If there is no self, what carries a habit through a night of dreamless sleep? The Yogācāra answer was a mind beneath the mind, flowing like a torrent and unknown to the one whose mind it is. Why Freud’s unconscious comes to mind and where the comparison fails, what the West’s hard problem of consciousness looks like from here, and how to keep the store consciousness from turning into a soul. 如果沒有我，是什麼把一個習慣帶過了一夜無夢的睡眠？瑜伽行派的回答，是心底下的一層心：像瀑流一樣流著，而它的主人並不知道它。為什麼人們會想到佛洛伊德的潛意識？這個比較在哪裡不成立？西方的「意識難題」從這裡看過去是什麼樣子？又該怎麼不讓阿賴耶識變成一個靈魂？
D12 Dharma and the West · 佛法與西方哲學Emptiness and Mind · 空與心Advanced · 高級about 30 min
八識・阿賴耶識
— Pāli aṣṭa-vijñāna, ālaya-vijñāna Sanskritthe eight consciousnesses; the store consciousness
The verdict · 判定
Closest: Freud, who also held that most of the mind is hidden from its owner and that what is hidden shapes what appears. Francisco Varela is closest in method, since he asked that trained first-person observation be made part of the science of mind. The likeness to Freud ends at the ego. Analysis aims to strengthen it. The Yogācāra account names the sense of “I” as the seventh consciousness, with four afflictions always attached, and aims at its transformation.
中文翻譯Every paragraph has a Chinese translation. Tap 中譯▾ under a paragraph to open that one, or use Show Chinese · 顯示中譯 at the top to open them all.每一段都有中譯：點段落下方的「中譯」只開那一段，或按上方的「顯示中譯」一次全部打開。
1 · What the Dharma says · 佛法怎麼說
A torrent underneath 底下的一道瀑流
The early discourses count six kinds of consciousness, one for each sense and one for the mind, and they are careful about what consciousness is. A monk named Sāti had concluded that “it is this very same consciousness that roams and transmigrates, not another.” The Buddha rebuked him sharply. “In many ways I have told you that consciousness is dependently originated, that without a cause, consciousness does not come to be.” Consciousness is named by what it arises from. That which arises dependent on the eye and sights is reckoned as eye consciousness, and so on for the rest, as a fire is called a wood fire or a grass fire by its fuel. On this account consciousness is an event that occurs when conditions meet. It is not a thing that travels.
This left later Buddhists with a question. The six kinds of consciousness stop. They stop in deep sleep, in a faint, and in certain deep states of meditation. Yet a person wakes with his memories, his skills, and his bad temper intact, and the results of an action may ripen years later or in another life. If nothing persists, what carries them across the gap? The Yogācāra school answered with two further levels. Beneath the six lies the store consciousness. Vasubandhu’s verses describe it as the ripening of past action and the holder of all seeds. Its objects and its working cannot be perceived. It is morally neutral, and it is “always flowing like a torrent.” The great Chinese commentary explains the image. A torrent is never the same water and never stops, so the store is neither permanent nor cut off, and the six ordinary kinds of awareness rise on it like waves on water when conditions strike.
Between the store and the six stands a seventh, called manas, the thinking mind. Its nature is to be always pondering, and what it ponders is the store, which it takes to be a self. “Four afflictions always accompany it: delusion about self, the view of self, conceit of self, and love of self.” This is the school’s account of where the sense of “I” comes from. No self is found in the stream, and something in the stream is continuously claiming one. The verses add that both levels come to an end. The store is given up at the stage of the arhat, and the seventh is absent in the arhat, in the attainment of cessation, and on the path beyond the world. Whatever the store consciousness is, the school did not regard it as what Sāti was looking for.
The unconscious, the hard problem, and a science with meditators in it 潛意識、難題，以及一門有禪修者在裡面的科學
A mind beneath the mind · 心底下的一層心
Sigmund Freud 佛洛伊德1900–1923
Before Freud, Leibniz had argued that we have countless small perceptions of which we are not aware, and that they make us who we are. Freud made the hidden mind the center of a psychology. Conscious life, he held, is the surface of a much larger system. Wishes, memories, and conflicts that never reach awareness go on producing effects in dreams, slips, and symptoms, and a person does not know his own motives. He later divided the mind into three agencies, of which the ego, the part that says “I,” is a late and partial organization of the rest. The structural likeness to the eight consciousnesses is plain: a store of latent dispositions, a function that claims selfhood, and a surface awareness shaped by both. The contents and the aim differ. Freud’s unconscious is made chiefly of what a person has repressed, and it is charged with desire. The store consciousness holds the trace of every action, wholesome and unwholesome, and is itself neutral. Analysis seeks to bring hidden material under the ego’s management. The Yogācārin regards the ego function as the principal affliction.
The philosopher David Chalmers divided the questions about consciousness into easy ones and a hard one. The easy problems concern functions: how the brain discriminates stimuli, integrates information, and controls behavior. They are difficult, and they are the kind of thing science knows how to explain. The hard problem is why any of this is accompanied by experience, why there is something it is like to see red or feel pain. No account of mechanisms seems to say why the lights are on. The Yogācāra system does not face this problem in the same form, because it does not begin with matter and ask how mind arises from it. Consciousness is among its starting points. This is a real difference of orientation and it gives no solution. The school has a hard problem of its own on the other side. It has to explain why experience presents itself as a world of solid outer things, and the theory of seeds is its attempt. A reader may judge that each tradition has explained what the other took for granted.
