Inside Vasubandhu's Yogacara

by Ben Connelly

  Many meditation instructions offer awareness of breath in the body as the basis for samatha; it is surely a good foundation. Just breath. In Dogen’s Universal Recommendation for Zazen, he begins his meditation instruction thus: “Stop measuring things with thoughts, ideas, and views. Give up the operations of mind, intellect, and consciousness. Do not think good or bad. Do not judge true or false.” This gives some good direction in how to practice samatha, but it is still dualistic. For example, we are instructed not to judge, which creates a duality of judging and not judging. We will see this is not the end of Dogen’s instruction on the subject, but it’s a good place to start. The Samdhinirmocana Sutra’s definition of how to practice samatha offers the similar instruction of “observe without conceptualizing,” but it also suggests something deeper, something beyond duality, something ungraspable: observing something nonconceptual that is, by definition, conceptualized by the process of consciousness.

  The Awakening of Faith, a highly influential sixth-­century text whose origins are murky but is probably from China, contains many Yogacara ideas. In it there are instructions on vipassana and samatha; here are that text’s beginnings of the instructions for samatha practice, in Yoshito Hakeda’s translation:

  Sit erect with an even temper. Attention should be neither focused on the breath, nor on any form of color, nor on empty space, earth, water, fire, wind, nor even on what has been seen, heard, remembered, or conceived.

  Focus is directed toward nothing. Generally the human mind focuses on a train of thought, or jumps about from object to object. Vipassana meditation gives the mind an object to attend to, on which to concentrate. In the Awakening of Faith’s instructions, samatha does not.

  What is most striking to me, however, is that the Awakening of Faith equates samatha with cessation; it says that to practice samatha in this way is to practice cessation.

  Cessation plays a major role in the Buddha’s first and most fundamental teaching, the four noble truths: suffering, the origin of suffering, the cessation of suffering, and the Eightfold Path, which leads to the cessation of suffering. Cessation is nirvana, the end of suffering, and it is simply defined as the letting go of craving, of wanting things to be other than they are. Cessation is achieved over time, through practice.

  However, many Mahayana teachings say everything is nondual. Therefore, suffering and nirvana are not separate. Enlightenment is now. The Awakening of Faith says you can practice cessation now; samatha, nondual meditation, is the practice of cessation. Zen Master Dogen’s central message, also, is that we can practice enlightenment right now. How do we do this? Dogen says we should engage in whatever we are doing wholeheartedly: scrubbing toilets, talking to lawyers, eating rice, raking leaves, sitting still, whatever it is, do it with your whole self. We should do it with no object—no goal and no object, nothing that is separate from us. We should practice nondualism. In his Universal Recommendation for Zazen, Dogen quotes Yaoshan’s teaching on how he rests in steadfast composure, calm abiding, samatha: “I think not-­thinking.”

  Nondualism is paradoxical and impossible to define; language always puts a false limit on it. Nondualism is impossible to practice, but we are always doing it, as we are already completely not-­separate from our activity and the whole universe; it is already our complete, realized nature. How do you practice samatha, cessation, how do you practice the radical and complete shedding of the delusion of separateness? There is no answer outside this moment of experience, but we have some clues left by masters along the way. Completely give yourself to this moment without judging or figuring anything out. Everything is included.

  24

  Three Natures, All Without Self

  The imaginary is without self by definition. The other-­dependent does not exist by itself.

  The third is no-­self nature—that is, || 24 ||

  Imagine yourself in a desert. The glare of the sun pushes your eyes down toward the sand, which makes the sweat run, burning, into your eyes. You are heading north to home and family on the shore of the vast, cool ocean. To the west, across the shimmering waves of burning gold you see a pool of water. Relief! You turn your course toward the cool, refreshing sight, but it never seems to get any nearer. With every step it still hovers just along the horizon, and the well of your thirst grows deeper.

  The metaphor of a mirage is a classic Yogacara description of the imaginary nature. Something occurs in our senses that we believe to be real, external, and desirable, and we pursue it endlessly. This is samsara. Sure, we may enjoy some of our time in the desert, but we spend a vast amount of our time working for things that don’t actually promote our well-­being. It’s well documented that wealth beyond enough to secure food, shelter, and medicine has almost no bearing on human happiness, yet look how much energy is put into pursuing a little (or a lot) more money. Money is just a concept, an imagination. It does not ultimately exist outside of its dependence on our belief in it. Sure, it’s a useful thing to imagine sometimes, and it can be nice to share the imagination and buy lunch for you and a friend, or send some imagination to Amnesty International, but it’s not worth overworking yourself just to get a little extra imagination.

  Infinite conditions come together to create the appearance of the mirage. Heat, the sun, the horizon, thirst, eyes, desire, molecules of oxygen, and so on. The conditions of an unknowably vast past, the countless components of this momentary experience, and the way our mind conceptualizes—conditioned by family, our actions, evolution, and culture—all participate in this web of dependencies that create the image that appears to be water where there is none. This is the mirage’s other-­dependent nature.

  When we see the other-­dependent nature we see that conditions have come together to create the appearance of a thing, and we see the complete, realized nature. We know that the shimmering dark image on the horizon is a mirage, and we are aware that it is a result of infinite conditions working together. If we think about the other-­dependence of a thing, we might say, “My thirst, the way my eyes function, the heat, the sand, and the atmospheric conditions are all arising in a way that makes me think that image over there will make everything okay if I can just get to it.” We know that the water is not itself, but an image created by dependence. When we see in this way, we can be aware that others will be desiring and striving to get to the water, and our heart will be touched to know that vast numbers of people are worrying, working, and struggling to get to the imagined relief of the shimmering oasis. Instead of being caught by desire, we can be aware of it and see that it arises dependent on everything else. We can turn our attention from pursuing the object of desire, the imaginary water, or the magical wealth, and turn it toward the central work of Buddhism: the alleviation of suffering.

  Vasubandhu gives us some help in developing a sense of the complete, realized nature in this and next verse. Here, he says it is no-­self nature; to see the complete, realized nature is to see not water, not a mirage. This is an important point for beginning. Enlightenment itself—“the way things appear in enlightenment” is part of the semantic range of the term “complete, realized nature”—is not a thing. It is, by definition, nonself, empty. This means you cannot have it, you cannot hold it. There is not an ultimate reality that you get to see because you are enlightened. This is not something you can grasp or acquire, and within it there is nothing to grasp or acquire.

  The term “realize” is felicitous. Complete realization is possible; it points toward a mind that has realized something and also to the act of its being made real. What is realized is neither the same nor different from the other-­dependent and has no self—it is not a thing.

  25

  Four Ways to Express the Inexpressible

  The complete, realized nature of all phenomena, which is thusness—

  Since it is always already thus, projection only. || 25 ||

  Vasubandhu makes one of the more extraordinary statements in this text at the end of this verse. He says that projection
only—whatever we are experiencing right now, the illusion created by our karmic conditioning—which presumably this entire text is designed to help us transcend, is identical with complete realization.

  In this verse describing the complete, realized nature as being absent of self-nature, he uses a fourfold description: it is nonself; it is complete, realized nature; it is thusness; and it is projection only. Dogen Zenji makes a very similar argument in characteristically poetic fashion in his essay “Painting of a Rice Cake.” Although the essay is complex and covers a great deal of ground, it is principally a commentary on an old Zen saying, “a painting of a rice cake does not satisfy hunger,” the most common interpretation of which is that the endless craving that characterizes the human condition cannot be satisfied by anything conditioned by our conceptualizations. A painting of a rice cake is not a real edible rice cake; it is of an imaginary nature, it is a projection. This is a major theme in Mahayana Buddhism. We must let go of all concepts to see the emptiness of phenomena and that is how we go beyond birth and death, beyond samsara, beyond suffering, and how we may engage in the world of suffering and be completely available in every moment. This certainly would seem to be a theme of the “Thirty Verses”—to look into the depth of our delusion about the world and investigate the patterns that cause it so that we may let it go. Dogen, like Vasubandhu, investigates thoroughly the necessity of letting go of conceptualization, to see how a painting of a rice cake cannot satisfy hunger. At the end of the essay, though, Dogen writes, “there is no remedy for satisfying hunger other than a painted rice cake.” The complete, realized nature is projection only. We do not realize the way by transcending or escaping projection only; we do it by realizing that the no-self nature of everything is projection only, complete realization, thusness, just this moment. And it is always already thus.

  Thusness, or tathata in Sanskrit, is sometimes translated as “suchness.” It refers to things right in this very moment, undivided by conception. Or, we might say, it refers to just this very moment, just this. It is an affirmative expression of the concept of emptiness. It is this moment of experience, of consciousness, without an overlay of concepts. We find some sense of what “thusness” refers to when the thinking mind slows way down in meditation and we find ourselves absorbed in simple uncategorized sounds, the patterns of light and dark on the floor, the sensations, unjudged, in the body. The complete, realized nature is right here in momentary concrete sensual experience, in your fingers holding this book, and the plane flying over my head.

  In Shitou’s poem “Harmony of Difference and Sameness” he says, “progress is not a matter of far or near.” The characters translated as “far” and “near” also carry the meanings “transcendence” and “intimacy,” respectively. To see the no-self nature of things is transcendence, to realize the complete, realized nature of projection only, of thusness, of your experience right now, is intimacy with our own mind, with everything. Shitou has internalized the message of this verse of Vasubandhu’s. He’s saying “difference” and “sameness,” “near” and “far,” are not two. Being completely intimate with whatever is here—joy, tranquility, anger, the sound of traffic, selfishness, lamplight, sleepiness—is the only way to transcendence, and transcendence only occurs in complete intimacy with how things are right now, thusness. You cannot realize the way by trying to escape.

