In his monograph on nirodhasamāpatti, entitled On Being Mindless (1986), Paul Griffiths discusses in detail the eightfold proof of ālayavijñāna found at the outset of the Viniścayasaṃgrahaṇī section of the Yogācārabhūmi. This proof is probably the oldest systematic discussion of ālayavijñāna in the extant Yogācāra texts and is very important. To the best of my knowledge, Griffiths’s work remains the only comprehensive discussion in English of this portion to date. In this work, he argues that ālayavijñāna was “an ad hoc intellectual construct designed to account for problems of continuity in Buddhist theories of personal identity” (p. 96) in the face of “idiosyncratic non-substantialist theories about what an individual is” (p. 97). He interprets the entire eightfold proof from this point of view. His view, however, does not seem to be supported by the text. This time I would like to read the eightfold proof from a different point of view. As Lambert Schmithausen has noted, the physiological functions of ālayavijnāna are highly emphasized in the eightfold proof. Furthermore, as Bhikkhu Anālayo has recently pointed out, physical elements are very important in the practice of meditation. To me these points seem to suggest that ālayavijñāna has a meditative background. In this paper I shall investigate such meditative implications of ālayavijñāna through critical reappraisal of On Being Mindless.
