All Mind, No Text – All Text, No Mind

All Mind, NO Text - All Text, NO Mind

Tracing Yogacara in the Early Bka' brgyud Literature of Dags po

Ulrich Timme KRAGH

To teach a group of monks who had gone away, the Buddha one day magically emanated a phantom monk, who went to instruct the wayfaring disciples. As if this story of an apparitional monk was not sufficiently phantasmagorical, Nagarjuna in the Madhyamakakarika (17.31) tweaked the eccentric vision a notch further: "Imagine," he said, "that the Buddha by his magical powers emanated a phantom, and that this phantom in turn produced yet another phantom." Nagarjuna conjured up this image to illustrate the manner in which a construct is capable of creating another construct. Like such reduplicating figures, it shall here be attempted to discuss how the phantom-like construct of one text emanates from the phantom¬like constructs of other texts.

The Magical Fabric of History

These playful phantoms will rematerialize later to impart their lessons, but first the question must be addressed what the early Tibetan bka' brgyud literature, which does not directly pertain to the great Indian Yogacarabhumi treatise (henceforth YBh), might be doing in this volume on the text and its adaptation history. Much of YBh research is concerned with origins. Progress has been made in recent years in the text critical area by creating new editions of the Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan texts. Deeper levels of understanding the book have also been achieved by the production of new annotated translations. It is a core objec¬tive of such undertakings to arrive at the earliest possible version and interpreta¬tion of the original work, and while a satisfactory reading of major parts of the text have been achieved, it must all the while be kept in mind that the YBh is not reducible to its earliest complete form, but that the text has lived its life throughout time and that it indeed continues to live on in the various traditions of modern Mahayana Buddhism as well as in its academic incarnations.

In fact, the scholarly project of reconstructing the earliest version of the text is wholly dependent on its later embodiments. A fourth-century Sanskrit autograph does not exist and hence the endeavor to reestablish the original treatise depends on later Sanskrit manuscript fragments, quotations preserved in other works, and its translations into Chinese and Tibetan. A critical edition of the YBh, no matter how perfect, will therefore always remain a construct, a phantom brought to life

from the witnesses of later ages. The lost original text approached through this editorial phantom-construct is, on the one hand, something above and beyond the text itself, perpetually just out of the scholar's reach, and for this reason it shall here be called the 'epi-text', meaning "what is above (epi) the text." On the other hand, the later witnesses, on which the epi-text's reestablishment through text criticism and other methods relies, constitute the corporeal foundation that lies beneath the text and props it up. Hence, these later witnesses and versions shall be labeled 'sub-texts', here taken to mean "that which is beneath (sub) the text" and what is secondary to it. Yet, even those witnesses are not whom they first appear to be. The Sanskrit works containing quotations of the YBh are themselves not at hand in their original versions, except in the form of later manuscript copies from Nepal, Tibet, or Japan. Xuanzang's Chinese YBh translation does not exist in its pristine 648 edition, but is only extant in later copies, such as the eighth-century manuscripts from Japan or the Dunhuang fragments of the ninth-tenth centuries. Likewise, the Tibetan translation is lost in its original eighth-century form and must be deduced from the five eighteenth-century versions of the Tibetan bstan 'gyur. Thus, even the witnesses employed to recreate the phantom of the original YBh are themselves phantoms. These phantoms have in turn created other phantoms, namely the multiple Yogacara shadows cast upon the subsequent religious traditions of interpretation and practice, and it is from such invisible strands of textual remains that the magical fabric of Yogacara history is woven.

The reconstitution of the epi-text is not the only aspect of YBh scholarship that depends on later sources. Also, the scholarly interpretation of the text is condi¬tioned by the subsequent traditions. Passages are examined through the prism of later commentaries. Philosophical ideas are scrutinized in the light of posterior adaptations and critiques. It is in the ambience of the medieval Indian, Central Asian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Tibetan intellectual landscapes that the modern scholar can produce new translations, write annotations to the text, and assess its thought.

