The Middle Way of Yogacara Buddhism

[Magical Realist]

"A friend asked me this week whether Buddhism teaches that "nothing exists outside the mind."

Of course, "Buddhism" is hard to pin down. Its teachings include two and a half millennia of monky debate. Of all the world religions, Buddhist sects' doctrines are particularly diverse and contradictory.

"Nothing exists outside the mind" is one interpretation of the Yogacara School, the "mind-only" school, a 4th-ish Century Indian Buddhist tradition that influenced the rise of the Mahayana branch, of which Zen is a sect. You could simplistically say that Yogacara taught "consciousness is ultimately real, perceptions arise in consciousness but they're only provisional, without essence, and dependent."

This is a common view among Buddhists, and it seems to be the Zen view if you read this koan:

Two monks were arguing about a flag. One said: "The flag is moving."

The other said: "The wind is moving."

The sixth patriarch happened to be passing by. He told them: "Not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving."1

There are a couple problems with the "mind is real, things are not" view, however.

One problem is, the earlier Buddhist texts prohibit us from taking a fixed stance about whether things exist or do not exist. A tremendously useful book I read on early Buddhism, "A History of Buddhist Philosophy: Continuity and Discontinuity" by David J. Kalupahana, explained this to me. In the oldest texts, Buddha argued that since human opinions cannot capture our giant world, any firm opinion we have about the world must be wrong. So we mustn't either fixate on a decision like, "I've decided that the tree is real," nor on a decision like, "I've decided that the tree is only in my mind." Each view is sometimes useful, sometimes not useful, but neither is ultimately true.

This "refusal to make an ontological commitment," as Kalupahana describes it, is Buddha's "Middle Way." It is a middle path between positivism and nihilism. So if you think Yogacara teaches that nothing is real, either you're wrong about what Yogacara teaches, or Yogacara itself was wrong. Or Buddha was wrong.

So the "mind is moving" koan is a trap. It tempts the reader to think that "only mind is real." But if you cling to that opinion, then Master Mumon's verse about the koan is corrective:

Wind, flag, mind moves,
The same understanding.
When the mouth opens
All are wrong.2

(Be careful with this verse, though: it does not tell us "don't believe anything." That, too, would be an ontological commitment.)

So that is the first problem with "everything is in the mind"—it is not what Buddha taught. The second problem is, it leads pretty naturally to moral nihilism, which is definitely not what Buddha taught!

There's a terrific Zen rejoinder to the "everything is in the mind" interpretation:

Hogen, a Chinese Zen teacher, lived alone in a small temple in the country. One day four traveling monks appeared and asked if they might make a fire in his yard to warm themselves.

While they were building the fire, Hogen heard them arguing about subjectivity and objectivity. He joined them and said: "There is a big stone. Do you consider it to be inside or outside your mind?"

One of the monks replied: "From the Buddhist viewpoint everything is an objectification of mind, so I would say that the stone is inside my mind."

"Your head must feel very heavy," observed Hogen, "if you are carrying around a stone like that in your mind."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogachara

"The central meaning of emptiness (śūnyatā) in Yogācāra is a twofold "absence of duality." The first element of this is the unreality of any conceptual duality such as "physical" and "non-physical", "self" and "other". To define something conceptually is to divide the world into what it is and what it is not, but the world is a causal flux that does not accord with conceptual constructs.

The second element of this is a perceptual duality between the sensorium and its objects, between what is "external" and "internal", between subject (grāhaka, literally "grasper") and object (grāhya, "grasped").[77] This is also an unreal superimposition, since there is really no such separation of inner and outer, but an interconnected causal stream of mentality which is falsely divided up.

An important difference between the Yogācāra conception of emptiness and the Madhyamaka conception is that in classical Yogācāra, emptiness does exist (as a real absence) and so does consciousness (which is that which is empty, the referent of emptiness), while Madhyamaka refuses to endorse such existential statements. The Madhyāntavibhāga for example, states "the imagination of the nonexistent [abhūta-parikalpa] exists. In it duality does not exist. Emptiness, however, exists in it," which indicates that even though that which is dualistically imagined (subjects and objects), is unreal and empty, their basis does exist (i.e. the dependently arisen conscious manifestation).[78][79]

The Yogācāra school also gave special significance to the Āgama sutra called Lesser Discourse on Emptiness (parallel to the Pali Cūḷasuññatasutta, MN 121) and relies on this sutra in its explanations of emptiness. According to Gadjin Nagao, this sutra affirms that "emptiness includes both being and non-being. both negation and affirmation."

[Syne]

A very pessimistic take. I prefer to think of it as "all are right." The mind is real and things are real, but only in/from certain contexts.
It is true that things only exist in the mind, from the mind. But it's equally true that things exist on their own, when the mind is not conscious of them.

