The paper deals with the early Yogācāra strategies for explaining intersubjective agreement under a ‘mere representations’ view. Examining Vasubandhu, Asaṅga, and Sthiramati’s use of the example of intersubjective agreement among the hungry ghosts, it is demonstrated that in contrast to the way in which it was often interpreted by contemporary scholars, this example in fact served these Yogācāra thinkers to perform an ironic inversion of the realist premise—showing that intersubjective agreement not only does not require the existence of mind-independent objects (...) but is in fact incompatible with their existence. By delineating the phenomenological complexity underlying this account, the paper then proceeds to unpack the emergent Yogācāra account of intersubjectivity, its implications on the understanding of being, the life-world, and alterity, arguing that it proposes a radical revision of the way we conceive of the ‘shared’ and ‘private’ distinction in respect to experiences, both ordinarily and philosophically. (shrink)

Trisvabh vanirdeśa (Treatise on the Three Natures) is Vasubandhu's most mature and explicit exposition of the Yogc c ra doctrine of the three natures and their relation to the Buddhist idealism Vasubandhu articulates. Nonetheless there are no extent commentaries on this important short test. The present work provides an introduction to the text, its context and principal philosophical theses; a new translation of the text itself; and a close, verse-by-verse commentary on the text explaining the structure of Yogacara/Cittamatra idealism and (...) comparing it to Western versions of transcendental idealism. In particular, I show how the doctrine of the three natures is used to make idealism coherent in a Buddhist context and how it sheds light on the structure and evolution of transcendental idealism in Europe. (shrink)

This essay is concerned with Indian Yogācāra philosophers’ treatment of the problem of other minds in the face of a threatened collapse into solipsism suggested by Vasubandhu’s epistemological argument for idealism. I discuss the attempts of Dharmakīrti and Ratnakīrti to address this issue, concluding that Dharmakīrti is best seen as addressing the epistemological problem of other minds and Ratnakīrti as addressing the conceptual problem of other minds.

Some of the basic terminology of Yogācāra philosophy needs reevaluation. Whereas commentaries almost universally gloss the term dvaya ('duality') with some version of the phrase grāhya grāhaka ca (lit. 'grasped and grasper', but usually translated as 'subject and object'), in fact this gloss is absent from the earliest strata. The term and its gloss are derived from separate streams of Yogācāra reasoning - one from discussions of linguistic conceptualization and the other from discussions of perception. Once we see that these (...) two are distinct, it becomes clear that the commentarial literature asserts their identity in order to philosophically unify Yogācāra thought. One upshot of this is that even in this later assertion 'duality' refers not to the distinction between internal and external reality (as in 'textbook' Yogācāra), but to the falsely projected distinction between mental subjects and mental objects. (shrink)

In recent decades, scholars of Buddhist philosophy have frequently treated the Trisvabhāvanirdeśa, or “Teaching of the Three Natures,” attributed to Vasubandhu, as an authentic and authoritative representation of that celebrated thinker’s mature work within the Yogācāra tradition. However, serious questions may be posed concerning the status and authority of the TSN within Yogācāra, its true authorship, and the relation of its contents to trends in early Yogācāra thought. In the present article, we review the actual state of our knowledge of (...) the TSN’s possible origins, considering, too, the implications this may have for contemporary treatments thereof. (shrink)