Such axioms governing the mode of reading primary sources necessitate a keen awareness of the text's later reception, the Wirkungsgeschichte of how the range of its ideas filtered down through the subsequent layers of traditions and the opinions that succeeding panditas held about its views. It is only by carefully understanding the sub-texts' historical horizon, from which the witnesses and exegesis of the YBh are being gathered, that the nature of these extracts and their unique perspectives can be appreciated, enabling academic critical self-reflection of the product that is brought into existence when reconstituting and interpreting the lost epi-text.

The study of a text's reception after its composition has become known as Wir- kungsgeschichte, a term which literally means a "history of effect" but which some¬times is called "reception history" in English. The word Wirkungsgeschichte was primarily introduced by the German classicist and philosopher Hans-Georg GADAMER in his 1960 work Wahrheit und Metode, where it not only denotes the study of what effect a given text has had on its successive generations of readers and interpreters, but also of what effect these various interpretations have on ourselves in forming the historical background that is the prerequisite for our own reading and interpretation of the book. In the present paper, it will be ventured to use Wirkungsgeschichte as a method for beginning to understand the particular Tibetan background for the YBh's sub-texts. This will be done by considering the issue at hand from what may be a surprising source, namely a corpus of early Bka' brgyud literature that, in fact, only has very tenuous and indirect connections with the YBh. Nonetheless, the Tibetan corpus in question may generally speaking be quite revealing in terms of uncovering subtle underlying attitudes towards and adaptations of Yogacara-Vijnanavada thought in Tibetan Buddhism.

A Warp in the Phantom Fabric

of the YBh's Wirkungsgeschichte

The YBh has yielded a significant influence on numerous later literary works and religious traditions. In the immediate centuries after its composition and redaction in the third-fourth centuries, the broader Indian Yogacara literature emerged, which was transmitted to China in the ensuing centuries. Back in India during the seventh to twelfth centuries, Yogacara concepts and religious practices were variously adopted but also criticized within other genres of Buddhist writing belonging to the Madhyamaka, Pramana, and Tantric traditions. It was during this later stage of the Indian Yogacara tradition that Buddhist culture was exported to Tibet, and Tibetan Buddhism inherited these later Indian attitudes towards and adaptations of Yogacara. Viewing the YBh from the Tibetan vantage point therefore reveals a motif that is quite different from the pattern, in which the YBh's Wirkungsgeschichte unfurled in China and other East Asian nations. This is a bit like seeing a design respectively on the back and front sides of a woven cloth, where the colors and patterns appear in the reverse. The present article only deals with looking at the fabric of the YBh's Wirkungsgeschichte from the reverse Tibetan side, and it should be kept in mind that if the same subject were approached from the East Asian perspective other patterns would emerge.

In a woven cloth, a long yarn called the weft winds its way back and forth, horizontally in and out between many separate vertical threads called warps. The woven cloth will here be used as a simile - an upama. The weft winding its way through the cloth is like the YBh's Wirkungsgeschichte. The multiple warps are like the many later textual corpora affected by the YBh and the related Yogacara literature that arose therefrom. Some warps are the Indian treatises of the late Madhyamaka tradition of the eighth century, whose authors - such as Santaraksita - synthesized Yogacara and Madhyamaka thought. Other Indian warps may be the songs and poems of the Tantric Mahasiddhas of the eighth to eleventh centuries, who sang about the mind and meditation in ways that are subtly related to the olden Yogacara compositions.

Some Tibetan warps of the late eleventh to early twelfth centuries would be the summaries of and commentaries on the Mahayanasutralamkara, the Madhyanta- vibhaga, and the Dharmadharmatavibhaga composed by Rngog lo tsa ba Bio ldan shes rab, Phywa pa Chos kyi seng ge's two twelfth-century Mahayanasutralamkara commentaries, and the twelfth-century commentary on the Bodhisattvabhumi book of the YBh written by Gtsang nag pa Brtson 'grus seng ge, all of which must be counted among the earliest extant indigenous Tibetan Yogacara literature.

