Damiani

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This series of classes prepares the members of Wisdom’s Goldenrod for an upcoming meeting with His Holiness the Dalai Lama in September 1984 through an intense examination of the reasonings about emptiness employed by the Yogacara (also known as Cittamatra) and Madhyamaka (Middle Way) schools of Tibetan Buddhism.

Several students take turns presenting key tenets of these two schools by reading and explaining selected passages from Jeffrey Hopkins’s book Meditation on Emptiness. Anthony Damiani then probes their understanding of the text by asking questions and urging them to translate the somewhat technical and scholastic terminology that Hopkins uses into plain English—for example, the language Paul Brunton (PB) uses in chapter 3, “The Birth of the Universe” of The Wisdom of the Overself.

Damiani claims that in this chapter, PB took the views of the four Buddhist schools (Vaibhashika, Sautrantika, Madhyamaka, and Yogacara) and restated them in ordinary English. Thus it would be worthwhile for students to look into this and discover how, and precisely where, in this chapter he reformulated the doctrines of these four schools. Throughout Damiani is careful to acknowledge that his criticisms are directed to the language Hopkins devised to translate Tibetan terms and not to the doctrines held by the various schools of Tibetan Buddhism.

Damiani also suggests it might be helpful to use a framework developed in other contemporaneous classes to try and understand both Yogacara and Madhyamaka—namely, there are two kinds of consciousness, an eternal unchanging consciousness and a discontinuous, changing consciousness. The I AM, the pure subjectivity championed by Advaita Vedanta and realized in nirvikalpa samadhi, is the unchanging consciousness. The vast World-Idea is the consciousness that is always changing. The World-Idea, which has the World-Mind as its substratum, includes both what is known by the I AM and the vehicles by which it participates in the gross, subtle, and causal levels of the universe.

Generally, Damiani thinks that Buddhism’s denial of a permanent self indicates that they presuppose they are located within the changing World-Idea, and they explain all phenomena concerning the self (e.g., its apparent identity over time and memory) from that perspective. But he still thinks it’s worth asking whether the Yogacara analysis of experience is from the perspective of the pure I AM or the World-Idea. Unlike the other three schools of Tibetan Buddhism, Yogacara doesn’t presuppose that the phenomenal world is already given, rather it is brought into existence by consciousness. The analysis of experience by Yogacara takes them right to the heart center where the mind receives the World-Idea. For them, falsity or illusion comes in when a division is made in experience between subject and object. The lack of that distinction is what they mean by emptiness. So perhaps this analysis presupposes that consciousness is prior to the World-Idea.

On the other hand, Madhyamaka criticizes Yogacara for making mind or consciousness an ultimate truth. For them, the ultimate truth is that everything is empty of having substantial being (svabhava), including mind. Hopkins translates the Tibetan term for svabhava as “inherent existence.” Damiani regards this as a confusing/confused translation: existence is all or nothing. There are not varieties of existence. If something is experienced, it exists. It may not be real; it may be only an appearance, or may exist only for a moment, but it exists.

Some of the questions persistently raised but not definitively answered in this series are the following: What is emptiness? Might emptiness be the same as the authentic being of the Platonists? What does the Madhyamaka mean by “inherent existence”? What does Prasangika-Madhyamaka mean by a “base of imputation”? What is “imputation by thought”? Might it be the individual mind imposing its images on the structured energy pulsating from the World-Mind? How does Madhyamaka understand the snake-rope illusion? Neither an illusory snake nor a real snake can be found among the bases of imputation, yet Madhyamaka distinguishes between them. Does the fact that a real snake can perform a function (e.g., it can bite you) but an illusory snake cannot explain the difference between them adequately?