104.  If a fire were to seize your head or your dress you would extinguish and subdue it, even then endeavour to annihilate desire, for there is no other higher necessity than this.

105.  By morality, knowledge and contemplation, attain the spotless dignity of the quieting and the subduing nirva@na not subject to age, death or decay, devoid of earth, water, fire, wind, sun and moon.

107.  Where there is no wisdom (prajna) there is also no contemplation (dhyana), where there is no contemplation there is also no wisdom; but know that for him who possesses these two the sea of existence is like a grove.

Uncompromising Idealism or the School
of Vijnanavada Buddhism.

The school of Buddhist philosophy known as the Vijnanavada or Yogacara has often been referred to by such prominent teachers of Hindu thought as Kumarila and S’a@nkara.  It agrees to a great extent with the S’unyavadins whom we have already described.  All the dharmas (qualities and substances) are but imaginary constructions of ignorant minds.  There is no movement in the so-called external world as we suppose, for it does not exist.  We construct it ourselves and then are ourselves deluded that it exists by itself (nirmmitapratimohi) [Footnote ref 1].  There are two functions involved in our consciousness, viz. that which holds the perceptions (khyati vijnana), and that which orders them by imaginary constructions (vastuprativikalpavijnana).  The two functions however mutually determine each other and cannot be separately distinguished (abhinnalak@sa@ne anyonyahetuke).  These functions are set to work on account of the beginningless instinctive tendencies inherent in them in relation to the world of appearance (anadikala-prapanca-vasanahetukanca) [Footnote ref 2].

All sense knowledge can be stopped only when the diverse

_______________________________________________________

___________

[Footnote 1:  Lankavatarasutra, pp. 21-22.]

[Footnote 2 Ibid. p. 44.]

146

unmanifested instincts of imagination are stopped (abhuta-parikalpa-vasana-vaicitra-nirodha) [Footnote ref 1].  All our phenomenal knowledge is without any essence or truth (nihsvabhava) and is but a creation of maya, a mirage or a dream.  There is nothing which may be called external, but all is the imaginary creation of the mind (svacitta), which has been accustomed to create imaginary appearances from beginningless time.  This mind by whose movement these creations take place as subject and object has no appearance in itself and is thus without any origination, existence and extinction (utpadasthitibha@ngavarjjam) and is called the alayavijnana.  The reason why this alayavijnana itself is said to be without origination, existence, and extinction is probably this, that it is always a hypothetical state which merely explains all the phenomenal states that appear, and therefore it has no existence in the sense in which the term is used and we could not affirm any special essence of it.