Abstract

This principal theme of this work involves a critical re-examination of the Buddhist doctrine of experience, as put forth in the late classical school of Buddhist philosophy known as Yogacara. The study itself is centered around an original translation and analysis of three seminal texts originally penned in Sanskrit by the early Yogacara philosopher Vasubandhu. Specifically challenged here is the frequent characterization of Yogacara as a philosophy embracing a doctrine of acosmic metaphysical Idealism. Alternately, it is proposed that early Yogacara thought exhibits a "process ontology" that radically deconstructs, rather than banishes into non-existence, the imputed entities of the so-called "objective" world. ;An extensive hermeneutical approach to the spirit of the textual material is undertaken in order to demonstrate that Yog acara is more appropriately understood in terms of contemplative philosophy, couched within a specific soteriological framework, than as a purely abstract system of speculative metaphysics as such. Yogacara literally means "contemplative practice." Its philosophy is conceived so as to illuminate that very process through its ontological discussion of sentient experience. Yogacara may therefore be quite legitimately regarded as a certain species of process metaphysics. ;Fresh light is cast upon the correlative cardinal Buddhist concepts of emptiness, impermanence, selflessness, and interdependence by re-examining them in process terms quite transparent and intelligible to contemporary philosophical and scientific modes of thought. In particular, some of the key notions developed by Alfred North Whitehead have been utilized to draw out some of the implications of Vasubandhu's Yogacara in ways which are resonant with contemporary modes of understanding. Ultimately sought is an improved conceptual bridge between the scientifically tempered worldview of twentieth-century Western intellectualism and the meditatively tempered worldview of Classical Indian contemplative thought