Some other Tibetan warps, however, are not direct commentaries on the Indian Yogacara works found in the Tibetan canon. Instead, they are texts merely affected by the shadows of these works, whose shapes and nuances are dimly reflected in the non-sastric character of indigenous Tibetan writings belonging to the various schools of Tibetan Buddhism. The above-listed Tibetan authors, who wrote direct commentaries on the Indian Yogacara treatises during the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, were all associated with the Bka' gdams pa school of Tibetan Buddhism. Masters of the other Tibetan lineages only began to write such exegetical Yogacara commentaries slightly later. Early indigenous Yogacara works by writers from other traditions include thirteenth and fourteenth centuries works, such as the Bodhisattvabhumi summary composed by the Sa skya pa hierarch 'Gro mgon Chos rgyal 'Phags pa, the Dharmadharmatavibhaga commentary by the third Karma pa Rang byung rdo rje, a Bka' brgyud pa master, written in 1320 or 1332, and the Abhidharmasamuccaya commentary by the Zha lu master Bu ston Rin chen grub written in 1333.

Yet, prior to that, already during the twelfth century when the Bka' gdams pa scholars had begun to write their indigenous direct commentaries on the Indian Yogacara works, Yogacara thought had an indirect impact on the compositions composed by authors from the other Tibetan traditions. In terms of the Bka' brgyud school, which is the focus here, a corpus of some of the every earliest writings of this tradition is called Dagspo'ibka' 'bum (henceforth Dakpo Kabum), meaning "The Manifold Teachings of Dags po," consisting of some forty texts of the twelfth-thirteenth centuries coming from a

small community of Bka' brgyud anchorite practitioners residing in the Dags po region of southern Tibet. Since multifarious subtle Yogacara effects can be detected in the works of this corpus, even though it does not contain any direct Yogacara commentary or text, the Dakpo Kabum corpus can be considered one of the many warps in the fabric of the literary histories of the Yogacara. If the present endeavor should be compared to the field of Chinese Buddhist studies, it might be said that an examination of [[Yoga[cara]] elements in this Tibetan corpus of meditative yoga literature would be comparable to attempting to analyze the early [[Chinese

Chan]] literature of the Tang dynasty, which likewise is a contemplative literature, for eventual influences from the Yogacara traditions of Paramartha and Xuanzang, which were active at the same time in China. It should though be noted that such a comparison is not meant to imply that the Dakpo Kabum constitutes a Tibetan version of Chan, which is hardly the case. It is by following the warp of the Dakpo Kabum through the phan¬tom fabric of textual histories and by coming to understand where and how the warp is crossed by the weft of the YBh's Wirkungsgeschichte that the effects, which the Yogacara sources yielded on the early Tibetan literature, shall here be mea¬sured.

The Bka' brgyud community in Dags po began as a small hermitage called Dags lha sgam po founded around 1121, when the monk Sgam po pa Bsod nams rin chen (1079-1153) moved to Mount Sgam po during his years of secluded meditation in the wilderness. The community gradually grew when a number of monks and yogis assembled there to practice under his guidance. While little was written by Gampopa's own hand, some of his immediate students as well as several persons of later generations took to writing what they considered to be his oral teachings, and these works were later compiled into the Dakpo Kabum.

Being a warp in the elusive fabric of the YBh's Wirkungsgeschichte, the Dakpo Kabum is just a thread of yarn, and yarn is made up of countless tiny fibers. Similarly, in its earliest stage, the material now found in the Dakpo Kabum was simply a lot of small scattered writings produced by many different hands. To be exact, the corpus contains eighteen actual texts dispersed between 375 disconnected passages, either bearing one of the signatures of twenty-three known authors or giving whatsoever no indication of authorship. Only later, in the early sixteenth century, were these texts and passages construed as the forty texts that are now contained in the Dakpo Kabum, most of which came to be ascribed to Bsod nams rin chen, and published as the first three-volume printed edition of the [[Dakpo] Kabum]] in 1520.

