This essay provides a concise, yet comprehensible, explanation for the concept of Jñeyāvaraṇa, according to East Asian Sākāra-vijñānavāda. The discussion is mainly based on the presentation from Xuanzang's Cheng Wei Shih Lun (成唯識論, CWSL), since the treatise is the major text among the existing materials in Sanskrit, Tibetan and Chinese, that able to provide a clear, detailed and comprehensible interpretation on Jñeyāvaraṇa. According to CWSL, Jñeyāvaraṇa is composed of three layers of different meaning, namely (1) the inborn realist attitude of cognition ; (2) Mahāyāna practitioner's unable to keep balance between the two truths or the middle way between emptiness and dependent arising ; and (3) unable to achieve omniscience, or otherwise unable to break from Incompleteness of Knowledge.
