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LATER BUDDHISTIC SCHOOLS
205 is pure subjectivism; and the complicated explanation of perception which the Sautrāntika gave may be supposed to have directly led to it. The followers of this view are known as Yogācāra-a term whose significance is not very clear. While, according to the two previous schools, knowledge is true so far as the sva-laksana is concerned and is false only in respect of the conceptual elements involved in it, according to the Yogācăra it is the sole truth and its whole content is false. In fact in the triple factor commonly assumed wherever experience arises--'knower,' 'known' and 'knowledge the last alone is here taken to be true. There is neither subject nor object but only a succession of ideas. The specific form which cognition at any particular instant assumes is determined in this view, not by an outside object presented to it, but by past experience. That is, the stimulus always comes from within, never from without. It is in no way dependent upon objects existing outside, but is to be traced to an impression (vāsanā) left behind by past experience, which in its turn goes back to another impression, that to another experience and so on indefinitely in a beginningless series. At no particular stage in the series, it must be noted, is the experience due to an external factor. In other words, the ideas signify nothing but themselves. Since the Yogācāra believes in the reality of nothing but these ideas (vijñāna), he is also designated as vijñāna-vādin.
We may mention some of the main arguments by which this extreme view is maintained. First comes the obvious analogy of dreams where experience arises without corresponding objects, and internal thoughts appear as external. The second argument is based upon the view which the Yogācāra holds in common with the rest of the Buddhists that cognition becomes aware of itself. In self-cognizing cognition, we have a case in which what is known is identical with what knows; and the Yogācāra argues that the same may be the case in all experience, there being no reason why an explanation which is not absurd in one case must be so in another. In the awareness of a jar also, knowledge and the
The Chinese rendering of the term suggests 'Yogācārya' as the Sanskrit form. See BP. p. 243 n. 1 Cf. Samkara on VS. II. ii. 28.