  The phrase “always already thus” is striking. Everything is always, already thus: nonself, complete realization, thusness, and projection only. Whatever consciousness is manifesting right now—perhaps a sense that you are a person reading a book in a chair—is simultaneously none of those things, a projection of karma, exactly what it is, and enlightenment. Enlightenment is not something separate from anything else. It is not a thing, but it is the nature of everything, always. The most extraordinary thing about this grand series of paradoxes is that they are merely the best efforts made by people in the Buddhist tradition to describe their experience, which is not their experience, because there is no one there in the middle to experience it. Why bother to describe this, why leap high into these impossible, linguistic hoops? Because they can point us on the way to practice and perhaps they can provide some encouragement along the way for those of us who wish to devote ourselves to universal well-­being.

  Each aspect of this fourfold description of Vasubandhu’s can help us. Studying that the nature of everything is nonself can help us to let go of the rigidity of our ideas, which keeps us feeling separate and caught in our web of self-­centered needs created by that sense of separation. Reminders that everything (including you!) is complete realization, is enlightenment, can let a great beam of light into us, a buoyancy, an illumination, a lifting, a softening of our heart, to everything we meet. Teachings on thusness remind us to just be here, in life, right now, exactly as it is. This very moment, however it is and whatever your activity, is your opportunity to give yourself wholeheartedly to the world: Change the diaper, type the report, listen to the radio, hug your mom. Do it with your whole heart. This is the whole thing, complete realization. That everything is always projection only reminds us that we don’t know what’s real: we are and are in our conditioning, we have our minds and hearts, our own emotional projections, our own habits and conceptions to take care of always. In taking care of what arises in this moment in our six senses, we can take care of our projection only. Every thought and every person, every animal, and every blade of grass is in this projection. They are all, in this very moment, our chance to step into the Way, into the vow to give ourselves to the well-­being of the world.

  26

  How We Are Bound

  As long as consciousness does not rest in projection only,

  The tendencies of grasping self and other will not cease. || 26 ||

  Vasubandhu does not here offer us a vision of escape from our projections and our karma; he offers the possibility of finding peace right in the midst of them. He is offering us hope for liberation from the relentless tendency of the mind to create grasping, and thus to create suffering. He does this while harmonizing the Early Buddhist idea that we practice to go from samsara to nirvana with the Mahayana idea that samsara and nirvana are one.

  Nirvana is defined variously in Early Buddhist texts, but basically it is nonsuffering, the end of desire, aversion, and delusion. In the Thirty-­Three Synonyms for Nirvana Sutra, the Buddha teaches that nirvana is “the peaceful, the deathless, the sublime, the secure, the destruction of craving, the wonderful, the unailing, the unafflicted, dispassion, freedom, nonattachment, the shelter, the refuge, the destination, and the path leading to the destination.” Here Vasubandhu uses a similar word, avatisthati, which is sometimes translated as “abide” or “rest.” This verse says that until we find rest here in projection only, the grasping of self and other will not cease, and thus, the cycle of seeds of suffering will continue. If we let consciousness rest in how things are a little bit, the tendencies of grasping self and other will soften, and some seeds will be planted that may fruit another day in deeper rest and a yet-­more-­open hand of thought. Many of my friends have talked about how after sitting silently on retreats at our Zen practice center, we often find that we feel a close bond, a deep connection to the other people there, people we may never have spoken to or even looked full in the face. A few days of letting the body be still and allowing things to come and go with an observant but relaxed mind, a few days of just resting in what is, bridged the apparent gulf between ourselves and others.

  Vasubandhu is reminding us that getting to nirvana is about going from a place of grasping to finding a place of rest. But in the same sentence, he is also saying that nirvana is not outside of samsara; rest is not outside of the very process of projection only that creates samsara. Rest is not going to be found when consciousness ends, nor when projection only is overcome, but when consciousness rests in projection only. He is saying that to realize the Buddha way we must be intimate with and completely realize projection only—that is,
whatever is here in this moment. Recall that avatisthati means “abide” as well as “rest”; consciousness always rests in projection only because there is nowhere else for it to be situated. Samsara and nirvana are not separate. Nirvana is “the destination, and the path leading to the destination.”

  Vasubandhu places the twofold grasping of grasping self and other, graha-­dvaya, at the very heart of what must be shed if we are to find peace and freedom. If we look back to the nineteenth verse, we will see that this sense of being a self perceiving other things is central to the way karmic seeds are produced:

  Karmic impressions and the impressions of grasping self and other

  Produce further ripening as the former karmic effect is exhausted.