ABSTRACT
Consciousness was a main focus of Yoga¯ca¯ra, evident by one of its signature doctrines, vijñapti-ma¯tra , frequently translated as “consciousness only.” The root jña¯ (cognate to gnosis, know) means “knowing, cognizing.” Grammatically, vijñapti is a causative, meaning “to make known’; ma¯tra signals reductiveness, “nothing but,” and often has a negative implication. Properly understood, vijñapti-ma¯tra means that, while unenlightened, what we take to be reality is “nothing but what is made known to us by our cognitions.” This is similar to epistemological idealism which holds that everything we know or think about occurs to us in and through cognition, including our ideas about what might lie outside our cognitive sphere. Yoga¯ca¯ra also claims that in unenlightened experience we only know what we encounter through our senses and cognitive activities. Even the idea that external objects exist is an idea since awareness of the objects themselves only occurs in cognition, and the same is true of any theories concerning such objects and their status. The key di erence between Yoga¯ca¯ra and Western epistemological idealists is that the latter consider access to the non-cognitive realm di cult or impossible, while Yoga¯ca¯ra considers immediate access to reality a basic aspect of enlightenment, in which the obstructions to
what is knowable ( jñeya-a¯varan․a ) are eliminated, and one’s discursive consciousness ( vijña¯na ) becomes direct and immediate cognition ( jña¯na ). Vijñapti-ma¯tra is not a declaration of metaphysical idealism, in which only mind is real, but rather a caution about a cognitive veil, a consciousness that projects and superimposes false notions and presuppositions on to reality, by which we mistake our interpretations for reality itself. Unenlightened cognitions are cognitive constructions. The Yoga¯ca¯ra project is to overcome erroneous cognition and lift the veil. With enlightenment, the projections cease and one’s mind becomes the great mirror cognition ( maha¯dars´a-jña¯na ) that refl ects everything just as it is ( yatha¯bhu¯ta ).
