04/06/2026
Emptiness in Mind-only, Cittamatra, Yogacharya: "Now, the third turning of the wheel of Dharma is often called the turning characterised by the teaching of Mind Only.
The foundational texts for that turning are the Saṃdhinirmocana Sūtra and the Lankāvatāra Sūtra, which the scholars believe came to be composed a few hundred years after the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtras, probably in about the third or fourth century of the Common Era - canonically they are held to be taught by the Buddha during his lifetime, again you can think about this any way you like – and a set of very important philosophical texts composed by philosophers like Digṅāga, Dharmakīrti, Vasubandhu and Asanga, with the view really articulated most deeply by Vasubandhu and Asanga, who were half-brothers, and by their great commentator Sthiramati (Loten in Tibetan), who really did a great deal to systematize the teachings of the masters.
Often when we hear the term “Mind Only,” we tend to think that the way to understand this view is that the mind is real and nothing else is real, that only the mind is real. It is possible to read those texts that way and that is certainly one of the interpretations we can adopt, but it is not by any means the only or maybe even the most useful way to understand the term.
We can also think of the phrase “Mind Only” as saying the mind is the only thing you need to worry about, or the mind is the only thing you can actually work on, or the actual nature of your experience is only the experience of mind; and if we think about it this way we suddenly discover a very profound teaching about the nature of our own subjectivity.
By the way, when we think about it this way we see an important analogy between the third turning and certain second turning texts. In the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa Sūtra when the question is asked
“How do you purify a Buddha field?”
the answer that the Buddha and Vimalakīrti give is:
“You purify your mind.”
That is if I want to make the world I experience into a world of pure Buddha action, I don’t do that by transforming each of you and providing some psychotherapy and a little cosmetic surgery here and there and maybe beautifying the environment, I transform myself. I am the only thing I can work on. My mind is the only thing I can work on.
In the Bodhicaryāvatāra when Śāntideva says:
“The world is covered with thorns and rocks and it’s very painful to walk on: I could cover the whole world with leather or I just could put on a pair of shoes,”
Śāntideva is pointing out that the transformation that we are after when we are involved in moral transformation is fundamentally the transformation of ourselves. In this way when we think of Mind Only as saying:
“The only thing you need to worry about is your mind and in fact the only thing you can transform is your mind,”
we see a teaching that is much more consistent with the second turning. Now we’ll begin talking about how to understand that in more detail.
Let’s turn now to one of the chapters of the Saṃdhinirmocana Sūtra, and this is the Paramārthasamudgata chapter where the bodhisattva Paramārthasamudgata asks the Buddha:
“Hey Buddha, you’ve said these things that seem to me to be contradictory, because you’ve said that sometimes things have the nature of arising from causes and conditions, that sometimes things have the nature of having these particular kinds of characteristics, and sometimes you say things are empty of any nature. What were you talking about? It sounds like you were being inconsistent.”
In his answer the Buddha says:
“That was a great question, Paramārthasamudgata! Let me explain!”
and he explains by distinguishing three natures that phenomena have, and three naturelessnesses, or three kinds of emptiness that phenomena have, arguing that each of the natures that things have are coupled with one of the naturelessnesses: one of the kinds of emptiness. In doing this he provides a very deep explanation of the nature of our experience, that is of what emptiness is like from the side of the subject, an examination of what our minds do to phenomena.
This account of the three natures is developed in much more detail by Vasubandhu in two very important texts. One is his treatise in thirty stanzas Trimśikākārikā. The other is his treatise Trisvabhāvanirdeśa or discourse on the three natures, and in those texts he develops this theory in much more detail. What I’m going to do is to step back from the details and talk about what the three natures are and the three kinds of emptiness, and show you how those provide a model of how our mind works and/or emptiness looks from the subject side.
The three natures are these: the first one is in Sanskrit called the parikalpita-svabhāva or the imagined nature, the second one paratantra-svabhāva or the dependent nature, and the third one the pariniṣpanna-svabhāva or the perfected or the consummate nature.
The three kinds of emptiness distinguished in the Saṃdhinirmocana Sūtra are: emptiness with respect to characteristics, emptiness with respect to production, and ultimate emptiness. Now what we need is a good example, so we’re going to take the cup. In particular what we are going to look at is how I actually experience the cup, and I want to do this just in a very ordinary, boring way from the standpoint of modern science for a moment."
From: The Three Turnings of The Wheel of Dharma – Why They Are Each Essential to All of Us, by Jay L. Garfield, Doris Silbert Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy, Smith College.
Link in comments.
Quote in image from Maitreya's Sublime Continuum, a key cittamatra text.
