by Ben Connelly
Recently another car almost hit me. I reflexively pulled over and dodged it. I noticed my racing heart and an angry thought, I noticed the leaves in the gutter, I saw the stricken face of the driver who’d realized what they’d done, I felt a flush of compassion for the two of us in this awkward situation, and I felt our deep connection to the billions of other people who are in danger, are afraid, who make mistakes, the whole thing. I felt at peace. The external situation was very similar to the first mishap, but there were different seeds in my storehouse this time, seeds of presence, seeds of peace, seeds of compassion, sown by Buddhist practice.
The store consciousness is a Yogacara innovation, but it has deep roots in Early Buddhist thought. Early Buddhism uses the term bhavanga to describe a similar aspect of consciousness, a ground of karmic activity below our awareness. In the Anguttara Nikaya, Buddha teaches, “Karma is intention, having intended, one does karma through body, speech, and mind.” Karma produces intention, which produces actions of body, speech, and mind, which produce further karma.
Since there is suffering in our past, there is suffering in our present. Since there is kindness in our past, there is kindness in our present. But this is the main point: you have this moment of intention. This moment’s intention—what you choose right now—is the key to whether you are moving toward more suffering or more kindness. Every single moment you have an opportunity to plant a beneficial karmic seed. In terms of what you can do with your life, your choice in this moment is what really matters. It is the endless point of return for Buddhist practice.
This does not mean that karma—previous intention—is the only thing that influences your life. In the Sivaka Sutta, Buddha makes it clear that in his view we experience many things that are not the result of karma. It is not karma that brings a tsunami to Indonesia, nor karma alone that gives you cancer. Just as Consciousness Only does not ultimately teach that consciousness is all that there is, but that it is best to concentrate on consciousness; likewise karma does not teach that our whole life is shaped by our past choices, but that, if we want to be well, we should concentrate on the choice we are making in this moment. Keeping the store consciousness in mind can help us remember that we have the capacity to plant healthy seeds that can bear fruit that is good for us, for our loved ones, and for everything.
There is a grave danger that the theory of karma will be used to blame the victims of horrible circumstances, by claiming that they are brought on by their karma. Karma should be used not to blame those whose suffer but to offer a message of empowerment. If you suffer from emotional and behavioral knots from traumatic experiences in the past, as I believe everyone to some degree does, the teaching of karma gives you the opportunity to practice freedom from these painful patterns.
In the second half of this verse, Vasubandhu begins to lay out some characteristics of the storehouse, as he will with the manas and the six senses in subsequent verses. The first characteristic is that what the storehouse holds and what it perceives as its surroundings are not something we can consciously know. What it holds is twofold: our body and our karma.
We say the store consciousness holds the body because somewhere deep in our unconscious mind there is a sense that our consciousness is attached to a physical form. In fact, underlying almost all human experience is a sense that we are located in a body. Oftentimes, our sense is that consciousness is located in the head. Neuroscientists, however, tell us that we can’t actually locate consciousness in a physical place, and sometimes people dreaming, meditating, reacting to trauma, under the influence of drugs, or in various other circumstances experience consciousness as outside of the body. However, we generally have a conscious sense of being in our physical body.
We say that the storehouse’s holding of the body is unknown because there are ways in which our consciousness relates to the body that are below or beyond our awareness. When we tie our shoes, it is very common that we have no awareness of what we’re doing with our fingers and yet they execute an incredibly intricate dance to tie the knot; this is conditioning of the store consciousness manifesting with its sense of holding a body. It is possible, of course, to be mindful of tying our shoes, to bring awareness to the action, and this is a lovely practice. Our breath is also a bridge between our store consciousness taking up the body and our awareness of that body; it is a place where we can become aware of something that is usually unconscious. But although we can come closer to seeing the way our unconscious has a sense of having a body, ultimately there will always be something below thought: for example, the motion of the individual ventricles of the heart and the dilation of our eyes.
The storehouse also holds our karma. In each moment the store consciousness is processing karma; the impressions of our past are forming what the storehouse is anew. Just as a river can be called a river, but at no point is it ever identical to any other version of itself—the riffles of its surface, the water of its flowing, utterly unique in each moment—so we can say that there is a storehouse that is made of a flow of karma, but what that karma is, is always completely unique. This unique moment of karmic contents is what the storehouse holds, and we cannot directly see it. We can infer things about our karma, but we can’t directly know it. In Buddhist practice we put some trust in our storehouse: if we plant beneficial seeds of kindness, generosity, mindful attention to our emotions, and wholehearted work, those seeds will bear fruit. This trust isn’t so hard to find if we practice, as it is very easy to see the wellness appear in our lives when we do it.