I think saying "all are wrong" is, itself, nihilistic. But saying "all is right" is neither nihilistic nor a fixed stance, since seeming contradictions are simultaneously right.

[Magical Realist]

I think it is healthy to retain a deliberate skepticism in the form of "none of this is real either" because it keeps us opened to the revealing nature of future experience. Belief, while often giving us solace and purpose, closes us off from the source of consciousness itself, whatever that is. A provisional nihilism regarding everything, in the radical sense of believing that nothing is real too, keeps that door of experience open and ready for more discovery and learning. It can even take the form of a paralogical syllogism like "everything is real therefore nothing is real" meaning the truth is still beyond our grasping it. We thus live in the awakened ambivalence of the middle way.

"Dreams are real as long as they last. Can we say more of life?"---Havelock Ellis

[Syne]

You can believe "all is right" AND be skeptical. People are right that they believe they see UFOs, ghosts, etc., but I can still be skeptical about in what sense their perceptions are right. That's how no one view is a fixed position.

[C C]

"A friend asked me this week whether Buddhism teaches that "nothing exists outside the mind."

Of course, "Buddhism" is hard to pin down. Its teachings include two and a half millennia of monky debate. Of all the world religions, Buddhist sects' doctrines are particularly diverse and contradictory.

"Nothing exists outside the mind" is one interpretation of the Yogacara School, the "mind-only" school, a 4th-ish Century Indian Buddhist tradition that influenced the rise of the Mahayana branch, of which Zen is a sect. You could simplistically say that Yogacara taught "consciousness is ultimately real, perceptions arise in consciousness but they're only provisional, without essence, and dependent."

[...] One problem is, the earlier Buddhist texts prohibit us from taking a fixed stance about whether things exist or do not exist. A tremendously useful book I read on early Buddhism, "A History of Buddhist Philosophy: Continuity and Discontinuity" by David J. Kalupahana, explained this to me. In the oldest texts, Buddha argued that since human opinions cannot capture our giant world, any firm opinion we have about the world must be wrong. So we mustn't either fixate on a decision like, "I've decided that the tree is real," nor on a decision like, "I've decided that the tree is only in my mind." Each view is sometimes useful, sometimes not useful, but neither is ultimately true.

This "refusal to make an ontological commitment," as Kalupahana describes it, is Buddha's "Middle Way." It is a middle path between positivism and nihilism. So if you think Yogacara teaches that nothing is real, either you're wrong about what Yogacara teaches, or Yogacara itself was wrong. Or Buddha was wrong. [...]

Since metaphysics falls out of reasoning or inference, neutrality about multiple metaphysical hypotheses usually revolves around only accepting phenomena or sense data as the non-speculative ground floor of knowledge, which thinkers like Ernst Mach and David Hume did.

However, over time that epistemological, "agnostic" phenomenalism stance slowly collapses into a metaphysical view itself, where the manifested alone is regarded as real (all other metaphysics rejected rather than belief merely suspended). It's not equivalent to the view of only mind existing, since the experiences are divorced from cognition and a subject, or placed prior-in-rank to such. But many are unable to make the distinction between "bare presentations" and cognition of them (identification and understanding), so they conflate the two. 

David Darling: Living in a world of words and concepts and inherited beliefs, says Zen, we have lost the power to grasp reality directly. Our minds are permeated with notions of cause and effect, subject and object, being and nonbeing, life and death. Inevitably this leads to conflict and a feeling of personal detachment and alienation from the world. Zen's whole emphasis is on the experience of reality as it is, rather than the solution of problems that, in the end, arise merely from our mistaken beliefs.

Because it eschews the use of the intellect, Zen can appear nihilistic (which it is not) and elusive (which it is). Certainly, it would be hard to conceive of a system that stood in greater contrast with the logical, symbol-based formulations of contemporary science. More than any other product of the Oriental mind, Zen is convinced that no language or symbolic mapping of the world can come close to expressing the ultimate truth.

... Zen differs from other meditative forms, including other schools of Buddhism, in that it does not start from where we are and gradually lead us to a clear view of the true way of the world. The sole purpose of studying Zen is to have Zen experiences — sudden moments, like flashes of lightning, when the intellect is short-circuited and there is no longer a barrier between the experiencer and reality. Sometimes its methods can seem bizarre and even startling. To catch the flavor, if a Zen master found you reading this book he might grab it from you and hit you over the head with it, saying: “Here’s something else for you to think about!” Such shock tactics, however, are intended not to offend but rather to wake us up from our normal symbol-bound frame of mind.

