Wei-Shi; Phenomenology; Unconscious; Alayavijnana; Yogacara; Chinese
摘要
My dissertation examines the most fundamental layer of consciousness, the so-called “storehouse” consciousness—ālayavijñāna —as formulated in the celebrated Cheng Wei-Shi Lun (The Treatise on the Doctrine of Consciousness-Only), which is an extended commentary of Vasubandhu's Trimśikā (Thirty Verses), a key text in the Yogācāra tradition, by the Chinese Buddhist monk-scholar Xuan Zang (Hsüan Tsang, 602–664). Furthermore, since ālayavijñāna has been often interpreted as the Buddhist equivalent of the notion of the unconscious in modern scholarly literature on Buddhism, I will compare the Yogācāra formulation of ālayavijñāna with the notion of the unconscious developed by Freud and Jung. My argument is that, despite the apparent similarity of their being subliminal, we need to be cautious in using the latter to approach the former since they are formulated to address different problematics which may not be compatible with one another. However our discussion will show a strong phenomenological orientation in Xuan Zang's Yogācāra philosophy, even though the theoretical objectives of Husserl and Xuan Zang are vastly different. We will come to the conclusion that Xuan Zang's Yogācāra formulation of ālayavijñāna is a Buddhist phenomenology of the un-conscious. It is methodologically phenomenological in its analysis of the subliminal mental activity, ālayavijñāna, the un-conscious (to be distinguished from the notion of the unconscious developed in the West), in order to defend the Buddhist orthodox of karmic retribution without reification.
Essentially, my work conducts a twofold critique on the Yogācāra philosophy with the notion of ālayavijñāna at its core, internal and external. The internal critique is meant to examine the rationale behind the development of a concept like ālayavijñāna within the Buddhist philosophical discourse when Buddhism culminates into the Yogācāra system. The external critique is meant to compare and contrast the Yogācāra philosophy with three other major conceptual frameworks which deal with human subjectivity, Freud's psychoanalysis, Jung's analytical psychology, and Husserl's transcendental phenomenology. In so doing, I hope to, first, search for an appropriate modern interpretative tool to approach ālayavijñāna and, second, to bring to the awareness of the limits of our theoretical endeavor which is colored and driven by a specific goal.
