Joy Brennan

This essay presents an early Yogācāra view of karma as both an individual and collective affair. Framing its discussion of karma in terms of three distinct Buddhist scopes, or frameworks for investigating karma, it introduces the idea of a distinctive early Yogācāra framework for karma, called the vijñapti scope. Grounding its exposition of the vijñapti scope in the Mahāyānsaṃgraha, the essay argues that within the vijñapti scope, all beings in a shared lifeworld share a subjectivity with regard to that lifeworld and that by virtue of this intersubjectivity they also share karmic burdens that manifest as the shared space of the lifeworld.

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.