Ālayavijñāna: On the Origin and the Early Development of a Central Concept of Yogācāra Philosophy, Part I: Text

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Mario D’Amato , in his review of Hartmut Buescher’s The Inception of Yogacara-Vijnanavada, introduces Lambert Schmithausen’s masterworks Alayavijnana: On the origin and the early development of a central concept of Yogacara philosophy in this way: “Briefly, Schmithausen’s aim in his Alayavijnana is to identify the first passage in which the concept of alayavijnana was introduced. Schmithausen specifies two criteria for identifying such a passage: that the exegetical situation presented a problem that could not be addressed with the current models of consciousness, making it inevitable that a new form of consciousness had to be introduced; and that it seems plausible that the term alayavijnana would have been chosen for this new form of consciousness. Schmithausen argues that the problem that makes a new concept inevitable centers on the meditative “attainment of cessation” (nirod- hasamapatti) – a state in which intentional mental events are held to cease, making it difficult, in light of various other Buddhist commitments, to explain how a series of such mental events can then resume for a subject emerging from this state. Schmithausen’s thesis is that the “initial passage” introducing the concept of alayavijnana occurs in the Samahita Bhumi of the Basic Section* of the vast Yogacarabhumi, where the new concept is invoked to address precisely such a problem. Buescher’s aim here, then, is to argue that Schmithausen’s presumed “initial passage” is not actually the earliest extant passage in which alayavijnana was presented.”