Philosophies of India

SR No.: 007309
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell
Publisher: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd
Publication Year: 1953
Total Pages: 709
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 34 MB

Page 548

HINAYANA AND MAHAYANA
of the Madhyamika theory of the void, but in either case the logical relationship of the two Mahāyāna schools is evident.74 A foothold for thought is retained in the Yogācāra-a last (oolhold, but a foothold nevertheless; for the void (šūnyalä) here is identified with pure consciousness, pure thought, true wisdom (prajñā), as in Vedānta, and a system of reasoning then is developed from this position.
The question is asked, for example, as to how this phenomenal world can have been produced out of the void. If pure thought creates the phantasis called beings and things, which are covered by the categories (dharmas), and if pure thought also (as in the experience of the sagcs) then realizes their voidness and reduces them as it were to nothingness, how does it do this? The Yogācāra thinkers addressed themselves to this question with profound concern.
Their philosophy has bcen termed the nir-ālambana-vāda, the "doctrine (vāda) of no (nir) support (ālambana),” since it denies that any external object exists, apart from our mental processes, to give external support to the constructions of the mind. The doctrine has been termed, also, vijñānavāda, "the doctrine (vāda) of idcation (vijñāna),” since it regards mere mental representations as the sole existcnce. It insists on the logical primacy not of the created manifold but of the creating principlc, pure thought; not the world, but thought, is treated as the positive. Starting from that as the primary substance, the philosophers then reason outward to the ephemeral variety of things. And so they carry to a logical conclusion the idealistic tendency of Buddhist reasoning as initiated by the Hinayāna Sautrāntikas,78 and moreover justify their own movement dog
74 Cf. infra, p. 526, note 77. "The general view places the Sünyavāda earlier than the Vijñānavāda (= Yogācāra) teaching, though one can never be sure of it. The two perhaps developed side by side" (Radhakrishnan, op. cit., p. 645). 76 Cf. supra, pp. 515-516.
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