Different Buddhist Schools of Thought

Here is an excerpt of a piece I am writing describing the Buddhist view of perception.

According to the Svatanrika school of Tibetan Buddhism, the self does not exist inherently. When you look for the self, especially when the mind is focused in meditation, you will find that every hypothesis turns out to be off the mark. I recall meditating on the mind one time, where the exercise was to identify the shape of the mind, identify its color, etc, and coming to the startled conclusion that "The mind appears to have no qualities." The closer you, look the less substantial it seems. This is not to deny that people exist, but that they have no unchanging eternal aspect (something akin to a soul.) People change from moment to moment and each aspect of their body and mind is interdependent with many other causes and conditions usually considered separate from the self. Now many people will agree that there is no permanent unchanging self, but yet in their day to day lives, still react emotionally as though they have one. In every experience, there always is a sense that there is a "me" experiencing it. When you hear a sound there is a sense that there is a sound and a person experiencing that sound, but actually both the sound and the experience occur simultaneously. The perceived and the perceiving are indivisible in our consciousness. So how does it make sense to say that there is a separate entity hearing that sound? It is quite common to intellectually agree that a certain concept is true, but to act without taking the fact to heart. For example, alcoholics can often see that alcohol will not bring them lasting happiness, but will actually lead to immense suffering, but they often cannot bring their actions into harmony with this intellectually held belief.

The Cittamatrin school of Tibetan Buddhism goes on to analyze the exterior world, coming to the conclusion that it and the things in it don't actually exist. The reasoning here is somewhat different. All objects are perceived through the mind. All experiences are mental experiences. Our minds cannot directly come in contact with a table for example. Indeed such a statement seems to be an absurd category error. So everything we experience is but a thought, a mental event. Hence it makes little sense to postulate that there is anything except the mind. Both internal and external phenomena are of one mental ``substance." At first this view seems solipsistic, that everything is but a massive hallucination, a delusion that we create. However, the refutation to this is that there is no self that could possibly have created all these mental events in the first place. The self is as much a product of mind as are seemingly external objects. The example given here is that of a dream. Life is like a dream according to this viewpoint in the sense that nothing is inherently real. Nothing has true physical solidity. That's not to say there is no difference between waking and dreaming life, but it does mean that they are of the same basic nature. I recall several lucid dreams that brought this point home to me. In one dream, I was floating through space when I realized that my true body was asleep in bed, and I couldn't fathom where it could be in the dreamscape. It seemed like it was in a totally different universe possibly way far beyond the horizon. It was a disorienting experience. In another dream I was walking down a very realistic street and the thought occurred to me that I might be dreaming. Yet as I gazed upon the scenery, it seemed so realistic that I came to the conclusion that I couldn't possibly be dreaming. After I woke up, I realized that I had been. Another time, I was walking down a street in my hometown, when I realized that the entrance to a building I was familiar with was very different than it had been. At that moment I realized I was dreaming, despite how real the scene was. These repeated dream experiences have driven home to me that the way the mind experiences waking life and the way it experiences dream life is truly of the same nature. After all, there is no fool-proof way to tell whether you are waking or dreaming, and as illustrated here, the mind can be frequently confused by this.

The Madyamika school of Tibetan Buddhism points to a problem they see with the Cittamatrin viewpoint, namely that the Cittamatrins seem to be saying that the mind has an inherent reality. The mind is like the ocean and thoughts are like waves on the ocean, or the mind is like a mirror and thoughts are reflections in the mirror. The Cittamatrins say that the ocean and the mirror really exist, whereas the Madyamikas argue that the mind can't really inherently exist either. It is totally beyond conceptuality. So they actually say that it doesn't exist. It doesn't not exist. It doesn't both exist and not exist. And it doesn't neither exist nor not exist.

Even beyond this is the Shentong school, but I'll save my commentary on that for another day.