In actuality, the Dakpo Kabum corpus is consequently not a sturdy body of flesh and blood but rather a phantom merely giving the appearance of solidity, fortified by the fact that it - just like the YBh - is not extant in its original epi- textual form. Instead, the mirage of its original epi-texts of the twelfth-thirteenth centuries must be assessed through their later sub-texts. Relying on these sub-texts naturally involves a whole range of problems in terms of how these sources were redacted in the process of their compilation and publication. Blatantly disregarding and glossing over such problems, the present analysis will merely focus on the sub¬text of the first printed publication of 1520. Since this version became the basis for all the later Tibetan xylographic prints of the Dakpo Kabum, it is the most proliferated and well-known recension among the Dakpo Kabum's earliest witnesses.

The YBh Weft Crossing the Dakpo Kabum Warp

In the fabric of the textual histories of Yogacara, the weft of the YBh's Wirkungs- geschichte crosses the Dakpo Kabum warp several times. When the YBh and the Dakpo Kabum are viewed side by side, different levels of similarities appear. On the most general level, there are broad genre similarities given that some segments of the Dakpo Kabum also concern stages of the path (bhumi) and given that the main theme of the entire Dakpo Kabum corpus likewise is the practice of yoga, i.e., 'yogacara' in its most literal, non-doxographic sense. On a more specific level, it is possible to see certain philosophical and doctrinal ideas stemming from the Yogacara-Vijnanavada tradition in the Dakpo Kabum, for example in the form of Cittamatra (sems tsam pa) doctrine. Finally, on the most concrete level, where the YBh weft crosses the Dakpo Kabum warp most frequently, the Dakpo Kabum contains concrete quotations from Yogacara sources or gives reference to specific Yogacara works. Consequently, in terms of Yogacara influences, it is possible to tease out for¬mal effects, doctrinal effects, as well as scriptural effects. These overall effectual levels thus range from abstract genre similarities to concrete adaptations of passages from Yogacara sources, and respectively indicate literary, philosophical, and authoritative reverberations of the Indian Yogacara tradition within twelfth¬century Tibetan contemplative writing. Distinguishing these influences under three groups of adaptations labeled (1) 'formal effects', (2) 'doctrinal effects', and (3) 'scriptural effects', such aspects of Yogacara effectual history, i.e., Wirkungs- geschichte, will now be presented one by one.

1. FORMAL EFFECTS

The first and most abstract level of the Yogacara-Vijnanavada imprint on the Dakpo Kabum is what may be called formal effects, namely the comparabilities revealed by form criticism. Form criticism is the method of scriptural study concerned with describing the different literary forms found in a textual corpus - that is to say, its distinctive genres - along with the prior literary histories of these genres as well as the practical applications that these genres may involve before the composition of the corpus in question. In the 1520 xylograph edition, the Dakpo Kabum contains forty texts, which can be grouped into seven distinct genres: (1) hagiographies (rnam thar), (2) teachings to the gathering (tshogs chos), (3) answers to questions (zhus lan), (4) in¬struction texts (khrid yig), (5) miscellaneous sayings (gsung thor bu), (6) eulogies (bstod pa), and (7) stages of the path (lam rim). Except for the biographies and eulogies, the remaining five genres bear certain formal literary similarities to the YBh and are accordingly indirect products of the Indo -Tibetan genres that evolved from the literary forms inspired by Indian Buddhist sastra composition, as exemplified in the YBh and associated Indian treatises. The formal effects of YBh are here of two types.

