Yogacara

Yogacara [Skt.,=yoga practice], philosophical school of Mahayana Buddhism , also known as the Vijnanavada or Consciousness School. The founders of this school in India were Maitreya (270-350), his disciple Asanga (c.375-430), and Asanga's younger half-brother Vasubandhu (c.400-480), who was also the greatest systematizer of the Abhidharma type of Buddhist philosophy. The school held that consciousness ( vijnana ) is real, but its objects are constructions and unreal. The school's teachings are thus often characterized by the phrase "consciousness-only" ( citta-matra ) or "representation-only" ( vijnapti-matra ). The content of consciousness is produced not by independently existing objects but by the inner modifications of consciousness itself. A theory of eight kinds of consciousness was formed to explain how this process functions. The deepest level of consciousness is the "store-consciousness" ( alaya-vijnana ), which is both individual and universal and contains the seeds or traces of past actions, which are projected into manifestation through the "defiled mind" and the six sense-consciousnesses (the five physical senses plus mind or thought). The school was transmitted to China as the Fa-hsiang. It eventually syncretized with the Madhyamika school.

Bibliography: See D. T. Suzuki, Studies in the Lankavatara Sutra (1930); S. Radhakrishman and C. A. Moore, A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy (1957); A. K. Chatterjee, The Yogacara Idealism (1962); C. L. Tripathi, The Problem of Knowledge in Yogacara Buddhism (1972).