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athāgatagarbha and Yogācāra

 A dispute at the start of the sixth century presaged a conflict that would

take the Chinese Buddhists more than two centuries to settle. Two Indian

monks collaborated on a translation of Vasubandhu’s Daśabhūmikasūutra

śāstra (Treatise on the Ten Stages Sutra; in Chinese, Shidijing lun, or Dilun

for short). The Dilun described the ten stages through which a bodhisattva

proceeded on the way to nirvāṇa, and Vasubandhu ’s exposition of it

highlighted aspects most in accord with the tenets of the Yogācāra school

(see Buddhism, Yogācāra school of ;  Vasubandhu). While translating, an

irreconcilable difference of interpretation broke out between the twotranslators, Bodhiruci and Ratnamati. Bodhiruci ’ s reading followed a

relatively orthodox Yogācāra line, while Ratnamati’s interpretation leaned

heavily toward a Buddhist ideology only beginning to receive attention in

China, tathāgatagarbha thought. Bodhiruci went on to translate roughly

forty additional texts, and was later embraced by both the Huayan and

Pure Land traditions as one of their early influences (see § § 8, 10).

Ratnamati later collaborated with several other translators on a number of

other texts. Both sides attempted to ground their positions on

interpretations of key texts, especially the Dilun. The Yogācāra versus

Yogācāra-tathāgatagarbha conflict became one of the critical debates

amongst sixth and seventh century Chinese Buddhists.

Yogācāra focused on the mind and distinguished eight types of

consciousness: five sensory consciousnesses; an empirical organizer of

sensory data (mano-vijñāna); a self-absorbed, appropriative consciousness

(manas); and the eighth, a warehouse consciousness (ālaya-vijñāna) that

retained the karmic impressions of past experiences and coloured new

experiences on the basis of that previous conditioning. The eighth

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consciousness was also the fundamental consciousness. Each individual

is constituted by the karmic stream of one’s own ālaya-vijñāna, that is, one’

s karmic conditioning. Since, like a stream, the ālaya-vijñāna is

reconfigured each moment in response to constantly changing conditions,

it is not a permanent self, although, being nothing more than a sequential

chain of causes and effects, it provides sufficient stability for an individual

to maintain a sense of continuity. According to classical Yogācāra texts, the

mind (that is, ālaya-vijñāna and the mental events associated with it) is the

problem, and enlightenment results from bringing this consciousness to an

end, replacing it with the Great Mirror Cognition (ādar śa-jñāna); instead of

discriminating consciousness, one has direct immediate cognition of things

 just as they are, as impartially and comprehensively as a mirror. This type

of enlightenment occurs during the eighth stage according to the Dilun and

other texts.

The term tathāgatagarbha (in Chinese, rulaizang) derives from two words:

tathāgata (Chinese, rulai) is an epithet of the Buddha, meaning either ‘thus

come’  or ‘thus gone’; garbha means embryo, womb or matrix, and was

translated into Chinese as zang, meaning ‘ repository ’ . In its earliest

appearances in Buddhist texts, tathāgatagarbha (repository of

buddhahood) signified the inherent capacity of humans (and sometimes

other sentient beings) to achieve buddhahood. Over time the concept

expanded and came to signify the original pristine pure ontological

Buddha-ness intrinsic in all things, a pure nature that is obscured or

covered over by defilements (Sanskrit, kleśa; Chinese fannao), that is,

mental, cognitive, psychological, moral and emotional obstructions. It was

treated as a synonym for Buddha-nature, though Buddha-nature

dynamically understood as engaged in a struggle against defilements and

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impurities. In Chinese Buddhism especially, the soteriological goal

consisted in a return to or recovering of that original nature by overcoming

or eliminating the defilements. The battle between the pure and impure,

light and dark, enlightenment and ignorance, good and evil and so on, took

on such epic proportions in Chinese Buddhist literature that some scholars

have compared it to Zoroastrian or Manichean themes, though evidence

for the influence of those religions on Buddhist thought has been more

suggestive than definitive (see Manicheism; Zoroastrianism).

In their classical formulations the ālaya-vijñāna and tathāgatagarbha were

distinct items differing from each other in important ways  –   for instance,enlightenment entailed bringing the ālaya-vijñāna to an end, while it meant

actualizing the tathāgatagarbha; the ālaya-vijñāna functioned as the karmic

mechanism par excellence, while tathāgatagarbha was considered the

antipode to all karmic defilements. Nonetheless some Buddhist texts, such

as the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, conflated the two. Those identifying the two

argued that the ālaya-vijñāna, like tathāgatagarbha, was pure and its purity

became permanently established after enlightenment. Those opposing the

conflation countered that the ālaya-vijñāna was itself defiled and needed to

be eliminated in order to reach enlightenment. For the conflators,

tathāgatagarbha was identified with Buddha-nature and with mind (xin)

(see Xin). Mind was considered pure, eternal, and the ontological ground

of reality (Dharma-dhātu), while defiled thought-instants (nian) that

engaged in delusionary false discriminations had to be eliminated. Once

nian were eliminated, the true, pure nature of the mind would brilliantly

shine forth, like the sun coming out from behind the clouds.

 A third view was added when Paramārtha, another Indian translator with

his own unique interpretation of Yogācāra, arrived in the middle of the sixth

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century. For his followers the most important of his translations was the

She dasheng lun (Sanskrit title, Mahāyānasaṃgraha), or Shelun, a quasi-

systematic exposition of Yogācāra theory by one its founders, Asaṅga. In

some of his translations he added a ninth consciousness beyond the usual

eight, a ‘pure consciousness’  that would pervade unhindered once the

defiled ālaya-vijñāna was destroyed. His translations, which sometimes

took liberties with the Sanskrit originals, offered a more sophisticated

version of the conflation theory.

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