perceiving them. The manifestation of these sensory impressions is
ultimately dependent upon the defiled nature of the mind (klista manas). As
a result of this we tend to attribute independent existence
(parikalpita-svabhava) to what we believe to be the subjective and
objective correlates of our experience. The stream of perceptions that we
actually perceive, however, is `just mind' (citta-matra), being the
conceptualisation (vikalpa/vijnapti) of the pre-given (vastu) into an
objective support of consciousness (alambana). Despite this, it must be
stressed that for the Yogacarin there is `something' there (viz. the
paratantric flow of dharmas) which constitutes the `raw material' of our
experience, although in the final analysis this is merely a fruition of
seeds caused by past conscious activity (karman).

Thus, it is possible to interpret the Yogacara discussion of the
perpetuation of samsara through the appropriation of karman not so much as
a denial of the external world but rather as a restriction upon the
parameters of legitimate discourse to a phenomenological context (that is a
context which does not attempt to postulate entities beyond the pure
givenness (vastu-matra) of experience).

It is important to bear in mind that the Yogacara conception of
citta/vijnana denotes a whole complex of events and processes which cannot
be adequately rendered by English terms such as `consciousness' or `mind'.
The `citta' of cittamatra includes within it the conscious apprehension of
sensory objects (six in all including the mano-vijnana). This is a crucial
point to acknowledge since, for the Yogacara school, the sensory
apprehension of objects cannot be divorced from one's consciousness of it
(though it is possible to make a purely abstract and theoretical
distinction between vedana on the one hand and vijnana, samjna and samskara
on the other when discussing the skandhas). In a sense the Yogacara
position offers the flipside to the standard Abhidharma position that citta
is intentional, that is, that to be conscious is to be conscious of an
object. For the Yogacara, to postulate an object requires that it is first
apprehended by a citta. The emphasis here is no longer on the suggestion
that citta is intentional but rather on the fact that objects of
consciousness are just that. Thus, the thesis of the intentionality of
citta becomes displaced in the emerging Yogicara philosophy by an emphasis
upon the `phenomenalistic' nature of objects. Objects are really
dharma-constructs and representations (vijnapti), dependent upon the
complex processes of citta for their appearance. Thus, one can talk of
apprehending a sensory object only after one has become conscious of it.
Sensory apprehension is thereby subsumed by the Yogacara analysis under the
broader domain of `citta,' which, now more clearly than ever, remains too
rich and all-embracing a term to be rendered by `mind' or `consciousness'.
As well as an awareness of sensory objects, citta also denotes the
organising faculty of the manas, the affective distortion of that process
by the defiled mind (klista manas) as well as the subliminal karmic seeds
(samskaras) and latent dispositions (anusaya) that are collectively known
as the alayavijnana. The complexity of terms like citta, therefore, when
combined with the Yogacara endorsement of the category of rupa-dharma and
the acknowledgment that vijnana remains only one of five skandhas suggests
that it is problematic to interpret the early Yogacara literature as
propounding a form of idealism at least in the sense in which this has
commonly been understood in the West.

For the Yogacara school any discussion which transgresses the experiential
boundaries of citta leads to the utilisation of conceptual distinctions
(vikalpa), idle speculation and conceptual-proliferation (prapanca). It
should be noted, however, that this view of the limitations of language and
appropriate dialogue is again not without its precedent. The Sautrantika
analysis of perception denied that external objects were given in
perception; only the images (akara) of the external world are actually
perceived by consciousness. The Sautrantika of course did not take this to
mean that one could not thereby make veridical statements about an external
world. Indeed, by stating that external objects (nimitta) can be inferred
from the experience of mental images (akara), the Sautrantika were
explicitly accepting that such discussion was appropriate. Although clearly
in conflict with the Yogacara position one can see that Sautrantika
epistemology is only one step away (albeit a significant one!) from the
more radical `phenomenalism' of the Yogacara school. As we have seen, for
the early Yogacara of Asanga and Vasubandhu discourse about the nature of
an external world is inappropriate precisely insofar as it goes beyond the
realm of that which is empirically (in this context experientially) given.