[Buddha-l] Cittamatra and Yogacara

[dorji.wangchuk at uni-hamburg.de]

> Many Tibetan writers treat Cittamatra and
> Yogacara as distinct schools
 > with quite different views - I'm wondering
> why many western writers seem
> to use the terms interchangeably and treat
> them as a single school?

- Chris


Dear Chris,

Some Tibetans, such as Shaakya mchog ldan, do 
differentiate between yogaacaara and cittamaatra 
(already noted in DREYFUS 1997: 433, 557, n. 
14; ALMOGI 2009: 145, n. 20), but I not sure 
whether Shaakya mchog ldan considered them to 
be "distinct schools." Many Tibetan authors in 
fact seem to consider yogaacaara, cittamaatra, 
vijñaptimaatra, and so on, as different 
designations for the one and the same Buddhist 
school of thought. It appears that during the 
early period of propagation of Buddhism in 
Tibet, the standard doxographic term for what 
we now call Yogaacaara was vijñaanavaada and 
not yogaacaara or cittamaatra. Ye shes sde, in his 
Lta ba’i khyad par, for instance, mainly employs 
the term rnam par shes pa tsam du smra ba.

Perhaps it should be pointed put that there are 
also nuanced observations made by Western 
scholars on the employment of these terms in 
general. Lambert Schmithausen 
(SCHMITHAUSEN 1992: 393), for example, has 
been pointed out that the terms vijñaptimaatra 
and cittamaatra do not occur in the various 
Indian Yogaacaara sources with equal frequency; 
the Langkaavatarasuutra, for instance, prefers 
cittamaatra and rarely uses vijñaptimaatra, 
whereas Vasubandhu’s TriMshikaa has only the 
latter term. Hartmut Buescher (BUESCHER 
2008) in his recent book prefers the compound 
Yogaacaara-Vijnaanavaada as the name of the 
school. 

Best,

Dorji Wangchuk


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