What began to exercise the mind of Buddhist thinkers was how to account for the world we perceive around us. Accepting that in the final reality, it did not exist, and accepting that it appeared to exist, how was this appearance constructed - how did it come about and what was it made of?
This was important for them as being meditators they had come to realise the nature of mind, and began to feel dissatisfied with a purely logical philosophical position. They wanted to tease out the very fabric of world as mind. This led to a psychological rather than philosophical approach.
The Buddhist scholar who brought Buddhism to Tibet, Santarakshita, posited a new view. So objects were ultimately non-existent, but they could exist in our mind with the appearance of conventionality, ie socially accepted, an agreement taken for granted.
Two brothers, Asanga and Vasubandhu, went further and attacked Madhyamaka in that it failed to offer any base for the understanding of experience and belief. (Which seems fair comment to me.) Nararjuna had really only put forth the position that nothing could be said about the ultimate reality, as it was ineffable. So, by definition, it was inexpressible. But that didn’t stop it existing in a state that was incapable of proof. Sure you can’t logically prove it exists, but there it stand before us nonetheless.
This position became know as Cittamantra, or ‘mind only’. The whole of creation is mind-created.
Citta is a Sanskrit word roughly translated as ‘mind’, but it is far more comprehensive than that, and lies at the basis of the Sanskrit model of the form side of the universe. It is the medium through which we build our world. It comes from Cit, which is one of the three fundamentals: Sat-Cit-Ananda (Truth-Mind-Bliss), of the Divine Reality, the Paramatma. So it is our part of this, but whereas Western psychological ‘mind’ is taken to mean the expression of our thought, volition and feeling, Citta is the universal medium through which consciousness functions on all planes of the manifested Universe. It is the fundamental and immaterial nature of consciousness itself, and as such was referenced in the very first statements by Patanjali on Yoga.
Cittamantra had three aspects. First was the pre-language phenomena in a categorised form. Language grasps this raw material and builds reified conceptualisations - making them appear as real things. Meditation strips this quality of fixedness and boundary from our perceptions of the world, and reveals it as a flow and without defined edges. It unmasks the discriminating mind and resolves everything into what they simply call the ‘suchness of things’, or tathata.
Cittamantra aserts that this ‘suchness’ really exists as the root of experience. Thus the use of the word Citta. Interesting how Buddhism reaches back to the ancient knowledge embedded in Sanskrit when they rediscover the nature of perceived existence, or of Maya. But further, it claims this process is not purely a personal thing - it is universal. Thus this ‘suchness’ it is in fact the Buddha Mind itself - the intrinsically pure universal state of being.
It works like this: bottom layer is the storehouse of unprocessed experience (alaya). Our actions leaves behind ‘seeds’ which exist in a dynamic, constantly changing state within this storehouse. Next layer is our everyday awareness which discriminates between elements of the store, emphasising some and skipping others, influenced by the seeds, and resulting in a construction which appears as solid reality and continuity (manas). What Toltecs called ‘skimming’. Meditation cuts through this construction, perceiving the unmodified store, and revealing the structure as illusion - the fabrication of our mind. Meditation reveals the suchness: colourful, variegated, flowing, devoid of all differentiation, without observer or observed. (Nifty way of describing it I’d say.)
The Kargyupa follow a related philosophical position which closely resembles Cittamantra. It is called Tathagatagarbha. Tathagata means Buddhahood - literally ‘the thus gone one’. Garbha means womb or embryo. Thus the womb-embryo of Buddhahood. The basis of sentience, and as such the Tathagatagarbha is equivalent to the storehouse, alaya, of Cittamantra. Clearance of the defilement of our fabrications results in perception of its pure nature (dharmakaya), which is enlightenment - sans ‘the enlightened’.
Thus the mind itself is the basis of defilement (samsara) and of purity (nirvana). And yoga, as stated by Patanjali in his second sutra, is the “inhibition of the modifications of the mind”: the path to nirvana.
The Tathagatagarbha doctrine underpins the most important medatitive traditions within Mahayana, Mahamudra, Dzogchen, Ch’an, Zen and Son. Comprehension of it gives the tonal note to what all these traditions are aiming at, and their practices. That it subtly negates the Madhyamaka position is known, and the Madhyamakas are none too pleased. Fights have broken out and it remains not entirely resolved to this day.
For the yogin, the tension between these two positions: the philosophical irrefutability of Madhyamaka which regresses into an infinity of absence (what Zen calls Mu), and the meditational experiential perceptions of Cittamatra and Tathagatagarbha, create a dynamic which the practitioner can employ beneficially in acquiring the View.
Meditating on the deepest meaning of the essence of existence, while acknowledging the experience revealed through the endeavour of meditation, allows the yogin to acquire a profound and resilient View.
That is a simple exposition of the Buddhist practitioner’s View. Next we deal with the Path.
