In the first part of this paper I critically examine some of the main interpretations of “classical” Yogācāra philosophy of Maitreya, Asaṅga and Vasubandhu. Among these interpretations, based on extant textual and contextual data, I consider philologically unlikely both metaphysical-idealistic readings, which ascribe to these authors the view that ultimate reality is a mental or subjective stuff, and epistemological-idealistic readings which advocate that either Yogācāra suspends judgment on the existence of the extramental or that it maintains that the extramental exists (...) in itself and ultimately. Instead, I consider more likely the thesis that classical Yogācāra upholds an epistemological idealism that, while admitting epistemological priority of the mental over the extramental, rules out the ultimate existence of both the former and the latter. This exclusion, however, does not amount to the exclusion of every metaphysics, but rather to the adoption of a metaphysics of emptiness conceived, in fact, as absence of the mental/extramental dichotomy. In the second part of the paper this reading of classical Yogācāra is compared with the interpretation of Nāgārjuna’s philosophy that I elsewhere called “realistic antimetaphysical”, and I reach the conclusion that, while with respect to epistemology between early Madhyamaka and classical Yogācāra there is continuity, regarding metaphysics these two schools are deeply distinct and discontinuous: while Nāgārjuna conceives of emptiness as an extinction of any metaphysical view, Yogācāra emptiness actually presents itself as a metaphysical point of view. (shrink)

This paper provides a new interpretation of the three natures theory of Yogācāra-Vijñānavāda thought by means of an examination of the path theory associated with it, which has not been previously examined in scholarly literature. The paper first examines this path theory in a number of foundational texts to show that the widely accepted pivotal model is not in fact the three natures model that predominates in foundational Yogācāra-Vijñānavāda literature. Second, the paper offers a new interpretation of the three natures (...) theory as providing a new causal model of the arising of suffering, and a corresponding theory of its cessation. This new causal model both makes possible the continued use of the kind of dharma analysis that Abhidharma thought employs to provide a causal analysis of the arising of suffering, and also couches such dharma analysis within the Mahāyāna framework of the emptiness of dharmas. (shrink)