Skip to content
Coordinates of ThoughtHome of Philosophy
Join
Reading Group

Reading group: Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses, and whether ‘mind-only’ means idealism

Kenneth Lam Chi-ho Fellow
· 6 replies
ConsciousnessBuddhistContinentalIndianPhenomenologyYogacaraEdmund HusserlVasubandhuXuanzang#idealism#mind-only#reading-group#yogacara
Follow

Vasubandhu's Twenty Verses (Viṃśatikā), with his own short commentary, is the most compact argument for the Yogācāra claim that there is "only consciousness" (vijñaptimātra). It is also the text that most invites the question of whether Yogācāra is a form of idealism, a phenomenology, or something else. Scholars disagree, and I'd like us to read it before forming a view.

Translation: Stefan Anacker's Seven Works of Vasubandhu (1984) includes it with the commentary. Other translations are fine; post which you use.

Week 1. The objections. If there are no external objects, why do we experience things only at certain places and times? Why do different people perceive the same thing? Why do things have effects? Vasubandhu answers with dreams, with the hungry ghosts who all see a river of pus where humans see water, and with the guardians of hell.

Week 2. The atoms. His argument that external objects can't be made of atoms: an atom joined to others on six sides would have six parts, and so would not be an atom.

Week 3. Other minds and karma. If everything is consciousness, how do minds affect each other, and how do actions have consequences?

At the end I'd like each of us to say how we would classify the text: ontological idealism, epistemological caution, phenomenological method, or something our categories don't fit.

LikeReply
Follow6 replies

Join the conversation: members reply here, and joining is free. Reading is always free.

Join free to reply Sign in

6 replies

  1. Nirmala Jayasekara

    Fellow

    Week 1. As a Theravādin I don't accept the conclusion, but the hungry ghosts argument is clever. It doesn't just say perception can be mistaken; it says beings with shared karma perceive a shared world, with no need for an external object to coordinate them. The "public" world is explained by similarity of karma. That's a stronger claim than dream-scepticism, and harder to dismiss.

    Helpful · 2
  2. Priya Raghavan

    Fellow

    Week 1. Modern predictive accounts say perception is largely the brain's best guess about the causes of its signals. That sounds Yogācāra-ish, and I enjoyed the resemblance. But predictive processing assumes there are external causes; it just says we never meet them directly. Vasubandhu removes the causes altogether. So the resemblance is real at the level of experience and breaks down at the level of what exists.

    Helpful · 3
  3. Meera Kulkarni

    Fellow

    Week 2. The atom argument is aimed at the Vaiśeṣika and Abhidharma atomists, and it is a mereological argument at heart: an indivisible thing can't have sides, but contact requires sides. Naiyāyikas replied that atoms contact without parts, by a special conjunction. I find Vasubandhu's version sharper than their reply. Week 2 is the strongest part of the text.

  4. Claire Dubois

    Fellow

    Week 3, and the classification question. Husserl's epoché brackets the existence of the world in order to describe how it appears, but it is a method, not a denial. Some scholars read Yogācāra the same way, as a phenomenology rather than a metaphysics. Reading the section on other minds, I find that hard to sustain: Vasubandhu seems to be making claims about what really causes what. I'd classify it as idealism with a phenomenological method, not as phenomenology.

    Helpful · 1
  5. Aiko Tanabe

    Fellow

    Late, because I read slowly. I came to this through Nishida, who also starts from experience before any split into subject and object. But Nishida's "pure experience" is not a consciousness that excludes things; it is prior to both. Reading Vasubandhu after Nishida, I notice how much Vasubandhu still talks about consciousness as one side. I would put him with the idealists, though with reluctance.

    Helpful · 2
  6. Kenneth Lam Chi-ho

    Fellow

    Tallying: Claire and Aiko read the text as idealism; Priya and Nirmala point to where it goes beyond experience; Meera finds its strongest argument mereological. My own view is the minority one: the text argues ontologically, but the later Chinese tradition after Xuanzang used it as a map of how consciousness constructs a world, which is a phenomenological use. Both readings have a text to stand on, which is why the question stays open.

    Helpful · 3