First, the YBh is generally speaking structured around a presentation of a series of bhumis, several of which (though not all) involve laying out concrete stages of the Buddhist path. This configuration is particularly seen in the succes¬sion of the last and possibly most original bhumi books of the Basic Section of the YBh, especially the Sravaka- and Bodhisattvabhumis, as well as the manner in which the Basic Section ends by pointing out the goal of the path in the Sopadhika and Nirupadhika Bhumis. Exposition of stages is also a major facet in two of the Tibetan genres represented in the Dakpo Kabum, namely the teachings to the gathering (tshogs chos) and the stages of the path (lam rim). A major concern in these genres is to provide an outline of the Mahayana bodhisattva-path in accordance with the Indian sutras and sastras. In some cases, the Mainstream Buddhist path of the sravaka practitioner is also explained within the doctrinal scheme of the so-called "three persons" (skyes bu gsum), which had its origin in the Bodhipathapradipa treatise (verses 2-5) composed by Atisa Dipam- karasrijnana (c.982-1054), probably basing himself on a passage from Vasubandhu Kosakara's Abhidharmakosabhaya Although rooted in an interpretation of so many Indian treatises, thereby providing a somewhat scholastic flavor, the Dakpo Kabum only presents a relatively simple layout of the Buddhist path, especially in the form of the framework of engendering the resolve for Awakening (cittotpada, sems bskyed) and the bodhisattva's practice of the six paramitas. The cittotpada - paramita structure is, of course, also central to the Bodhisattvabhumi book of the YBh, especially in the six patala chapters presenting the paramitas, i.e., the Dana- patala (I.9), Silapatala (I.10), Ksantipatala (I.11), etc., as well as to the Yogacara treatises that are closely related to the Bodhisattvabhumi, including the Mahayana- samgraha and the Mahayanasutralamkara. It is here notable that the Dakpo Kabum's Jewel Ornament of Liberation treatise (Dags po'i thar rgyan) refers re¬peatedly to the Bodhisattvabhumi and the Mahayanasutralamkara in its exposition of these topics, thereby revealing direct dependency on Yogacara texts.

Another basic division of the path that occurs several times in the Dakpo Ka- bum is the distinction of paths that are gradual (rim gyis pa) or instantaneous (cig car ba). Albeit rare, a similar distinction is indeed attested in some early Indian Yogacara sources though not in the YBh, e.g, in the Lahkavatarasutra, which speaks of simultaneous (yugapad, cig car) and gradual (krama, rim gyis) practice (vrtti, 'jug pa). From these Yogacara sources, the gradual/instantaneous distinc¬tion later became important in the Indian Tantric literature, which may have added to its significance in the early Tibetan Bka' brgyud writings.

Secondly, at its core, the YBh is a treatise on yoga, denoting religious practice in general and the practice of meditation in particular. Similarly, four of the Dakpo Kabum's genres are centered on yoga-related instructions providing either motivational, theoretical, or pragmatic explanations of meditation practice. These four genres are the teachings to the gathering (tshogs chos), answers to questions (zhus lan), instruction texts (khrid yig), and in part also the miscellaneous sayings (gsung thor bu). The predominant concern of these works is to explicate the two major meditational systems that were at the heart of the Dags lha sgam po community of recluses, namely the samadhi-like teachings of the so-called Mahamudra system (phyag rgya chen po) and the methods of physical and visualization yoga-practices generally referred to as the "Six Doctrines of Naropa" (Na ro chos drug). Their shared focus on meditation makes these four genres principally though not concretely related to the parts of the YBh dealing with meditation, especially the Samahita Bhumih, BhavanamayiBhumih, Sravakabhumi, and Bodhisattvabhumi.

The two aforementioned formal effects are comparabilities that here are theo-retically addressed by form criticism. As a method, however, form criticism is not exclusively concerned with describing different literary forms, i.e., the distinctive genres found in a textual corpus, but it also aims at accounting for the practical use that these literary forms may have had. Given that the shared attention to delinea¬ting the path and explaining yogic practices are both pragmatic concerns, the YBh and the [[Dakpo] Kabum]] are fundamentally comparable in terms of being manuals intended for communities of coenobite or anchorite meditation practitioners. It should here be noted that the Sravakabhumi as well as the Bodhisattvabhumi repeatedly return to the need for practicing meditation in a secluded retreat setting (vyapakarsa or pravivekya, dben pa), which constitutes a fundamental characte¬ristic of the contemplative path set forth in the YBh. Likewise, the Dakpo Kabum emphasizes the need for practicing in retreat, offers many motivational passages aimed at inspiring the practitioners to keep up their secluded lifestyle, and from what is known from religious histories and hagiographies concerned with Dags lha sgam po, it is evident that it was a small community of coenobite Buddhist monks. While Yogacara texts at this time were studied at the Tibetan seminaries belonging to the Bka' gdams pa tradition, whose monasteries were located in the floor of the valleys, the early Bka' brgyud yogi communities, such as the one at Dags lha sgam po, resided high up in the secluded wilderness of the mountains. The feature of yogic seclusion in the wilderness thus creates a strong formal link between the YBh and the Dakpo Kabum.

