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Concept
Eight Consciousnesses
Summary
The Eight Consciousnesses (Skt. aṣṭa vijñānakāyāḥ) is a classification developed in the tradition of the Yogācāra school of Mahayana Buddhism. They enumerate the five sense consciousnesses, supplemented by the mental consciousness (manovijñāna), the defiled mental consciousness (kliṣṭamanovijñāna), and finally the fundamental store-house consciousness (ālāyavijñāna), which is the basis of the other seven. This eighth consciousness is said to store the impressions (vāsanāḥ) of previous experiences, which form the seeds (bīja) of future karma in this life and in the next after rebirth.
All surviving schools of Buddhist thought accept – "in common" – the existence of the first six primary consciousnesses (Sanskrit: , ). The internally coherent school associated with Maitreya, Asaṅga, and Vasubandhu, however, uniquely – or "uncommonly" – also posits the existence of two additional primary consciousnesses, kliṣṭamanovijñāna and , in order to explain the workings of karma. The first six of these primary consciousnesses comprise the five sensory faculties together with mental consciousness, which is counted as the sixth. According to Gareth Sparham, The doctrine arose on the Indian subcontinent about one thousand years before Tsong kha pa. It gained its place in a distinctly system over a period of some three hundred years stretching from 100 to 400 , culminating in the , a short text by Asaṅga (circa 350), setting out a systematic presentation of the doctrine developed over the previous centuries. It is the doctrine found in this text in particular that Tsong kha pa, in his Ocean of Eloquence, treats as having been revealed in toto by the Buddha and transmitted to suffering humanity through the founding saints (Tib. shing rta srol byed): Maitreya[-nātha], Asaṅga, and Vasubandhu.While some noteworthy modern scholars of the Gelug tradition (which was founded by Tsongkhapa's reforms to Atisha's Kadam school) assert that the is posited only in the Yogācāra philosophical tenet system, all non-Gelug schools of Tibetan buddhism maintain that the is accepted by the various Madhyamaka schools, as well.
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