Integrating Yogacara in Your Practice
by Guo Gu
From Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quartely
Buddhist Practitioners are all too familiar with the ups and downs of meditative experience, but most have no idea why certain experiences occur while others never happen. When our practice hits a low point, we don’t know how to pull ourselves our. And even when our practice is strong, we don’t know how to sustain it. In truth, no those rare occasions when we do slip into a peaceful, clear state of mind in meditation, we’re most often like a blind cat that has caught a dead mouse.
Human experience is complex; what shapes our lives changes from moment to moment with our perception. From the Yoganara, or consciousness-only, perspective, our subtle momentary mental states, or factors, determine the quality and experience of our lives. We are habituated to behave and perceive in patterned ways. If we want to change, we must transform the patterns of our mental life. One of primary reasons we struggle with this is that we don’t know what’s present in our minds. When we lack awareness of the workings of our minds, we misinterpret our experiences, creating all sorts of problems for ourseves.
Yogacara played a central role in the development of most Mahayana Buddhist traditions. First systemized in India during the fifth century by brothers Asanga and Vasuhandhu, and popularized in China during the seventh century by Xuanzang, Yogacara teachings are deeply embedded in Abhidharma—the second basket of the Tripitaka, which contains schematic classifications and lists summarizing the philosophical, psychological, epistemological, and metaphysical teachings of the earliest Buddhist scriptures. As such, Yogacara can be difficult to appreciate without a firm grasp of that body of literature, and most in-depth works on Yogacara in English, until recently, have been written in a dry scholarly fashion. For those seeking practical guidance on how to live according to Buddhist wisdom and compassion, it may be difficult to see how a collection of dusty volumes of long, often repetitive treatises filled with unfamiliar words and ideas could be of help on the path. But if we can open our hearts and minds to what our dharma ancestors have to tell us, these teachings can offer us valuable guidance.
The central teaching of Yogacara is simple: everything is created or mediated by consciousness. In life we experience happiness and anger, highs and lows, pleasure and sadness. We believe these emotions are the result of a world that exists outside us, and so we invest endless effort in trying to perpetuate, possess, change and control things “out there” so we can be happy. Yet our attempts are always met by unpredictability and uncertainty.
Yogacara teachings show us how, in the fluctuating stream of our experiences, we persistently and irrationally imagine two constants against which and through which we interpret and evaluate life: self and others. In traditional Buddhist language, there are atman and dharmas, “self” and “things.” Yogacara proposes that our sense of self is an illusion and that the world is a construct—both are fantasies. To see this clearly, we must explore these two constants in light of Yogacara’s teaching on the three natures: imagines nature, interdependent nature, and perfected nature.
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[For full version of this article, please refer to the Buddhadhrama: Issue of Winter, 2107]
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Integrating Yogacara in Your Practice
Yogacara provides meditators with a useful conceptual framework for understanding the workings of mind, but we also need a practice model for integrating the Yogacara teachings and transforming our thoughts and emotions. For this, I teach a four-step process: recognizing, embracing, transforming, and freeing or letting go. These four steps are neither theoretical nor linear. In order to be of use, they must be experiential, reciprocal, and continuous.
Let’s examine how this process works in light of what happens when we become distracted during meditation. Many meditators mistakenly believe it’s the mental factor of conception, which enables us to create symbols through words and language, that causes distraction in meditation, but that is not actually the case. Rather, it is carving, one of the unwholesome factors, that causes us to lose attention. When we are distracted, it’s more often because we wish the moment to be other than it is. We may be subtly seeking calm and clarity, so the unwholesome mental factor of carving for something better has set in. The fact that other people may not be distracted by whatever is calling our attention means the external stimulus can’t be responsible; we are distracted because of our own craving for something different. We need to first recognize this.
In order to embrace this reality, the second step, we need to accept the reality of both our own carving and our distraction. In essence, we are embracing the truth that our own perceptions shape the world.
To transform this experience, the third step, we must relax the whole body. When we become distracted or stressed, cortisol is released throughout our bodies, making us tense. In such situations, we are at a disadvantage to do anything about our carving and tend to default to our habitual tendency to blame objects “out there” for disturbing us. To short-circuit this tension, I teach progressive relaxation, using sensation as a guide to scan the body, section by section. From head to toe, we recognized the tension and relax each part as a foundation for meditation. In doing so, we learn to embody and integrate the Yogacara insight and avoid being in your heads. This method can also be used anytime we experience tension, whether psychological or physical. When our bodies are relaxed, our breath becomes calmer, and the presence of craving will naturally dissipate. Only then can the negative mental factor be transformed, allowing the wholesome factor to be. When we can do this, we are ready to return to our method of practice without getting caught up with the object of our distraction.
The final step is freeing ourselves from vexations, or harmful mental conditionings. This ability develops over time through engaging in the above practice until it becomes second nature. The practice of recognizing, embracing, and transforming prepares us to relax our grip on our fixations, which is the first step to letting go. Once our grip is loosened, we give ourselves room for insight into the imagined, interconnected, and perfected nature of this moment. We are released.
It’s important to familiarize and explore this on your own, as well as with a teacher. Being gradually, practicing with only one or two mental factors for a couple of weeks. Then, move onto a few other factors for two more weeks, and so on. Practicing in this way brings Yogacara teachings to life. Not only will you deepen your meditation practice but the quality of your life will also improve. These teachings are nothing less than a means to discover your perfected nature within.