The Way of Zen - Alan Watts [40]
The problem of “what” the mind is can now be seen to be the same as the problem of “what” the real world is. It cannot be answered, for every “what” is a class, and we cannot classify the classifier. Is it not, then, merely absurd to speak of the mind, the citta, at all if there is no way of saying what it is? On the contrary, the mathematician Kurt Gödel has given us a rigorous proof of the fact that every logical system must contain a premise which it cannot define without contradicting itself.11 The Yogacara takes citta as its premise and does not define it, since citta is here the equivalent of sunya and tathata. For the mind
is beyond all philosophical views, is apart from discrimination, it is not attainable, nor is it ever born: I say there is nothing but Mind. It is not an existence, nor is it a non-existence; it is indeed beyond both existence and non-existence.… Out of Mind spring in-numerable things, conditioned by discrimination (i.e., classification) and habit-energy; these things people accept as an external world.… What appears to be external does not exist in reality; it is indeed Mind that is seen as multiplicity; the body, property, and abode–all these, I say, are nothing but Mind.12
Within this undefined continuum of citta the Yogacara describes eight kinds of vijnana, or “discriminating consciousness.” There is a consciousness appropriate to each of the five senses; there is the sixth sense-consciousness (mano-vijnana), unifying the other five so that what is touched or heard may be related to what is seen; there is manas, center of the mind’s discriminative and classifying activity; and finally there is the “store-consciousness” (alaya-vijnana), the supra-individual mind which contains the seeds of all possible forms.
The “store-consciousness” is almost equivalent to the citta itself, and is supra-individual because it stands prior to every differentiation. It is not to be conceived as a sort of ghostly gas permeating all beings, since space and extension are likewise here only in potentiality. In other words, the “store-consciousness” is that from which the formal world arises spontaneously or playfully (vikridita). For the Mahayana does not make the mistake of trying to account for the production of the world from the mind by a series of necessary causes. Whatever is linked by causal necessity is of the world of maya, not beyond it. Speaking somewhat poetically, the world illusion comes out of the Great Void for no reason, purposelessly, and just because there is no necessity for it to do so. For the “activity” of the Void is playful or vikridita because it is not motivated action (karma).
Thus, as the Yogacara describes it, the production of the formal world arises spontaneously from the “store-consciousness,” flows up into the manas, where the primordial differentiations are made, passes thence into the six sense-consciousnesses, which in turn produce the sense organs or “gates” (ayatana) through which it finally projects the classified external world.
The Buddhist yoga therefore consists in reversing the process, in stilling the discriminative activity of the mind, and letting the categories of maya fall back into potentiality so that the world may be seen in its unclassified “suchness.” Here karuna awakens, and the Bodhisattva lets the projection arise again, having become consciously identified with the playful and purposeless character of the Void.
1 Keith (1), p. 273.
2 The alleged “obscenity” of maithuna, as this practice is called, is entirely in the minds of Christian missionaries. In fact, the relationship with the shakti was anything but promiscuous, and involved the mature and all-too-infrequent notion of a man and a woman undertaking their spiritual development in common. This included a sanctification of