We also can’t know what the store consciousness perceives; it is perception operating below our conscious awareness. In the Yogacarabhumi, Vasubandhu’s half-brother and the other great genius of Yogacara, Asanga, explains using the metaphor of a burning lamp. He compares the body to a wick, our karmic impressions to oil, and light to what the storehouse perceives. On one hand it is clear that a wick, oil, light, and the images the light illuminates are interdependent: none exists without the other. The key point here, though, is that what our unconscious perceives is limited and profoundly colored by our current state of body and karma. Picture a large cave lit by an oil lamp’s flame; we see a tiny area of the floor and dim light disappearing into darkness in all directions. If the lamp burns high and steady, with clear fuel and a good wick, we may see the rough and lovely walls appear. If the flame is guttering and rough, we see a phantasmagoria of tortured shadows writhing on the walls. Before our perceptions even enter our conscious awareness as the six senses, there is this unconscious perception of the world, profoundly influenced by our karma and our body, that underlies what we believe is direct perception.
I recall once, as a young adolescent, I was living in London, far from my small hometown in Iowa. I was making a long walk home from the center of the city and took a new route. I became disoriented and began to feel a rising sense of panic, completely lost in a foreign city much larger than any I had known. As I walked, everything looked utterly unknown and frightening. My mind raced and my heart pounded. Suddenly in the middle of a large open square, I realized exactly where I was and that I had been there a dozen times before. I recognized everything as familiar. One step before, I had seen a dangerous, unknown city; in the next step, a well-known, comfortable spot near my home. The external world was the same, the processes in my storehouse were different. The karmic impressions of fear and disorientation and the racing heart and ragged breath all evaporated in the light of the karmic impressions of my memory of the place, and the nearness of a cup of milky tea.
It helps to know that what the storehouse perceives is unknown. It helps because it can remind us that what we are seeing—what we believe to be reality right now—is actually deeply and unknowably conditioned by our unconscious tendencies. This knowledge can help us let go when we are trying hard to control things, when we feel like we know exactly how everything should be. We don’t even know how it really is; how can we know how it should be? When we are afraid, or anxious, or sad, we can rem
ember that whatever is bringing us this feeling has only questionable reality. It helps to know that what the storehouse perceives is unknown because it may encourage us to do our meditation practice, to sow the seeds of wellness, so that the world our storehouse perceives doesn’t have to be one full of fearful things, ugliness, and problems, but can instead be full of beauty and opportunities to do some small, helpful thing. Through upright sitting and the steady practice of compassionate action, the lamp of our store consciousness may come to cast a bright and steady light to guide the Way.
4
Aspects of the Buddhist Unconscious
It is always associated with sense-contact, attention, sensation, perception, and volition,
Neither pleasant nor unpleasant. It is unobstructed, and karmically neutral,
Like a river flowing. In enlightenment it is overturned at its root. || 4 ||
Sense-contact, attention, sensation, perception, and volition—these are the five universal mental factors, which are always associated with the store consciousness. In order to understand the first line of this verse, we’ll need to see their close relationship to the five aggregates, or skandhas, one of the oldest and most fundamental subjects of Buddhist teaching.
These aggregates—form, sensation, perception, formation, and consciousness—provide a way of describing experience. A key Early Buddhist practice was to see the five aggregates and realize that none of them were I, me, or mine. When one sees that nothing in our experience is truly ourself, the tendency to cling to things is shed—since there is no I that can cling—and we can be free of suffering.
The first of the aggregates, form, means the physical world: earth, water, air, and heat. The next, sensation, sometimes translated as “feeling-tone,” is the very root-level and generally subconscious sense that we have in each of moment of “liking,” “not liking,” or “indifference.” This is usually described as positive, negative, or neutral sensation. Perception, the third, is the ascribing of concepts to this basic sense data. When there is dark motion in our field of vision, that is form; when the mind conceptualizes it as a bird, that is perception; when it is large, there may be a positive sensation, as some minds are inclined to like large birds. Formation, the fourth aggregate, is the way that our karmic conditioning impels us to act. It is the intersection of our karma and our intention, and it often carries an emotional tone. I was raised by birders, so when perception recognizes a big bird and a positive sensation arises, a formation of excitement appears, and I desire to stop and look at it. Consciousness, the fifth aggregate, sometimes called “knowing,” is awareness or cognizance. It has a distinct meaning in this five-aggregate schema. Generally in a case like this, my consciousness is awareness of the bird as a form in the visual field and as a perception: “An eagle!” But if I am mindful of the aggregates, I may also notice the formation, an excited emotion and impulse to point, the underlying sense of positive sensation, and form as it manifests in the way my body feels.
The five factors in this verse, which will reappear twice more in the “Thirty Verses,” are a modified version of the five aggregates. The reworking of the five aggregates into the five universal factors was an innovation of the Abhidharma movement, in which Vasubandhu did his earlier studies and writing.
