East Asian Yogācāra

East Asian Yogācāra is the development of Indian Yogācāra Buddhist philosophy in China and neighboring regions. Its traditions analyze consciousness, karmic experience, and the path to awakening.

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Yogācāra: A Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophical tradition that analyzes consciousness, cognition, and the construction of experience. East Asian schools developed from this Indian tradition and its account of cognition.
Karmic Seeds: Latent dispositions in Yogācāra that condition future experience and action. Seeds in storehouse consciousness explain how actions shape later experience without a permanent self.
Xuanzang: A seventh-century Chinese Buddhist monk who traveled to India and translated major Buddhist works. His translations and teaching established the textual basis for the Faxiang school.
Tathāgatagarbha: The Mahāyāna doctrine that beings possess, or are grounded in, the potential for buddhahood. Its language of innate awakening potential created tensions with some Yogācāra accounts of spiritual capacity.
Tiantai: A Chinese Buddhist school organized around the Lotus Sutra and the doctrine of threefold truth. Tiantai classified Yogācāra teachings within its hierarchy of Buddhist doctrines.
Eight Consciousnesses: A Yogācāra model comprising five sensory consciousnesses, mental consciousness, a self-grasping mind, and storehouse consciousness. The model became a central framework for explaining experience in East Asian Yogācāra.
Transformation of the Basis: The transformation of consciousness that ends delusion and enables awakening in Yogācāra. It describes the soteriological change that East Asian accounts associate with purifying consciousness.
Kuiji: A Chinese Buddhist monk and principal disciple of Xuanzang, associated with the Faxiang school. His commentaries systematized Xuanzang’s Yogācāra teachings in China.
Awakening of Faith in the Mahāyāna: A Chinese Buddhist treatise that presents mind as encompassing both suchness and arising-and-ceasing. Its synthesis differs from the more analytical consciousness frameworks associated with Faxiang.
Chan Buddhism: An East Asian Buddhist tradition emphasizing meditation and direct realization. Chan developed alongside Yogācāra scholarship and inherited parts of its vocabulary of mind and practice.