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Making Sense of Mind Only: Why Yogacara Buddhism Matters
Through engaging, contemporary examples, Making Sense of Mind Only reveals the Yogacara school of Indian Buddhism as a coherent system of ideas and practices for the path to liberation, contextualizing its key texts and rendering them accessible and relevant.
The Yogacara, or Yoga Practice, school is one of the two schools of Mahayana Buddhism that developed in the early centuries of the common era. Though it arose in India, Mahayana Buddhism now flourishes in China, Tibet, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. While the other major Mahayana tradition, the Madhyamaka (Middle Way), focuses on the concept of emptiness—that all phenomena lack an intrinsic essence—the Yogacara school focuses on the cognitive processes whereby we impute such essences. Through everyday examples and analogues in cognitive science, author William Waldron makes Yogacara’s core teachings—on the three turnings of the Dharma wheel, the three natures, the storehouse consciousness, and mere perception—accessible to a broad audience. In contrast to the common characterization of Yogacara as philosophical idealism, Waldron presents Yogacara Buddhism on its own terms, as a coherent system of ideas and practices, with dependent arising its guiding principle.
The first half of Making Sense of Mind Only explores the historical context for Yogacara’s development. Waldron examines early Buddhist texts that show how our affective and cognitive processes shape the way objects and worlds appear to us, and how we erroneously grasp onto them as essentially real—perpetuating the habits that bind us to samsara. He then analyzes the early Madhyamaka critique of essences.
This context sets the stage for the book’s second half, an examination of how Yogacara texts such as the Samdhinirmocana Sutra and Asanga’s Stages of Yogic Practice ( Yogacarabhumi ) build upon these earlier ideas by arguing that our constructive processes also occur unconsciously. Not only do we collectively, yet mostly unknowingly, construct shared realities or cultures, our shared worlds are also mediated through the storehouse consciousness ( alayavijñana ) functioning as a cultural unconscious. Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses argues that we can learn to recognize such objects and worlds as “mere perceptions” ( vijñaptimatra ) and thereby abandon our enchantment with the products of our own cognitive processes. Finally, Maitreya’s Distinguishing Phenomena from Their Ultimate Nature ( Dharmadharmatavibhaga ) elegantly lays out the Mahayana path to this transformation.
In Waldron’s hands, Yogacara is no mere view but a practical system of transformation. His presentation of its key texts and ideas illuminates how religion can remain urgent and vital in our scientific and pluralistic age.
The Yogacara, or Yoga Practice, school is one of the two schools of Mahayana Buddhism that developed in the early centuries of the common era. Though it arose in India, Mahayana Buddhism now flourishes in China, Tibet, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. While the other major Mahayana tradition, the Madhyamaka (Middle Way), focuses on the concept of emptiness—that all phenomena lack an intrinsic essence—the Yogacara school focuses on the cognitive processes whereby we impute such essences. Through everyday examples and analogues in cognitive science, author William Waldron makes Yogacara’s core teachings—on the three turnings of the Dharma wheel, the three natures, the storehouse consciousness, and mere perception—accessible to a broad audience. In contrast to the common characterization of Yogacara as philosophical idealism, Waldron presents Yogacara Buddhism on its own terms, as a coherent system of ideas and practices, with dependent arising its guiding principle.
The first half of Making Sense of Mind Only explores the historical context for Yogacara’s development. Waldron examines early Buddhist texts that show how our affective and cognitive processes shape the way objects and worlds appear to us, and how we erroneously grasp onto them as essentially real—perpetuating the habits that bind us to samsara. He then analyzes the early Madhyamaka critique of essences.
This context sets the stage for the book’s second half, an examination of how Yogacara texts such as the Samdhinirmocana Sutra and Asanga’s Stages of Yogic Practice ( Yogacarabhumi ) build upon these earlier ideas by arguing that our constructive processes also occur unconsciously. Not only do we collectively, yet mostly unknowingly, construct shared realities or cultures, our shared worlds are also mediated through the storehouse consciousness ( alayavijñana ) functioning as a cultural unconscious. Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses argues that we can learn to recognize such objects and worlds as “mere perceptions” ( vijñaptimatra ) and thereby abandon our enchantment with the products of our own cognitive processes. Finally, Maitreya’s Distinguishing Phenomena from Their Ultimate Nature ( Dharmadharmatavibhaga ) elegantly lays out the Mahayana path to this transformation.
In Waldron’s hands, Yogacara is no mere view but a practical system of transformation. His presentation of its key texts and ideas illuminates how religion can remain urgent and vital in our scientific and pluralistic age.
384 pages, Paperback
Published November 7, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
March 20, 2024
amazing! will definitely teach this book . and re-read many times
February 17, 2024
This book is, essentially, the text on Yogacara Buddhism I have been waiting for.
Until now there have been some useful texts but none have, to my mind, explained the development of Yogacara philosophy from early Buddhism to its height, as this book does, or shown as adeptly how the philosophy underpins Buddhist practice.
In Tibetan Buddhism particularly, the two primary Mahayana modes of philosophy - Madhyamika and Yogacara thinking - are often pitted against each other to see which is true and yet, as William Waldron demostrates here, it seems more that Yogacara takes the primary premise of Madhyamika philosophy, sunyata (emptiness), and clarifies it in a way that works in terms of Buddhist practice, adding an extra element to make the Madhyamika two truths into the Yogacarin three natures. Yogacara does not negate Madhyamika thinking, nor vice-versa, but they can be seen as both being methods to show how we view reality.
The way this book is structured works perfectly for me, first demonstrating how Yogacara thought built upon earlier Buddhist ideas, and then uses several prominent Yogacara texts to show how this philosophy works in practice, ending with showing how it points us towards thusness (Jp. 恁麼 inmo) as we experience it in Zen and other forms of meditation.
For anyone interested in Yogacara philosophy, I hugely recommend this book which was a joy to read and clarified many aspects of this way of thinking that I was previously unclear on. I expect to return to it numerous times in future, and use it to teach from.
Until now there have been some useful texts but none have, to my mind, explained the development of Yogacara philosophy from early Buddhism to its height, as this book does, or shown as adeptly how the philosophy underpins Buddhist practice.
In Tibetan Buddhism particularly, the two primary Mahayana modes of philosophy - Madhyamika and Yogacara thinking - are often pitted against each other to see which is true and yet, as William Waldron demostrates here, it seems more that Yogacara takes the primary premise of Madhyamika philosophy, sunyata (emptiness), and clarifies it in a way that works in terms of Buddhist practice, adding an extra element to make the Madhyamika two truths into the Yogacarin three natures. Yogacara does not negate Madhyamika thinking, nor vice-versa, but they can be seen as both being methods to show how we view reality.
The way this book is structured works perfectly for me, first demonstrating how Yogacara thought built upon earlier Buddhist ideas, and then uses several prominent Yogacara texts to show how this philosophy works in practice, ending with showing how it points us towards thusness (Jp. 恁麼 inmo) as we experience it in Zen and other forms of meditation.
For anyone interested in Yogacara philosophy, I hugely recommend this book which was a joy to read and clarified many aspects of this way of thinking that I was previously unclear on. I expect to return to it numerous times in future, and use it to teach from.
December 21, 2025
William S. Waldron has written an extraordinary book explaining Yogācāra Buddhism. Yogācāra is fascinating. It goes beyond most other forms of Buddhism in explaining the human mind and where we belong as cognitive beings. What Waldron does in this book is exceptional in that he has used the first half of the book to prepare the reader to start learning about Yogācāra by presenting a history of Buddhism from the time of the Buddha through to the early period of Mahayana up to Nāgārjuna.
Indeed, at first I considered skipping the first half of the book given that I had spent the better part of the last year immersing myself in early Buddhism, up to and including Nāgārjuna. But I thought the better of that plan of attack to great benefit of my grasp of Buddhism and Yogācāra. Waldron not only prepared me for Yogācāra by giving me an in-depth insight into Buddhist psychology but also strengthened my understanding of other aspects of Buddhism. One can never assume that they have learned a sufficient amount of Buddhist philosophy.
In regard to the second half of the book dealing with Yogācāra, Waldron leaves no stone unturned in the ideas underlying the epistemology, psychology and history. He bases a large part of his exposition on the first Yogācāra sūtra, the Samdhinirmocana Sūtra, which according to Waldron, “sets forth a more-or-less complete outline of the Yogācāra tradition, one that would be developed and elaborated in the centuries that followed.”
Waldron’s exposition of Yogācāra includes” the three natures, the three turnings of the wheel, … the storehouse consciousness (Ālayavijñāna) and the concept of mere perception.” As well, he clarifies the importance of dependent arising in Yogācāra. ‘Analyzing experience in terms of dependent arising … involves discerning patterns of interaction—“objects impinge upon the faculties of, cognitive awareness arises and the coming together of the three is contact. This is its basic mode of analysis and its basic unit of interaction. Most of the radical implications of the Buddhist worldview follow from this simple but profound approach: dependent arising involves interactive processes, not independent entities.’ A lesson that has become part of my worldview.
If you have an interest in Yogācāra, I would highly recommend this book. Waldron presents his lessons in clear well founded arguments. At the same time, he is presenting ideas that you will not encounter elsewhere. Indeed, if nothing else it is a wonderful opportunity for exercise your thought processes.
Indeed, at first I considered skipping the first half of the book given that I had spent the better part of the last year immersing myself in early Buddhism, up to and including Nāgārjuna. But I thought the better of that plan of attack to great benefit of my grasp of Buddhism and Yogācāra. Waldron not only prepared me for Yogācāra by giving me an in-depth insight into Buddhist psychology but also strengthened my understanding of other aspects of Buddhism. One can never assume that they have learned a sufficient amount of Buddhist philosophy.
In regard to the second half of the book dealing with Yogācāra, Waldron leaves no stone unturned in the ideas underlying the epistemology, psychology and history. He bases a large part of his exposition on the first Yogācāra sūtra, the Samdhinirmocana Sūtra, which according to Waldron, “sets forth a more-or-less complete outline of the Yogācāra tradition, one that would be developed and elaborated in the centuries that followed.”
Waldron’s exposition of Yogācāra includes” the three natures, the three turnings of the wheel, … the storehouse consciousness (Ālayavijñāna) and the concept of mere perception.” As well, he clarifies the importance of dependent arising in Yogācāra. ‘Analyzing experience in terms of dependent arising … involves discerning patterns of interaction—“objects impinge upon the faculties of, cognitive awareness arises and the coming together of the three is contact. This is its basic mode of analysis and its basic unit of interaction. Most of the radical implications of the Buddhist worldview follow from this simple but profound approach: dependent arising involves interactive processes, not independent entities.’ A lesson that has become part of my worldview.
If you have an interest in Yogācāra, I would highly recommend this book. Waldron presents his lessons in clear well founded arguments. At the same time, he is presenting ideas that you will not encounter elsewhere. Indeed, if nothing else it is a wonderful opportunity for exercise your thought processes.
February 1, 2024
Here's an excerpt from a longer review I posted elsewhere:
In his recent book on Yogacara Buddhism, Waldron points out that “Humanity is in a crisis, quite a few in fact: global inequality, racial and ethnic conflict, the alarming rate of climate change, and pervasive mistrust of the institutions that inform and organize our lives. On top of these…we are in a deep epistemological crisis, doubting our ability to distinguish valid knowledge from fantasy and false imagination” (313). The answer to the question which is the subtitle of his book—“Why Yogacara Buddhism Matters”—is that it offers us a solution to our current crises, but especially to the epistemological one. However, Waldron clearly does what Richard Payne suggests most Western Buddhists do: he translates Buddhism into the terms of Romanticism. I am left doubting that this new version of Romanticism-in-Buddhist-garb can solve any of our crises. I’m doubtful that it can even help to make clear the nature of those crises.
Waldron clearly accepts the Romantic narrative of fall and redemption, and throughout this book insists that early Buddhist thinkers were arguing the same thing that cognitive science has now discovered. This struck me as a bit like the craze for cognitive literary theory about a decade or so ago: the argument was that Romantic poets and novelists were really cognitive scientists avant la lettre, which gets it exactly backwards. That is, cognitive scientists are simply repeating Romanticism in the guise of science, producing ideology while they think they are discovering objective truths. It has become common in Western Buddhism to turn to cognitive science to “prove” the truth of the Romantic interpretation of Buddhist texts, and of course it always works, since cognitivism just is Romanticism.
This acceptance of the two aspects of capitalist ideology leads to some difficulties that I think cannot be resolved, but only obscured, by this version of Yogacara. The first set of problems comes from the acceptance of cognitivism, in the argument that we are trapped by our evolutionary history in a limited perception of the world which we cannot escape, and in the insistence that what is dependently arisen is therefore nothing but mere illusion. We see these two claims constantly in cognitive science, and both ultimately serve the function of excluding from all consideration the social practices which lead to most of our human suffering today, to wit: capitalism. We are supposed to accept that our brains were hardwired for a certain kind of function some time about two hundred thousand years ago; but this structure of our brain, our natural and innate way of acting in the world, always somehow turns out to look exactly like the subject of capitalism: the possessive individual, the atomistic homo economicus, reifying everything and absolutely self-interested.
Waldron frequently repeats the claim that we are inherently limited by the kinds of sense organs we have, and so we see the world in a distorted fashion (e.g. page 259). But of course, we are not so limited. We know, we all know, that there are many things in the world we cannot detect with our senses but which have real causal power. That’s why we wash our hands frequently, and why we have CO detectors in our homes, right? And how do we come to know these things? Because we humans have the capacity for language, which enables us to move beyond our perceptions. On Waldron’s account, which is the one we hear most often from cognitive science, language is in fact a trap, causing us to misidentify and confuse things, and to ruminate obsessively; the ultimate reality is inexpressible in language, and so to become enlightened is to be set free of our linguistic trap. Another way to understand this is to see language as the first step in setting us free of the animal world of ignorance; the next step, then, is reason and rigorous thought, which can only be done in language, but which can complete the move out of the limitations of natural history that language has only begun. Payne, incidentally, see a narrative like this as existing in some forms of early Buddhist: “This narrative would start with a primal condition of ignorance and its consequent suffering, move into an arising of the intent to awaken, and culminate in insight into the emptiness of all conditioned existence and the liberation of all sentient beings” (48). This narrative, then, need not see thought and language as impediments, and does not insist that we are endlessly limited by our evolutionary history.
Waldron also repeatedly suggests that all things that arise dependently, when seen correctly, will be seen as mere illusions. For me, this is the greatest problem. Because if we see conventional reality as mere illusion, a term Waldron uses repeatedly, then we can of course never see that conventional reality should be altered, not simply “seen through.” To use one of Waldron’s examples, the U.S. Congress is surely a dependently arisen thing, but this is not at all proof that it is not real! Because bacteria cannot “contemplate the ramifications of iPhones” (248) does not mean that therefore iPhones are unreal. These are very real things, with real causal powers in the world. The fact that once we finish destroying all life on the planet Congress will cease to exist does not make it less of a real thing. Yes, we might be wrong about the kid of thing Congress is—might think it is a group of intelligent women and men, democratically elected to protect the interests of the people, when in fact it is a group of sociopaths doing the bidding of the very rich—but being wrong about it is something we can correct only when we see the dependently arisen things are in fact very real, the only kind of real things that exist at all, and have real causal powers.
The solution to this problem is yet another component of Romantic ideology. That is, if we understand that “ultimate reality is inexpressible, beyond concepts or words” (172) and is made up of “illusions” that yet are able to “do their dirt work” (274) despite not being real, well, how do we reconcile these things? The solution is in how we see things: when we “perceive them differently” (278), with non-conceptual wisdom, we are awakened, and able to act more efficiently in the world of illusory phenomena. And this non-conceptual wisdom turns out to be, not surprisingly, the Romantic Sublime! In “conceptual wisdom” all “phenomena reappear” but now “like and illusion or a mirage, without any distinguishing characteristics or nature of their own” (295). This way of perceiving, like the sublime, can only be defined negatively, by what it does not include: it does not “direct the mind conceptually” (the very definition of a sublime experience in Romanticism); it is not, though, free of concepts; it is not “thorough pacification of conceptuality”; it is not mere materiality; and it “is s not sufficient to grasp onto the signs of nonconceptuality” (again, a defining feature of the Romantic Sublime). We see in a new way that can “fundamentally transform our minds and hearts” (276) when we use concepts and language to escape the trap of concepts and language. This is, as has been argued so many times by so many Romanticists, the way that poetry is understood to interpellate us into the dominant ideology!
This will likely seem deep and profoundly true to most readers of such a book, because most of them will be Romantic subjects already. We all are, without knowing it. Ask any class of college freshman to define poetry, and most will literally quote from the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” without ever even having heard of Wordsworth. But it doesn’t seem to me that this thorough interpellation into Romantic ideology, even in its current postmodern form, has done anything to alleviate human suffering. In fact, it seems to me to be the cause of that list of crises Waldron cites.
Waldron repeatedly agrees with the finding of cognitive science that “due to our evolved cognitive processes, human beings are predisposed to be naive realists, natural dualists, and innate essentialists” (182), that this way of (not) thinking is innate, hardwired into our brains at the moment the first homo sapiens came into existence through some random mutation a couple hundred thousand years ago. I would suggest that, instead, it is the nature of capitalist ideologies, including economics, psychology, cognitive science (all the “constructs” Waldron is afraid to deconstruct) to make us think this way. Poor thinking is dependently arisen, not from genetics and evolution, but from cultural practices, from ideology.
The question is, what kinds of practices might make people into the kinds of subjects who don’t think in this way? Surely the answer is not Romanticism…
I'd suggest that a better, although more challenging, account of (one version of) Yogacara can be found in Dan Arnold's "Brains, Buddhas and Believing."
In his recent book on Yogacara Buddhism, Waldron points out that “Humanity is in a crisis, quite a few in fact: global inequality, racial and ethnic conflict, the alarming rate of climate change, and pervasive mistrust of the institutions that inform and organize our lives. On top of these…we are in a deep epistemological crisis, doubting our ability to distinguish valid knowledge from fantasy and false imagination” (313). The answer to the question which is the subtitle of his book—“Why Yogacara Buddhism Matters”—is that it offers us a solution to our current crises, but especially to the epistemological one. However, Waldron clearly does what Richard Payne suggests most Western Buddhists do: he translates Buddhism into the terms of Romanticism. I am left doubting that this new version of Romanticism-in-Buddhist-garb can solve any of our crises. I’m doubtful that it can even help to make clear the nature of those crises.
Waldron clearly accepts the Romantic narrative of fall and redemption, and throughout this book insists that early Buddhist thinkers were arguing the same thing that cognitive science has now discovered. This struck me as a bit like the craze for cognitive literary theory about a decade or so ago: the argument was that Romantic poets and novelists were really cognitive scientists avant la lettre, which gets it exactly backwards. That is, cognitive scientists are simply repeating Romanticism in the guise of science, producing ideology while they think they are discovering objective truths. It has become common in Western Buddhism to turn to cognitive science to “prove” the truth of the Romantic interpretation of Buddhist texts, and of course it always works, since cognitivism just is Romanticism.
This acceptance of the two aspects of capitalist ideology leads to some difficulties that I think cannot be resolved, but only obscured, by this version of Yogacara. The first set of problems comes from the acceptance of cognitivism, in the argument that we are trapped by our evolutionary history in a limited perception of the world which we cannot escape, and in the insistence that what is dependently arisen is therefore nothing but mere illusion. We see these two claims constantly in cognitive science, and both ultimately serve the function of excluding from all consideration the social practices which lead to most of our human suffering today, to wit: capitalism. We are supposed to accept that our brains were hardwired for a certain kind of function some time about two hundred thousand years ago; but this structure of our brain, our natural and innate way of acting in the world, always somehow turns out to look exactly like the subject of capitalism: the possessive individual, the atomistic homo economicus, reifying everything and absolutely self-interested.
