Buddhist Philosophy: A Comparative Approach, First Edition. Edited by Steven M. Emmanuel.
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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Yogācāra, “the yogic practice school” – from yoga and ācāra (practice) – came
to be one of two main lines of interpretation of Mahāyāna Buddhism. There is
a good deal of internal diversity within this “school,” and this chapter will make
some distinctions among its interpretative strands, including an important one
between subjective idealism and absolute idealism. Subjective idealism is the
claim that only mind exists (as Berkeley said, “existence is perception”), and
absolute idealism is the claim that everything is unitary and thus that all
relations are internal. The latter does not necessarily entail the former.
The place of mind in Yogācāra texts remains an open question. Namely,
are external objects reducible to mind (subjective idealism)? Or are objects
co‐dependent with minds (in a relational network), or in some sense nondual
(absolute idealism)? I wish to argue that Yogācāra is not necessarily a form of
subjective idealism, although it can be. Yet when read as subjective idealism
(as in the philosophy of “mind only”), it is not so interesting. Other readings,
such as absolute idealism or relational pluralism, are more promising. Absolute
idealist and pluralist readings are clearly distinct from subjective idealism, for
subjective idealism collapses objects into a subject. In contrast, in absolute
idealism, external relations (like those between subject and object) are unreal
as they are subsumed by the whole. Alternatively, neither mind nor matter
need have a privileged place in a relational ontology where the world is
constituted by relations.
Just as is the case with Yogācāra, there are a number of different interpreta-
tions of panpsychism. “Panpsychism,” from the Greek pan (all) and psyche
(mind or soul), has been defined as “the view that all things have mind or
a mind‐like quality” (Skrbina 2005, 2). Like Yogācāra, there are parallel distinc-
tions to be made in terms of how panpsychism has been conceived: in a
relational, pluralistic, or singular (or nondual) way. In its strong form, panpsy-
chism can mean that everything, including electrons, has a mental dimension
along with a physical one. I will refer to this strong form of panpsychism as
The Other Side of Realism:
Panpsychism and Yogācāra
Douglas Duckworth