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The Buddhist Unconscious: The Alaya-vijñana in the Context of Indian Buddhist Thought. By William S. Waldron. New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. Pp. xvi + 269. $90.00.
The Buddhist Unconscious: The Alaya-vijñana in the Context of Indian Buddhist Thought by William S. Waldron is an examination of the origins of the Yogacara concept of alaya-vijñana, or "storehouse-consciousness." Where orthodox Buddhist psychology speaks of six types of consciousness (one for each external sense modality, plus one for "inner sense" or manas), the Yogacara school of Mahayana Buddhism posits an additional kind of consciousness to serve as the substratum of the seeds thought to be engendered by karma. This is sometimes seen as tantamount to admitting a self, a criticism the author seeks to rebut. His chief concern, however, is to show how this posit grew out of a set of problems inherited from pre-Yogacara Abhidharma. He discusses the conception of consciousness that is to be found in early Buddhist sources, describes how orthodox Abhidharma sought to deal with a variety of mental continuities, and then traces the development of the notion of alaya-vijñana through the early Yogacara texts Samdhinirmocanasutra, Yogacarabhumi and Mahayanasamgraha.
The story that the author tells is basically this. Early Buddhism explains suffering as derived from false belief in an enduring subject, the "I," where there is really just a multiplicity of ephemeral psychophysical factors in causal succession. Actions based on this false belief lead to a further strengthening of those factors that perpetuate the belief, resulting in the round of rebirth. Abhidharma set about trying to catalog these factors and their multifarious causal connections. But it encountered a seemingly insuperable difficulty in trying to account for a variety of psychological continuities in terms of a model that lacks mental continuants. The Yogacara posit of alaya-vijñana solves this difficulty by supplying a mental continuum that is not (ordinarily) accessible to introspection.
Yogacara is best known, of course, for its denial of external objects (cittamatra), but that claim is largely ignored here. Instead the author focuses on continuities with earlier Abhidharma thought concerning the nature of the mental continuum. Waldron is no doubt correct to see the Yogacara enterprise as itself a (Mahayana) form of Abhidharma. But while the concept of alaya-vijnana might perhaps be seen as...