The Chilean biologist Francisco Varela argued that the science of mind had a gap in its method. It had precise instruments for the brain and almost none for experience, which it took from the untrained reports of volunteers. He proposed that disciplined first-person observation be developed and joined to brain science, each constraining the other, and called the program neurophenomenology. Varela was a practicing Buddhist. The book he wrote with Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch drew on the Abhidharma analysis of mental factors and on meditation as a trained way of observing the mind, and he helped begin the conversations between scientists and the Dalai Lama. This is the Western project closest in method to what the Yogācārins did. Their lists of consciousnesses and mental factors were maps made by observers, for the use of observers. Varela wanted better science. The maps were drawn for people trying to become free.
Who is closest, and where the likeness ends 誰最接近，相似到哪裡為止
On the conclusion Freud is closest. He and the Yogācārins agree that the mind is layered, that the deeper layers are unknown to the person, and that they determine much of what he perceives, feels, and does. They agree that the “I” is a function within the system and has no standing outside it. On method Varela is closest, and on the question that now dominates Western philosophy of mind, the hard problem, the two traditions start from opposite ends and do not meet.
The likeness to Freud ends at three points. The first is content. The store is the residue of action, karmic in the plain sense, and it has no special connection with sexuality or with childhood. The second is value. Freud’s unconscious is turbulent and largely hostile to civilized life. The store is neutral ground in which wholesome and unwholesome seeds lie side by side. The third is the aim. Freud said that the work of analysis is to put ego where id was, and he promised no more than the exchange of neurotic misery for ordinary unhappiness. The Yogācāra path aims at what the school calls the transformation of the basis, in which the eight consciousnesses become four kinds of knowledge and the store, cleared of seeds of affliction, becomes a mirror-like awareness that reflects everything and claims nothing. Freud wanted the patient to know himself. The school wanted to remove the conditions under which there seems to be a self to know.
The unconscious: repressed wishes and memories潛意識：被壓抑的願望與記憶
Unconscious processing in the brain大腦裡無意識的處理
Brain processes, plus an unexplained fact of experience大腦的歷程；外加一項未被解釋的事實：經驗
Where does it come from?它從哪裡來？
Past action過去的行為
The nature of each monad每個單子的本性
Instinct and early life本能與早年生活
Evolution and learning演化與學習
Not addressed沒有處理
Is it good or bad?它是好的還是壞的？
Neutral. It holds seeds of both kinds無記。兩種種子都有
Neither兩者都不是
Largely at odds with reason and society大體上與理性、與社會相衝突
Neither. It is machinery兩者都不是。它是機制
Not addressed沒有處理
What is the “I”?「我」是什麼？
The seventh consciousness, mistaking the store for a self第七識；它把阿賴耶識錯認成我
A simple substance, a soul一個單純的實體；靈魂
The ego, a partial organization自我：一種局部的組織
A model the brain makes of itself大腦為自己建立的一個模型
The subject of experience經驗的主體
What is to be done?該怎麼辦？
Transform the basis; consciousness becomes knowledge轉依；轉識成智
Nothing. Understand it不必做什麼。理解它
Make the unconscious conscious; strengthen the ego使潛意識成為意識；強化自我
Describe and predict it描述它、預測它
Explain why there is experience at all解釋為什麼竟然有經驗
5 · The step the Dharma takes further · 佛法多走的一步
Every act plants something 每一個行為都種下了什麼
The first further step is the theory of perfuming. The school held that each act of body, speech, or mind leaves a trace in the store, as incense leaves its scent in cloth, and that the trace becomes the seed of a tendency to act and perceive in the same way again. The seed ripens when conditions allow and, in ripening, lays down more of its kind. Western psychology has a similar account of habit, which William James set out for teachers. The Yogācāra version adds two things. The process is moral through and through, since what is laid down is a disposition toward greed or generosity, anger or patience. And it runs in both directions. The same mechanism that builds affliction builds the path. A moment of attention, a kind act, or the hearing of the teaching also perfumes the store, and the school explains awakening as the result of such seeds, planted and replanted until the others are crowded out.
The second step is the transformation itself. Freud and the cognitive scientists describe a structure and take it as given. The Yogācāra texts describe the same kind of structure and say that it is temporary. The verse on the store ends with the words “given up at the stage of the arhat,” and the commentary lists what each consciousness becomes. The store becomes the great mirror knowledge, which reflects all things without distortion. The seventh, which had clung to self, becomes the knowledge of equality, which regards self and others alike and is joined with great compassion. The sixth becomes the knowledge that observes each thing precisely, and the five senses become the knowledge that accomplishes what is to be done. The map is drawn so that it can be redrawn. This also answers the worry that the store is a soul. A soul is what one is. The store is what one has made, and the school describes a mind in which it has been unmade.
Westerners have two ready-made boxes for this teaching and both distort it. One is the soul. The store consciousness continues through sleep and death and carries what a person has done, and a listener raised in a Christian culture will conclude that Buddhism has an immortal soul after all. The other is the unconscious of popular psychology, a hidden self with secret wishes. Start from the early discourse. A monk once said that the same consciousness travels on from life to life, and the Buddha told him he had it wrong. Then give the image of the torrent. A river is continuous and has no water in it that stays. Use the language of habit throughout. What carries over is tendencies: trained ways of seeing and reacting. Everyone knows that a habit can run a life without being a self, and that it can be changed by practice.