Waldron frequently repeats the claim that we are inherently limited by the kinds of sense organs we have, and so we see the world in a distorted fashion (e.g. page 259). But of course, we are not so limited. We know, we all know, that there are many things in the world we cannot detect with our senses but which have real causal power. That’s why we wash our hands frequently, and why we have CO detectors in our homes, right? And how do we come to know these things? Because we humans have the capacity for language, which enables us to move beyond our perceptions. On Waldron’s account, which is the one we hear most often from cognitive science, language is in fact a trap, causing us to misidentify and confuse things, and to ruminate obsessively; the ultimate reality is inexpressible in language, and so to become enlightened is to be set free of our linguistic trap. Another way to understand this is to see language as the first step in setting us free of the animal world of ignorance; the next step, then, is reason and rigorous thought, which can only be done in language, but which can complete the move out of the limitations of natural history that language has only begun. Payne, incidentally, see a narrative like this as existing in some forms of early Buddhist: “This narrative would start with a primal condition of ignorance and its consequent suffering, move into an arising of the intent to awaken, and culminate in insight into the emptiness of all conditioned existence and the liberation of all sentient beings” (48). This narrative, then, need not see thought and language as impediments, and does not insist that we are endlessly limited by our evolutionary history.
Waldron also repeatedly suggests that all things that arise dependently, when seen correctly, will be seen as mere illusions. For me, this is the greatest problem. Because if we see conventional reality as mere illusion, a term Waldron uses repeatedly, then we can of course never see that conventional reality should be altered, not simply “seen through.” To use one of Waldron’s examples, the U.S. Congress is surely a dependently arisen thing, but this is not at all proof that it is not real! Because bacteria cannot “contemplate the ramifications of iPhones” (248) does not mean that therefore iPhones are unreal. These are very real things, with real causal powers in the world. The fact that once we finish destroying all life on the planet Congress will cease to exist does not make it less of a real thing. Yes, we might be wrong about the kid of thing Congress is—might think it is a group of intelligent women and men, democratically elected to protect the interests of the people, when in fact it is a group of sociopaths doing the bidding of the very rich—but being wrong about it is something we can correct only when we see the dependently arisen things are in fact very real, the only kind of real things that exist at all, and have real causal powers.
The solution to this problem is yet another component of Romantic ideology. That is, if we understand that “ultimate reality is inexpressible, beyond concepts or words” (172) and is made up of “illusions” that yet are able to “do their dirt work” (274) despite not being real, well, how do we reconcile these things? The solution is in how we see things: when we “perceive them differently” (278), with non-conceptual wisdom, we are awakened, and able to act more efficiently in the world of illusory phenomena. And this non-conceptual wisdom turns out to be, not surprisingly, the Romantic Sublime! In “conceptual wisdom” all “phenomena reappear” but now “like and illusion or a mirage, without any distinguishing characteristics or nature of their own” (295). This way of perceiving, like the sublime, can only be defined negatively, by what it does not include: it does not “direct the mind conceptually” (the very definition of a sublime experience in Romanticism); it is not, though, free of concepts; it is not “thorough pacification of conceptuality”; it is not mere materiality; and it “is s not sufficient to grasp onto the signs of nonconceptuality” (again, a defining feature of the Romantic Sublime). We see in a new way that can “fundamentally transform our minds and hearts” (276) when we use concepts and language to escape the trap of concepts and language. This is, as has been argued so many times by so many Romanticists, the way that poetry is understood to interpellate us into the dominant ideology!
This will likely seem deep and profoundly true to most readers of such a book, because most of them will be Romantic subjects already. We all are, without knowing it. Ask any class of college freshman to define poetry, and most will literally quote from the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” without ever even having heard of Wordsworth. But it doesn’t seem to me that this thorough interpellation into Romantic ideology, even in its current postmodern form, has done anything to alleviate human suffering. In fact, it seems to me to be the cause of that list of crises Waldron cites.
Waldron repeatedly agrees with the finding of cognitive science that “due to our evolved cognitive processes, human beings are predisposed to be naive realists, natural dualists, and innate essentialists” (182), that this way of (not) thinking is innate, hardwired into our brains at the moment the first homo sapiens came into existence through some random mutation a couple hundred thousand years ago. I would suggest that, instead, it is the nature of capitalist ideologies, including economics, psychology, cognitive science (all the “constructs” Waldron is afraid to deconstruct) to make us think this way. Poor thinking is dependently arisen, not from genetics and evolution, but from cultural practices, from ideology.
The question is, what kinds of practices might make people into the kinds of subjects who don’t think in this way? Surely the answer is not Romanticism…
I'd suggest that a better, although more challenging, account of (one version of) Yogacara can be found in Dan Arnold's "Brains, Buddhas and Believing."
