[Buddha-l] Sabba Sutta

[Richard Hayes]

On Thu, 2008-11-27 at 00:16 -0500, Dan Lusthaus wrote:

> To the question of whether the alayavijnana is restricted to a single
> individual, or whether there is a "collective unconscious" a la Jung, the
> Yogacara texts themselves categorically deny the latter, and insist on the
> former.

Actually, so does Jung. He regretted using the term "collective
unconscious," because so many people took it to mean some sort of spooky
shared psyche of which our individual minds are a manifestation. Jung
found the idea of a shared psyche ridiculous. In clarifying what he
meant by the term "collective unconscious" Jung later wrote that he had
in mind something like instincts that members of a species are born
with. Surely, he argued, not all our neuroses come from our individual
childhood experiences of stumbling into our parent's bedroom and
catching them in flagrante delicto. Rather, he suggested, we are
innately predisposed as human beings to have many of the same traits our
ancestors had and on account of which they survived long enough to have
offspring. We are born, he claimed, with propensities to form certain
habits, and these propensities take certain archetypal forms, such as an
ego, that are psychologically active but of which we are mostly unaware.
And some of those tendencies that have supported the survival of our
ancestors are what make us neurotic. 

The Jungian theory of archetypes (which Waldron gets right) is not so
different from the classical Buddhist idea of anusayas---deeply latent
tendencies of which a person tends to be unaware that keep manifesting
as karma (deliberate action). It is because the anusayas are so deep,
and so outside our ordinary awareness, that it takes strong medicine to
eliminate them. The Buddha, like Aristotle, was quite aware of akrasia
and had a pretty good account for why it happens. 

> So, while each of us has our own alayavijnana, it is being influenced not
> only by our own past, but we are influencing each other, continuously. That
> engenders a type of collective karma (but not collective unconscious, except
> in the most imprecise terms).

As I understand Waldron, that is pretty much exactly how he sees it.
(And I think Jung was pretty much on the same page.) As for me, I'm
inclined to agree with Conze's assessment of the ālayavijñāna as one of
the most hideous conceptual monstrosities in all of Buddhism. But what
the hey, what else would a Mādhyamika say on this topic?

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico