The History of Buddhist Thought c26.37

c26.37

The term *vijñaptimātra* is used like the term *vijñānamātra*, “consciousness only,” but *vijñapti* means “information, indication”, and it has been explained as “thought”, as being that which is expressed by indication. Vasubandhu and his commentators are much more interested than the *Laṅkāvatāra* in explaining the nature of existence as it appears, the different kinds of causes, and their relation to the store-consciousness. Dr. Masuda, in his important study, says that in the Yogācāra philosophy the store-consciousness (unlike the *Laṅkāvatāra*) is still throughout an individual consciousness.² This is so because the exposition starts from phenomena, and explains them as they appear in each individual. Yet, as he says (p. 40), their theory led to the conclusion that nothing but consciousness exists, and the substance of phenomena, or in their terminology "the true nature", is the absolute or suchness (*tathatā*). For Nāgārjuna also it was suchness, but he gave no positive explanation of the relation between phenomena and the absolute. Dr. Masuda holds that for Yogāchāra it consists in the two being "neither different nor non-different" (p. 43). Thus so far as the store-consciousness is non-different from the absolute it is entirely universal and undifferentiated, and the positive explanation involves a contradiction to be surmounted by the methods of the mystic.