Summary
This section has argued that, in general, the Yogācārin philosophy coincides with the
Madhyamaka, in that Asaṅga and Vasubandhu, like Nāgārjuna, believed in the
inexpressibility of ultimate truth. While the Madhyamaka tends to focus more on a
negative concept, the Yogācārins steered towards a positive account of emptiness.
Given the belief in inexpressibility, however, neither of these is to be taken as a statement of ultimate truth, and Vasubandhu, just like Nāgārjuna and the Buddha himself,
systematically dismantles his own constructions, so that all propositions about existence are eventually turned into ones about neither existence nor nonexistence.
Yogācāra thought starts from the premise that there is an ultimate reality, which is
equated with absolute-svabhāva, and that this reality can be known.
Yet, the fact that there are several words that refer to the same thing suggests that the true nature of all things cannot be captured with words. The true nature, of course, is none other than emptiness, which the Yogācāra explains through the doctrine of the Three Natures.
Reality is described, in keeping with Buddhist doctrine, to have an other-dependent
nature. It is generally known in its imagined nature, where we impute all sorts of
concepts and dualisms onto our experience of the other-dependent nature. Enlightened
beings, on the other hand, experience reality in its consummated nature, or as emptiness,which is explained as the other-dependent without the imagined aspect. It was pointed out that the other-dependent and the consummated are intimately related, and that they are realized together.
In bringing in a third nature in addition to the two truths, it was suggested that the
Yogācārins are able to insulate Mahāyāna philosophy from nihilism. The other-dependent
nature was compared to a wine glass, while the imagined nature was represented by wine,
and by introducing, as a third concept, the consummated as the absence of wine, and by
claiming that it exists, the Yogācārins provide room for a positive view of emptiness.
What they affirm, I argued, is the actual experience of emptiness, the "constant notfinding of duality",and the experience of the imagined, which has both an existent and a non-existent quality to it. Importantly, nowhere is either emptiness or the imagined claimed to exist absolutely.
Finally, I argued against construing the Yogācāra as a form of idealism. I examined two implications of this view, that consciousness exists and that external objects do not exist. I argued that in those passages that are generally believed to support such an interpretation, Vasubandhu is making an epistemological and not an ontological point, and that they are to be regarded as provisional constructs. Thus, when Vasubandhu
says "all this is perception only" what he means is that one can never get beyond
phenomena to the noumena, and that, by meditating on this one realizes emptiness. Even
the idea "all this is perception-only",is to be regarded as such—as only an idea—and not
as something the meditator must grasp at. Similarly, the analogy between ordinary
experience and illusion does not imply that external objects do not exist; Vasubandhu is
only denying the possibility of knowing them. Since we can never know the external
object, we cannot know whether our waking experience is any more real than our dreams,
and the distinction between 'illusory‘ and 'real‘ as we generally understand these words
collapses.