NEW339H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Indriya, Pineapple, Yogachara
The hand out is a list of what yogacara called mental states
Todays class is a compared study of the psychological states as
discussed in western psychology and how they were understood in
Buddhism psychology
The Buddhist approach in the understanding of these mental
states: how do the Buddhists understand the meaning of these mental
states and what to do about them once they understand them
Alaya-vijana the storehouse consciousness
•The relation of this with the mind
•Function: there is only one function and that is to store up the
seeds from our karmic actions; The actual function is more or
less like a filing cabinet, where are the files of our karmic are
filed under different categories (good, bad, neutral files, etc)
in the storehouse Only function
o It doesn’t choose what files to store, it doesn’t
discriminate the files in any way, whatever you do it
creates a new file in the cabinet, it is neutral about this;
It doesn’t reject files
•Because of this function, there is a later yogacara believe that
when we die, it is this function of our consciousness that this
storehouse is the last part that leaves the body BUT the first
thing that enters to womb of our mother
•It is a tool for transmigration󰇫
•It is only karma that links you up with your future/past lives,
we are neither the same or different from our future/previous
lives; It’s a stream of consciousness that it maintained
throughout storehouse consciousness
•Upon our death our physical being decays, our body is viewed
as the 5 main elements (fire, earth, wind, water), one
dissolves into the other This could explain why we are cold
when we die or why we are thirsty
•When we breath our last breath we would be certified as dead
from a medical perspective but the storehouse consciousness
is still functioning
o The consciousness in our body is still active, what is
dead is the physical being and once we are certified as
dead there is a period of 14 days that the consciousness
is still inside our body so we can still hear things around
us; after 14 days it will be carried onto one’s future
mother
There is karma that builds of the attractiveness to
your future mothers womb
Consciousness is waiting for the chance for their
reincarnation more scary than Halloween itself
This is not a belief of an internal soul
because the content of the alaya-vijana is
always changing
o This process can be described in very colorful ways
o After your death you can still see/hear/smell/feel, etc
You still have these consciousness
Bardo states = in between 2 lives
The alaya-vijana is usually described as the 8th consciousness
•Before the time of yogacara there was a belief that we had 6
consciousness – Better way to look at it is that we have 1
single consciousness with 6 different functions (our eyes,
ears, nose, tongue, body, mind); These 6 consciousness’s are
mental states/consciousness
o Eye: We are able to see things not just with the eyes;
the eyes themselves are the indriya (tool) but we also
need the mental capacity as well
It is the eye consciousness that allows us to see
things with the eyes and same for the other 5
elements….you need consciousness after the
function*
•The Buddhist says that an experience arises when there is the
subject meeting with the object as well with a consciousness
present
o i.e. an experience of smelling coffee would only happen
if we have a nose, an actual coffee present and a nose
consciousness; When the 3 meet that’s when we have
the experience of smelling the scent of coffee – We
couldn’t smell anything else like pineapple unless the
pineapple was there
o All things are dependently originated, all of these are
conditions
Document Summary
The hand out is a list of what yogacara called mental states. Todays class is a compared study of the psychological states as discussed in western psychology and how they were understood in. Buddhism psychology states: how do the buddhists understand the meaning of these mental states and what to do about them once they understand them. The buddhist approach in the understanding of these mental. Sarvastivada: the past is still in the past and the future is already in the future. We recreate our own past according to how we want it to be; Imagination is one thing, the actual experience of seeing something with the present of it and the consciousness that relates to it is another. Meritorious mental states all of these have to be understood according to a context: faith, if we are trying to understand this in yogacara.
