by Ben Connelly
A practical, down-to-earth guide to mind-only philosophy—which can transform modern life and change how you see the world.
In Inside Vasubandhu’s Yogacara, author and teacher Ben Connelly sure-handedly guides us through the intricacies of Yogacara and the richness of Vasubandhu’s “Thirty Verses on Consciousness Only.” Dedicating one chapter of the book to each verse of the poem, he helps us understand this profound work from a titan of Buddhist thought. Connelly’s warm and wise voice unpacks and contextualizes Vasubandhu’s wisdom, showing us how we can apply his ancient insights to our own modern lives, creating a life of engaged peace, harmony, compassion, and joy.
“A readable, accessible starting point for verbal understanding, contemplation, and meditative maturation. Connelly’s clarity and refreshing humility invite a wide range of practitioners into the view and methods of the Consciousness-Only school.” —Shosan Victoria Austin, San Francisco Zen Center
This is a great introduction to a philosophy, a master, and a work whose influence reverberates throughout modern Buddhism.
BEN CONNELLY is a Soto Zen priest in the Katagiri lineage. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and is the author of Inside the Grass Hut: Living Shitou’s Classic Zen Poem.
Contents
Foreword by Norman Fischer
Introduction
“Thirty Verses on Consciousness Only”
1.Self and Other
2.The Eight-Consciousnesses Model
3.Store Consciousness
4.Aspects of the Buddhist Unconscious
5.Mind Makes Self and Other
6.Stuck on the Self
7.Seeing Through I, Me, and Mine
8.The All
9.Mindfulness of Phenomena
10.Five Aggregates, Five Universal Factors
11.Cultivating Seeds of Goodness
12.Being with Suffering
13.Taking Care of Suffering
14.Not Always So
15.The Water and the Waves
16.On Thinking
17.Projection Only
18.The Process of Consciousness
19.The Ripening of Karma
20.Three Natures
21.Dependence and Realization
22.The Harmony of Difference and Sameness
23.No Own Nature
24.Three Natures, All Without Self
25.Four Ways to Express the Inexpressible
26.How We Are Bound
27.Thinking About It Is Not Enough
28.Being at Rest
29.Transformation at the Root of Suffering
30.The Blissful Body of Liberation
Epilogue: Meditation and Compassionate Action, and the “Thirty Verses”
Acknowledgments
Selected Bibliography
The “Thirty Verses” in Devanagari and Romanized Script
English-to-Sanskrit Glossary
Index
About the Author and Translator
Foreword
BY NORMAN FISCHER
You have in your hands a wonderful book—a product of what I call Buddhism’s “third wave.”
I think of original Buddhism, in all its many manifestations in the many countries where it arose, as Buddhism’s great “first wave.” It rose up out of the deep waters of our first great cultures, when monarchs ruled the world in feudalistic agrarian societies, and writing was new. Developing in midst of such social arrangements, Buddhist teaching could not help but be influenced by them.
I call the initial encounter of this first Buddhism with contemporary thought and culture the “second wave.” Its task was to be as faithful as possible to Buddhism’s ancient wisdom while making it understandable and relevant in the new context. Historically, the second wave began in the mid-nineteenth century, with the West’s “discovery” of Buddhism, and has continued more or less until the present.
And now we have a “third wave,” represented by this book and its author. In this third wave, Buddhism is fairly well established as a spiritual practice everywhere in the contemporary world. The inevitable early exaggerations and cultural misunderstandings of Buddhism’s adoption into the West having been more or less overcome, Westerners like Ben Connelly can now train in Buddhism steadily for decades under Western teachers with a lifetime of experience in the practice. For teachers like Ben, Buddhism is more natural and normal than it was for people of my generation. When I began Buddhist practice in the late 1960s there were almost no Western Dharma centers. It took me a few years to hear of the San Francisco Zen Center, then newly formed as the first major Buddhist center in the West. By the time Ben began his practice, Zen and other Buddhist centers had been long established all over the country.
Naturally, the literature produced by these three waves of Buddhism differs. The first wave gave us the primary ancient texts that have survived through the generations. The second wave needed good translations of primary sources, initial introductory texts by the great Asian teachers who first transmitted the teachings, and informal interpretations by the first Western teachers trying to find a new voice for this ancient wisdom. The third wave, just beginning, is now giving us wonderful books like Inside Vasubandhu’s Yogacara—contemporary Western commentaries to traditional texts, grounded in solid practice.
We are past the moment of being introduced to and amazed by this great teaching. Now we are ready to learn how to make use of it for the lives we are living here in our time.
A key aspect of this third wave is that it arises with—or perhaps has given rise to—the mindfulness movement, a secular approach to Buddhism grounded in mindfulness meditation and associated practices. Aligned with contemporary Western psychology and, especially, with a range of research on cognitive processes, mindfulness has had a profound impact on how Buddhism is understood in the modern world—and how the modern world understands itself. While first-wave Buddhism was clearly an Asian religion, third-wave Buddhism erases the boundary between religion and spirituality, faith and praxis, East and West. For most Buddhists today, practice has to do with how we live, how we train our minds and hearts, how we, in Ben’s phrase “take care of our consciousness.”
