The Doctrine of Consciousness-Only (Vijnaptimatra)

The technical term at the heart of Yogacara philosophy is vijnaptimatra, usually rendered "representation-only" or "cognition-only," and used largely interchangeably in the secondary literature with the related term cittamatra, "mind-only." The doctrine's classical statement opens Vasubandhu's Vimsatika: "All this is representation-only, since it appears as a nonexistent object, just as someone with an optical disorder sees nonexistent nets of hair, moons, and so forth." The claim is not that individual minds create the physical universe by an act of will, but that what ordinary experience takes to be a mind-independent external object is, on analysis, nothing over and above a structured flow of momentary cognitive events (vijnapti) bearing the appearance of an object; the felt duality between a perceiving subject (grahaka) and a perceived object (grahya) is, for Yogacara, itself an internal feature of consciousness rather than evidence of two really distinct kinds of thing.