Inside Vasubandhu's Yogacara: A Practitioner's Guide

by Ben Connelly

While first-wave Buddhism was clearly an Asian religion, third-wave Buddhism erases the boundary between religion and spirituality, faith and praxis, East and West. For most Buddhists today, practice has to do with how we live, how we train our minds and hearts, how we, in Ben’s phrase “take care of our consciousness.”

Sometimes people claim that Consciousness Only contradicts the central Buddhist tenet that all things are empty of an independent, lasting self.

Buddhism is the promotion of well-being, and the Eightfold Path is how you do it. If we look at the steps on the path—right view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration—we can see that there is nothing in it that is external to our own mind and actions.

This path radically directs us to concentrate on our own choices, our own actions, and our own minds, which is in direct contradiction to most of our habitual tendencies.

Vasubandhu’s vision for how to give ourselves to the well-being of the world and the central intention of all Buddhist teaching: the alleviation of suffering.