... Zen uses language to point beyond language, which is what poets and playwrights and musicians do. But, less obviously, it is also what modern science does if the intuitive leap is taken beyond its abstract formalism. The deep, latent message of quantum mechanics, for instance, codified in the language of mathematics, is that there is a reality beyond our senses which eludes verbal comprehension or logical analysis.

... Intuition has ever been the handmaiden of science. And although science represents its theories and conclusions in a “respectable” symbolic form, its greatest advances have always come initially not from the application of reason but from intuitive leaps — sudden flashes of inspiration very much akin to Zen experiences. --Zen Physics. Chapter 12
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Edwars S. Reed: [Thomas H.] Huxley, like all the other scientists in the group -- and like almost all scientists in Europe or America at the that time -- was not a materialist, despite his belief in the progress of mechanistic physiology. He argued in two directions: one from the external phenomena of science (say, the data of physiology) and the other from introspective phenomena (for example, our belief in free will). He was inclined to believe that most (or all) introspectively revealed phenomena would prove to be caused by externally revealed ones.

But in any event he was a phenomenalist, arguing that what is real is phenomena. If the soul (or the unconscious) is not real, it is because it is not part of the phenomenal world.

This panphenomenalism was widely labeled positivism when it was propounded by scientists. In the loosely defined meandering of the term, positivism dominated the European intellectual scene from approximately 1870 to 1890. Yet that type of positivism is inherently unstable when applied to psychology. The externalist (physiological) analysis of behavior and mind attributes all psychological states to antecedent causes. Introspective analysis reveals both intuitions of freedom and the appearance of autonomous psychological states. The two seem irreconcilable. --From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology, from Erasmus Darwin to William James;  p.121 to 122 by Edward S. Reed (1997)

Positivism was not only agnostic with respect to religion, it was also antimaterialist. This antimaterialism was expressed in a very novel way -- with reference to the new Erkenntnislehre -- mental states or behavior. Matter for Huxley was just what is was for Mach or Hertz: a set of phenomenal observations made by scientists. It is thus remarkable but true that the most reviled "materialists" of the 1880s--Huxley, Tyndall, and Clifford--were all phenomenalists of sort or another and not materialists at all.

The positivist impulse gave new life to a variety of panphenomenalism, one whose adherents were surprisingly uncritical about the analysis of those allegedly basic mental phenomena, sensations. Thus, thinkers as different in outlook and interests as Huxley and Mach, Taine and Spencer, Wundt and Lewes all agreed that the basic "data" on which all science was to built were sensations. --From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology, from Erasmus Darwin to William James; p.159 to p.161 by Edward S. Reed (1997)

[Magical Realist]

I've been playing with the model of a Venn diagram to illustrate my present position on all this.

Consider this: Two circles--the mental, or mind. And the physical, or matter. In between these two domains we have one common domain---the phenomenal, or consciousness. The two circles of mind or form and matter or substance are entirely exclusive of each other except where they overlap or intersect in the phenomenal.

Hence we have the phenomenal manifestation of the physical as properties or patterns, and the phenomenal manifestation of the mental as qualia or consciousness.

For example, the apple I'm seeing before me is undeniably a real physical object in the world. I can see it, touch it, smell it, and even eat it. But it is also at the same time undeniably an abstract notion in my mind. How else could I know what it is?

So how do these two states adhere together? The actuality of the apple and the cognition of the apple. And how does one effect the other? As the mediating perceptions/sensations of the apple. The phenomenal properties of redness and roundness and texture and mass and sweetness reveal the object that is the apple, at the same time instantiating the apple as the idea of the apple.

Or take another aspect of the physical--mass/force. We could juxtapose this to the mental as purpose or intention. Where they overlap each other would be simply movement. The experience of moving immediately demonstrating the synthetic unity of force and intention.

Thus the two-fold nature of the phenomenal as objective properties AND subjective qualia interfaces the physical world with the mental world. The physicalist is half right that there is a real self-contained objective world out there and the idealist is half right that there is an imaginal self-contained subjective world in here, because they both meet and synthesize as the immediate appearances/experiences of the phenomenal world. The Middle Way of consciousness or "suchness". Being and Essence flowing into one transparent stream of pure Becoming.

https://zenawakened.com/suchness/

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[Magical Realist]

The sole purpose of studying Zen is to have Zen experiences — sudden moments, like flashes of lightning, when the intellect is short-circuited and there is no longer a barrier between the experiencer and reality.

That's what I try to be open to--those spontaneous jewel-like moments when a certain idea or fact or poem or experience dawns upon me and frees me into a profound sense of the unity of my consciousness with reality. It is language pointing beyond itself to the inexpressible truth of just being. I believe our lives are strewn with daily occasions such as these, if we can be alert and present enough to them.

“Ten times a day something happens to me like this - some strengthening throb of amazement - some good sweet empathic ping and swell. This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.”― Mary Oliver