Third-wave Buddhist teachers like Ben stand on the shoulders of their predecessors. They have a solid understanding of the traditional teachings, but they do not simply take them as is. They ask of them, what works? What can be useful and practical for the contemporary practitioner? They assume, as this book does, that the teachings are already ours and that it is up to us to find out how to apply them.
Vasubandhu’s “Thirty Verses” is a famous text, important for more than seventeen hundred years. When I first looked at early attempts at translation and commentary, I was immensely impressed—and intimidated. I could barely understand it. So I am frankly amazed by Ben’s daring and skill to undertake this project so successfully. He and his learned colleague Weijen Teng have made a new, clear translation of the Sanskrit text, and Ben has provided a straightforward and eminently useful commentary.
Yogacara thought is subtle and hard to fully appreciate. And yet, as the Buddha himself noted, we are all philosophers, full of dysfunctional ideas about reality. So it is in our best interests to examine these ideas and disabuse ourselves of the worst of them. In this book Ben manages not only to explain Yogacara thinking, but to show how it fits into the edifice of Buddhism—and, most importantly of all, demonstrate its relevance for the contemporary practitioner who is concerned to be mindful and humane in her living.
How, I wonder, can Ben accomplish such a difficult task? Maybe it’s because he is a musician. As a person who likes to read philosophical texts, I have noticed that there is music to meaning. When you begin to hear the song behind the word
s, the words become clear. This, it seems to me, is the magic that Ben has wrought in his book: he’s heard Vasubandhu’s song and has sung it for us, in our own idiom and situation.
I feel very fortunate to be around for this new wave of Buddhism, to be able to learn and benefit from it. And I am grateful for this book, and for the friendship of its marvelous author.
Introduction
Thank you for joining me in this opportunity to engage with the Way, to engage with an opportunity, available in each moment, to offer our attention and effort to peace, wellness, and harmony.
I am writing this so that we can bring some old and beautiful wisdom to life, so that together we can celebrate and take up the most concise and practical text of one of the most revered and influential figures in Buddhist history. Vasubandhu showed his compassion and appreciation for us through a lifetime of devotion to the path of freedom and well-being for all, and we have this chance to give this love and appreciation right back with our own investigation and practice. Yogacara teachings may seem hard to understand at first, but by being with them together we can see that they show a comprehensive and powerful model for how to devote our lives to universal well-being.
In this book, I’ll spend a minimum of time digging into the many and fascinating philosophical implications of Vasubandhu’s Yogacara; instead, I’ll devote my energy to showing how it can provide a template for compassionate engagement with what is here right now. Together, we can be empowered by these teachings to dive joyfully and kindly into life.
WHO WAS VASUBANDHU?
We don’t know much about Vasubandhu, but there are some aspects of his story that are widely circulated and probably have some relation to the actual events.
The records we have date Vasubandhu’s life to the fourth century. He was born to a brahmin family in India and became one of the most revered teachers of Abhidharma, which systematizes and analyzes the earliest Buddhist teachings. Later in life, he became a devotee of Mahayana, with the help of his half-brother Asanga, the other great genius of Yogacara. Vasubandhu’s ability to integrate his extraordinary understanding of both Abhidharma and Mahayana thought and practice, and to express them in his numerous writings, helped give birth to the new tradition of Yogacara. This book is a commentary on Vasubandhu’s most practice-oriented text, “Thirty Verses on Consciousness Only,” which succinctly expresses the central themes of Yogacara.
He is included in all Zen lineages in China and Japan, and is revered and quoted in texts from many other Tibetan, East Asian, and Indian schools of Buddhism. In the Soto Zen tradition, Vasubandhu’s importance is expressed during the ancient ritual of chanting the eighty names of the ancestral lineage, dating back to the Buddha. As the community intones the names amid the candle glow and drifting incense, the head teacher does deep, full bows at the names of the six most influential figures in the Soto tradition: Buddha, Nagarjuna, Vasubandhu, Bodhidharma, Huineng, and Dogen Zenji.
WHAT IS YOGACARA?
Yogacara means “yoga practice.” Yoga is a word that has come to mean bending and stretching to many Americans but, in its original sense, refers to joining together or uniting. Yogacara, therefore, is about integration, connection, and harmony. Yoga practice traditionally includes ethical living, meditative absorption and analysis, and training of breath and body. Yogacara teachings in particular emphasize compassionate living and meditation.
The Yogacara tradition is traced to the appearance of the Samdhinirmocana Sutra around the third century CE, then through the many writings of Vasubandhu and Asanga, to the Lankavatara Sutra’s appearance, and the transmission of these texts from India into Tibet and China in the middle of the first millennium. Although no longer extant as a distinct school of practice, Yogacara continues to have a strong influence in Mahayana Buddhism. For instance, Yogacara study has historically been and often still is included in Tibetan monastic training. Xuanzang, who is mythologized in the popular Chinese legend Journey to the West, composed as his magnum opus the Chengweishilun, a translation and commentary on the “Thirty Verses” that has exerted a major influence on Chinese Buddhism. Yogacara was also central to the birth of Zen; Zen’s founder Bodhidharma reportedly referred to the Lankavatara Sutra, a Yogacara text, as the “only” sutra, and early Zen texts are larded with Yogacara terms.
