying to understand the words of a text (the philological approach that is much in vogue) is the wrong way of approaching a metaphysical mindset that deviates sharply from our own. Alas, Buddhist scholarship has suffered grievously because of this philological nitpicking that substitutes for the understanding of complexities that are too difficult for words.
To conclude, here is a misreading (or misinterpretation) that is deliberate and tendentious. The late President of India – the Dean of the Contemporary School of Indian Philosophy - Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan – declared that ‘Buddhism is an ethical development of the Upanishads. The Buddha, like all other spiritual leaders of India, based his thinkinChanraj 10:53, 18 October 2007 (UTC)g on the Vedic mysteries’. This is a blatant falsehood. To compare the complex subtleties of Buddhism with the incantations of the god-besotted early Aryans is like comparing the Calculus with the counting-frame arithmetic of ancient peoples. Such is the power and influence of the Brahamanic leadership of India that it has had no trouble foisting the myth that Buddhism is a ‘minor offshoot’ of the perennial rootstock of ‘Hindu’ religion. This was one of the many strategies used in making Buddhism dysfunctional in the land of its origin. Around the 11th Century AD, Buddhism was driven out of India. The New Hindu Zealots mortally wounded Buddhism while the coupe de grace was delivered by the sword-wielding Islamic fanatics.

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