Contexts and Dialogue: Yogacara Buddhism and Modern Psychology on the Subliminal Mind

Chapter 1: The Origin of the Concept of Ālayavijñāna

1 T H E O R I G I N O F T H E C O N C E P T O F 0L A Y A V I J Ñ 0N A Religious doctrines are a complex web of teachings whose sources are far from being singular or homogeneous. If a religious tradition has a founder, whether actual or alleged, the received teachings of the founder become the foundation upon which the orthodoxy evolves. However, when the founder addresses questions from disciples directly, various explanations are given on different occasions within different contexts to different audiences addressing different concerns. When the founder dies, his disciples are left with the task of assembling his teachings to preserve them for future generations . Because different teachings target different audiences in their lived situations, apparent inconsistencies emerge when such concrete contexts are left out in the pursuit of abstract doctrinal formulations. With the teacher gone, the contexts of many of the teachings go with him, and his disciples have to deal with these inconsistencies.Although some of them can be explained away through a study of the contexts of the teachings, others are harder to clarify by appealing to the contexts alone. This latter kind of inconsistency is usually indicative of tensions among some foundational doctrines within the religious tradition. Such tensions constitute a major source of creativity, often leading to the development of various doctrinal systems. In the context of Buddhism, the rise of Abhidharma literature in early Buddhism, which is meant to classify and analyze the fundamental teachings of the Buddha, reflects the Buddhist effort to overcome a variety of tensions in these teachings. Yog1c1ra Buddhism , which started around the fourth century C.E., inherits the Abhidharma’s systematic pursuit of a body of coherent and cogent Buddhist doctrines. As William Waldron points out, “[I]t was within 21 the historical and conceptual context of Abhidharma scholasticism that the Yog1c1ra school arose, and within whose terms the notion of the 1layavijñ1na was expressed” (2003, 47). In this chapter we will explore one fundamental tension within the Buddha’s teachings that Abhidharma Buddhists attempt to overcome. This will set the stage for our discussion, in Chapter Two, of the continual effort by Yog1c1ra to grapple with this critical problem in its theoretical endeavors with the postulation of 1layavijñ1na at the center. The tension in question is between identity and change, reflected in the difficulty in conceptualizing continuity. On the one hand, for there to be continuity in change, there needs to be something— identity—that is continuously changing; on the other hand, if there is identity, change is either impossible (identity itself cannot change otherwise it would be lost) or regarded as the attribute of unchanging substance or identity; hence change is only apparent/illusory but ultimately unreal. Such a tension is played out in the Buddhist struggle to provide a coherent account of the Buddha’s core teachings of an1tman (no-self), karma, anitya (impermanence), and pratEtyasamutp1da (dependent origination). In other words, can an1tman be reconciled with karma if there is no underlying bearer of karma? Can the impermanence of existence account for the continuity and coherence of our experience of the world as depicted by dependent origination? We will see how various schools of Abhidharma Buddhism, prior to or contemporaneous with the Yog1c1ra School, attempt to cope with this tension so that Yog1c1ra’s effort, culminated in the formulation of 1layavijñ1na, can be understood within a proper context. In providing a philosophical account of the origin of the concept of 1layavijñ1na, this chapter is written with one primary objective in mind: to reveal the rationale for the postulation of a concept like 1layavijñ1na within the Buddhist tradition. This will provide a proper context for our detailed discussion of the formulation of 1layavijñ1na in Chapter Two, thus laying the foundation for the comparative study of Yog1c1ra and modern psychoanalysis and their respective conceptualizations of the subliminal mind later in the book. Given this book’s intended audience (Buddhist specialists as well as non-specialists), its dialogical and comparative nature, and the existence of several fine scholarly works on some of the issues examined ,1 our investigation of the origin of 1layavijñ1na will not be exhaustive; neither is an exhaustive investigation desirable for our purpose here. I will focus my attention on the theoretical endeav22 contexts and dialogue ors that...