Yogacara arose as an attempt to integrate the most powerful aspects of the earliest Buddhist teachings and later Mahayana teachings. There was growing sectarian argumentation between the proponents of these two bodies of teaching, and Yogacara sought to show how the teachings were not actually in conflict and to allow for practitioners to access the profound transformative benefits of both traditions. Yogacara provides a beautiful model for how to work with the great range of Buddhist traditions that have arrived in the West from all over Asia in the last fifty years.
THREE SCHOOLS OF BUDDHISM
Throughout this book I will refer to three bodies of Buddhist teaching relevant to the development of Yogacara: Early Buddhism, Abhidharma, and Mahayana.
Early Buddhism refers to the very first tradition of Buddhism and to the teachings that can be found in the Pali Canon, the earliest substantial body of Buddhist teachings available to us. Since these were first written down several hundred years after the death of the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, it is hard to know how accurately they reflect his teachings. However, they are probably as close as we can get. These teachings lay out a path of practice for going from suffering to non-suffering, from samsara to nirvana. They are held up as most valuable by the modern Theravada and Vipassana traditions.
Abhidharma means something like “about Dharma,” or “meta-Dharma.” The Early Buddhist records we have in the Pali Canon contain a very large section called the abhidharma, which organizes elements of other teachings into lists. There are thousands of lists, and lists of lists. It is a rather dizzying body of literature. However when I use the term Abhidharma, I refer not to the Pali abhidharma but to a closely related later textual tradition. At the dawn of the first millennium, the Abhidharma movement sought to work with these lists and all the other existing teachings and refine and systemize them. Because the Early Buddhist teachings were compiled over the Buddha’s forty-year teaching career and then passed down orally for a few hundred years, they did not always logically hang together; Abhidharmists sought to create a more complete coherence from this great mass of earlier teachings. Abhidharma teachings are notoriously and incredibly complex. They are a phenomenally detailed cataloguing of the process of consciousness. This is the tradition in which Vasubandhu was originally trained.
Mahayana, or “Great Vehicle,” Buddhism arose at the start of the first millennium as well, but it took a radical turn. Rooting its thought and practice in a small body of Early Buddhist teachings, it put an enormous emphasis on nondualism, often described as emptiness or interdependence. Over and over again Mahayana sutras point out that everything we think or believe is rooted in dualistic thought, and thus none of it is ultimately real, and all of it leaves us in a web of our mind’s making. We may say there is day and night, but these are not actually separate phenomena. They are interdependent, empty of separation, not-two. You can’t have day without night; they interdependently are. Absolutely everything that can be conceived or spoken is like this. Mahayana teaches that what you think or believe something to be is conventionally useful but not the absolute truth, and that seeing connection, rather than separation, is the ground of compassionate freedom of mind. Mahayana teachings often suggest that the dualisms of Early Buddhism and the categorizations of Abhidharma are a distraction from realizing liberation right now through unconceptualized nondualism. In general the Early Buddhist schools’ emphasis on the path of personal liberation and attainment of nirvana, and the Mahayana idealization of the bodhisattva’s path of devotion to universal enlightenment, were often seen as in direct contradiction.
During Vasubandhu’s time and still today, we find great debate about which view is co
rrect, which is best. Vasubandhu’s “Thirty Verses” finds a way to make these differing ideas harmonize in practice. The verses show how differing points of view and practices can help us to be free, at peace, and available to give our best to the world. They are the work of someone who, instead of picking sides, poured his genius and effort into helping people come together. They show a way that finds common ground but also honors difference. They help us to access the best of both Early Buddhist and Mahayana thought in our own lives and practices.
A TWOFOLD MODEL OF UNDERSTANDING
The “Thirty Verses” focuses on a twofold model of practice and understanding—the study of the functioning of consciousness and the study of the nature of phenomena—although ultimately it suggests that these two are not separate.
For the first, it uses a model of experience called the eight consciousnesses and teaches us how to practice with and understand consciousness to liberate ourselves from afflictive emotions like anger, selfishness, and laziness. This set of teachings is closely tied to Early Buddhism and has extraordinary transformative psychological power.
For the study of the nature of phenomena, it uses what is called the three-natures model, which is rooted in Mahayana teachings that emphasize letting go of delusion, letting go of the way of seeing that creates alienation: the delusion that our happiness or suffering are dependent on the slings and arrows of an external world from which we are separate. The three-natures teachings help us to realize the totality of our connection and intimacy with everything.
Yogacarins often speak of two barriers: the barrier of afflictive emotion and the barrier of delusion. The first half of “Thirty Verses” uses the eight-consciousnesses model to treat the barrier of afflictive emotion, and the second half uses the three natures to take care of the barrier of delusion. The “Thirty Verses” is about empowering us to see that we are victims of neither our own karma (habits of emotion, thought, and action) nor apparently external phenomena.