December 17, 2025
This is the most accessible and eloquent introduction to the Buddhist Yogacara School I’ve ever read. Waldron disentangles Yogacara from the often criticized Cittamatra and makes a strong case for how it perfectly complements Prasangika Madhyamaka with a powerful framework for understanding the processes of the conscious and unconscious human mind.
February 1, 2024
What I liked about this book was the contextualization of Yogachara thought within its historical and philosophical context. Having read it, I am still not convinced that the perspectives Yogachara puts forward support the kind of existential transformation that Buddhism is concerned with. To my mind it is rather abstract and lacking in pragmatic strategies to overcome selfcentred conduct.
December 8, 2023
One probably cannot overstate the importance of the Yogacara (Mind Only) teachings and instructions for addressing the current social and economic malaise and ecological decline much of Western culture and many societies find themselves in after a seemingly roaring success in the last century. The author makes this point towards the end of this magnificent book, but it's best stated upfront. Anyone who genuinely wants to understand how to get at the root of today's problems, of why we don't seem to able to get it together to solve urgent problems, such as rapidly increasing wealth inequality, the disappearance of cultural and social diversity, and the climate emergency, should read this book.
It may seem strange that a philosophy of mind that's 1,000+ years old may hold the key for bettering our lives and ourselves. But if one takes the time to engage with the ideas and those that preceded them (from earlier Buddhist and non-Buddhist schools and traditions) presented in this book, this becomes a lot clearer.
As Waldron carefully shows, Yogacara philosophers take skillful aim at our engrained tendency to "essentialize" almost everything we encounter, be it persons, ideas/ideologies, or fancy cars or houses, and to entirely overlook the constructed nature of our experience (something that modern cognitive science has confirmed time and again). In the (paraphrased) words of another philosopher of mind, Jay Garfield, "We construct a world with things in it and then tell ourselves that we found it 'out there.'"
Because of the weighty subject matter, and since the book appears to be written for a largely academic audience, many readers may want to start with "Affirming the Conventional in Our Contemporary World" (in the Conclusions)--it emphasizes that Yogacara is not a philosophy that denies the existence of an external world but in fact is a moral philosophy at its root that locates a lot of our difficulties in our inability (and cultural prohibition) to acknowledge and skillfully deal with our unconscious desires and impulses (emanating from the "storehouse consciousness" or alayavijnana--Asian philosophy had an early leg up on Freud). The remainder of the book is very logically organized, helping one to quickly understand how Yogacara (or Mind Only) arose amidst competing schools of thought. A very engaging and fascinating read--highly recommended!
It may seem strange that a philosophy of mind that's 1,000+ years old may hold the key for bettering our lives and ourselves. But if one takes the time to engage with the ideas and those that preceded them (from earlier Buddhist and non-Buddhist schools and traditions) presented in this book, this becomes a lot clearer.
As Waldron carefully shows, Yogacara philosophers take skillful aim at our engrained tendency to "essentialize" almost everything we encounter, be it persons, ideas/ideologies, or fancy cars or houses, and to entirely overlook the constructed nature of our experience (something that modern cognitive science has confirmed time and again). In the (paraphrased) words of another philosopher of mind, Jay Garfield, "We construct a world with things in it and then tell ourselves that we found it 'out there.'"
Because of the weighty subject matter, and since the book appears to be written for a largely academic audience, many readers may want to start with "Affirming the Conventional in Our Contemporary World" (in the Conclusions)--it emphasizes that Yogacara is not a philosophy that denies the existence of an external world but in fact is a moral philosophy at its root that locates a lot of our difficulties in our inability (and cultural prohibition) to acknowledge and skillfully deal with our unconscious desires and impulses (emanating from the "storehouse consciousness" or alayavijnana--Asian philosophy had an early leg up on Freud). The remainder of the book is very logically organized, helping one to quickly understand how Yogacara (or Mind Only) arose amidst competing schools of thought. A very engaging and fascinating read--highly recommended!
March 22, 2024
The book is really interesting and offers for all facts summerized and collected references. The book also closes the gap between science and spirituality. It is interesting to see the development of buddhism and its influences.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews