The 'Buddhist Unconscious': The Alaya-Vijnana in the Context of Indian Buddhist Thought by RoutledgeCurzon

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The 'Buddhist Unconscious': The Alaya-Vijnana in the Context of Indian Buddhist Thought by RoutledgeCurzon An Historical Exploration of The Evolution of Early Buddhist
In this volume, William Waldron explores the tension that existed in early Buddhist thought between a phenomenological psychology that took synchronic moments of mind as their point of focus, and a view of karma and liberation that was diachronic in nature. The early Buddhist psychology of the Pali Nikayas did not provide for nonconscious mental mechanisms that could provide continuity to both karma and the afflictive tendencies when they were momentarily out of consciousness. The Yogacara school of Buddhism developed the concept of the alaya-vijnana to remedy that problem, but then reached back to find justification for these novel ideas in the earliest strata of Buddhist texts. William Waldron carefully explores the development of these ideas from the Pali Nikayas, through the early abhidharmic writings, to the Yogacara writings of Asanga and Vasubandhu as these ideas gradually took on broader resonance and served new roles within Mahayana Buddhism, and as they developed against the broader background of Gupta-era Indian philosophizing. His prose is clear, his analogies helpful, and his scholarship seems careful and thorough. I am not a Buddhist scholar, but am a psychologist who has an interest in Buddhism. I think this book will be of great interest, not only to scholars, but also to readers who are interested in learning more about the psychology that is implicit in Buddhist writings. It certainly helped me to clarify some understandings of Buddhist terms which were still overly vague in my own mind, as well as to better understand the historical context in which they developed.
The 'Buddhist Unconscious': The Alaya-Vijnana in the Context of Indian Buddhist Thought by RoutledgeCurzon Book Description
This is the story of fifth century CE India, when the Yogacarin Buddhists tested the awareness of unawareness, and became aware of human unawareness to an extraordinary degree. This important study reveals how the Buddhist unconscious illuminates and draws out aspects of current western thinking on the unconscious mind. One of the most intriguing connections is the idea that there is in fact no substantial 'self' underlying all mental activity; 'the thoughts themselves are the thinker'. William S. Waldron considers the implications of this radical notion, which, despite only recently gaining plausibility, was in fact first posited 2,500 years ago.