The Way of Zen - Alan Watts [39]
But in Buddhist philosophy citta does not stand over against a conception of solid stuff. The world has never been considered in terms of a primary substance shaped into various forms by the action of mind or spirit. Such an image is not in the history of Buddhist thought, and thus the problem of how impalpable mind can influence solid matter has never arisen. Wherever we should speak of the material or physical or substantial world, Buddhism employs the term rupa, which is not so much our “matter” as “form.” There is no “material substance” underlying rupa unless it be citta itself!
The difficulty of making equations and comparisons between Eastern and Western ideas is that the two worlds do not start with the same assumptions and premises. They do not have the same basic categorizations of experience. When, therefore, the world has never been divided into mind and matter, but rather into mind and form, the word “mind” cannot mean quite the same thing in both instances. The word “man,” for example, does not have quite the same meaning when contrasted with “woman” as when contrasted with “animal.”
A simplified, and somewhat rough, way of stating the difference is that Western idealists have begun to philosophize from a world consisting of mind (or spirit), form, and matter, whereas the Buddhists have begun to philosophize from a world of mind and form.
The Yogacara does not, therefore, discuss the relation of forms of matter to mind; it discusses the relation of forms to mind, and concludes that they are forms of mind. As a result, the term “mind” (citta) becomes logically meaningless. But because the main concern of Buddhism is with a realm of experience which is nonlogical and meaningless, in the sense that it does not symbolize or signify anything other than itself, there is no objection to “meaningless” terms.
From the logical standpoint the proposition “Everything is mind” says no more than that everything is everything. For if there is nothing which is not mind, the word belongs to no class, and has no limits, no definition. One might as well use “blah”–which is almost exactly what Buddhism does with the nonsense word tathata. For the function of these nonsense terms is to draw our attention to the fact that logic and meaning, with its inherent duality, is a property of thought and language but not of the actual world. The nonverbal, concrete world contains no classes and no symbols which signify or mean anything other than themselves. Consequently it contains no duality. For duality arises only when we classify, when we sort our experiences into mental boxes, since a box is no box without an inside and an outside.
Mental boxes are probably formed in our minds long before formal thought and language supply labels to identify them. We have begun to classify as soon as we notice differences, regularities and irregularities, as soon as we make associations of any kind. But–if the word “mental” means anything at all–this act of classification is certainly mental, for to notice differences and to associate them with one another is something more than simply to respond to sense contacts. Yet if classes are a product of the mind, of noticing, association, thought, and language, the world considered simply as all classes of objects is a product of the mind.
This is, I think, what the Yogacara means by the assertion that the world is mind-only (cittamatram lokam). It means that external and internal, before and after, heavy and light, pleasant and painful, moving and still are all ideas, or mental