A Yogācāra Buddhist Critical Phenomenology

Abstract: This paper uses early Yogācāra Buddhist philosophical sources to outline a programmatic basis for a Buddhist critical phenomenology. This paper argues that the early Yogācāra textual tradition’s concept of the “entry into mind only” should be understood as a call for an individual to occupy their own subjectivity as it unfolds in relation to internal and external objects of perception and cognition, where these include one’s own body, thoughts, feelings, and dispositions, and also one’s relations to other beings, to time and space, and to one’s lifeworld. This occupation of one’s own subjectivity should then lead to what early Yogācāra texts call the attainment of “no mind,” which this paper argues is the capacity to live with the reality of one’s social subjectivity and its many implications and entanglements, without being bound by the delusions of that subjectivity.