“Perception” and “sensation” from the five aggregates become two of the five universal mental factors, unchanged. “Form” is revamped into “sense-contact”: the interaction between a sense organ, for example the ear, and a sense object, such as sound. By reframing this we seek to eliminate the problem of knowing whether what we are perceiving as form is real. For example I have tinnitus, a constant ringing in my ears. Also, right now, there are crickets singing outside the window. The sounds are extremely similar and sometimes indistinguishable. By calling the experience “sense-contact,” and identifying a sound (singing and/or ringing) instead of a form (crickets?), I acknowledge that I don’t ultimately know what is “out there”; I just know that there is some kind of sensory experience. “Form” implies that we experience a “thing” or object; sense-contact simply describes that there is a sensory occurrence.
The aggregate of consciousness is remade into “attention” in this system. In Early Buddhist texts the term consciousness usually means “awareness,” but sometimes it refers to that which enters into the womb when a person embarks on a new rebirth. By using the term attention the Abidharma and this text give us one definition and one aspect of experience we can attend to: awareness, or more precisely, where our awareness is directed.
Formation, or volitional tendency, is remade here into “volition.” In momentary terms we can notice that we have an impulse or choice to do something, a volition. We can’t, however, directly experience the past conditions that create that volition; as we saw in verse 3, what the storehouse holds (its karma) can’t be known. The aggregate called “formation” includes both of these aspects—volition and conditioning—but Vasubandhu, using the Abhidharma approach, divides and isolates them. He gives us “volition” to investigate in the moment as one of the five universal mental factors, and then he deals extensively with the issue of conditioning throughout this text, using the metaphor of karmic seeds. Thus these two aspects of the aggregate called “formation” are separated.
HOW THE ELEMENTS OF THE THREE WAYS OF CATEGORIZING EXPERIENCE CORRESPOND
Five Aggregates
Five Universal Mental Factors
Six Conciousnesses; the All
Form
Sense Contact
sight, sound, smell, taste, touch
Consciousness
Attention
thought
Sensation
Sensation
Perception
Perception
Formation
Volition
To recap: Sense-contact is a nonconceptualized moment of sensory experience. Attention is the mind being aware of some particular aspect of the moment. Sensation is a very basic, generally subconscious sense of positivity, negativity, or neutrality. Perception is the ascribing of conceptual labels to things. Volition is the impulse or inclination to act, generally characterized by an emotion. Being aware of these universal factors occurring through mindfulness meditation allows us to see that they are not I, me, or mine—they are just things that are happening—and thus helps us let go of our ego-centered tendency to cling to things. We will investigate meditation practice with the five universal factors in a few chapters.
The second line of this verse refers to a kind of neutrality that characterizes the store consciousness. It doesn’t have a positive or negative sensation, it isn’t obstructed by afflictive emotion or delusion, and it does not itself create or record karma. This is a little confusing as the karmic processes in the store consciousness produce sensations, affliction, and further karma, which we experience as a sense of self and the imagery of sense objects. The storehouse is not the seeds, though neither is it separate from them. The point is that the storehouse itself is neutral; it is simply a space where karmic processes occur. It can be full of rotting corn or fresh organic greens, but once those are gone, it is just a neutral space ready for the next contents. Even when you find yourself overwhelmed by fear, grief, anger, or confusion, you still have the chance to plant a seed of compassionate awareness and find a moment of peace. Sometimes the power of our conditioning—that thicket of thorns—is so dense that our intention to be present and kind seems like a puff of cotton in the wind, but that small effort may allow that seed to land and someday grow into the broad shade of a cottonwood tree, where weary travelers find rest. Because of the neutrality of the store consciousness there is room for infinite change and growth. Every moment is your opportunity.
The store consciousness is like a river flowing. We can describe it as a solid thing for practical purposes, but it is only a process of change. It is a momentary phenomenon that is nominally described to help us be well. It is not lasting, separate, or permanent. T
he earliest Yogacara text, the Samdhinirmocana Sutra, states:
The storehouse consciousness is very profound and subtle;
All its seeds are like a torrential flow.
I do not explain it to the ignorant,
For fear they will cling to it and consider it a self.
As Heraclitus perfectly put it, “You cannot step in the same river twice.”
A river is powerful and ineluctable. Forces infinitely old come together to make the river what it is in this moment. Sometimes heat-beaten wayfarers may come to take cool water on the banks along with all the wild things, at other times the waters rise in great flood and tear away trees and bridges, sweeping away those who come too close. Sometimes our conditioning allows us to be a cool place for others to find respite, and other times we cause harm. The river itself is beyond our control, but by attending to our minds we can become aware of how it swells, how it banks, and how it slowly flows. We don’t really see the river, the store consciousness, but we can see how the force of our conditioning is creating this moment of emotion and in this way be a little less likely to be swept away by it. We can take care of what’s right before us, our own on-flowing heart.
A basic teaching of Buddhism tells us that we can let go of karma and find complete rest: nirvana. This third line says that in nirvana, the entire process of karma that occurs in the storehouse is overturned; there is a revolution at the root of consciousness, sometimes called a transformation at the base.