2. DOCTRINAL EFFECTS

The second level of Yogacara effects on the Dakpo Kabum is the doctrinal effects, which are more tangible than the formal effects, because they bring into view the presence of certain philosophical and doctrinal ideas in the Dakpo Kabum that ultimately can be traced back to the early Indian Yogacara-Vijnanavada literature. The forty texts of the Dakpo Kabum contain 733 folios of text printed on each side of the folio, or in other words 1,466 pages. There are, in this mass, 21 texts belonging to the genres of teachings to the gathering, answers to questions, instruc¬tion texts, miscellaneous sayings, and stages of the path that have 67 passages containing unique Yogacara doctrines. The varied nature of this Yogacara mate¬rial is significant and must be discussed through four doctrinal themes: (A) doxo- graphic passages, (B) 'all mind/no mind' passages, (C) 'all mind' passages, and (D) self-awareness passages.

A. DOXOGRAPHIC PASSAGES

The weft of the YBh's Wirkungsgeschichte crosses the warp of the Dakpo Kabum at ten intersections forming concrete doctrinal effects. Essentially, all the passa¬ges deal with explaining the so-called 'mind-only' (cittamatra, sems tsam pa) view either in the form of references to or summaries of this philosophical position. Characteristically, these doxographic passages do not endorse the Cittamatra view, but rather contrast it with other views considered superior to it. In particular, the views of the Madhyamaka school (dbu ma pa) and the Guhyamantra tradition (gsang sngags pa) are put forward as its polemical counterparts. To give just one example of such doxographic passages in the Dakpo Kabum, the text entitled Presentation of the Three Trainings and so Forth (Bslab gsum rnam bzhag la sogs pa) contains the following doxographic passage setting the Cittamatra against the Madhyamaka:

I bow down to the authentic gurus! The Cittamatra proponent asserts self-awareness (rang rig, *pratyatmavedya) as ultimate reality (don dam, *paramartha). He asserts that the knowledge of awareness (rig pa'i ye shes, Vdyajnana), which is beyond the scope of logic, the self-awareness shining in the Buddha's heart, exists ultimately. The Madhyamika says: "That, which is your ultimate reality, is my relative reality. She, who is your mother, is my wife! The self-awareness, which you hold to exist ulti¬mately, is self-clinging (ngar dzin, *ahamkara), and that is for me relative reality (kun rdzob, *sanivrti). I am without the extremes of existence, non-existence, both, or neither. Being without any of these four extremes,

I assert nothing."

It is notable that the above example ascribes to the typical Tibetan doxographic opinion that the Cittamatra proponent asserts the mind (sems, *citta) to exist ultimately, a view that may, in fact, be rather questionable as a fair representation of the intention of the Indian Yogacara-Vijnanavada tradition. While several later Yogacara-Vijnanavada works speak of everything being cognition-only (vijnapti- matra) or mind-only (cittamatra), it is very rare to see cognition or the mind asser¬ted to be ultimate reality in Indian sources. Such opinions are usually only set forth in works that are critical of the Yogacara tradition. Rather, the Tattvarthapatala (1.4) of the YBh's Bodhisattvabhumi book speaks of ultimate reality as being inex¬pressible (nirabhilapya), free from the duality of existence and non-existence. The YBh asserts so in order to avoid an overly nihilistic interpretation of emptiness (sunyata), leading instead to the sense that there is something real and true (sad) that remains (avasista, lhag ma) when something is empty of something else, and what remains is called inexpressible. Consequently, what is inexpressible can nei¬ther be said to be ultimately existent nor non-existent. It is also to be observed that the cited passage illustrates what Tibetan doxo- graphers came to call the "Yogacara-Madhyamaka" (rnal 'byor spyod pa'i dbu ma pa), according to which the Cittamatra understanding is taken as representing relative truth (sainvrtisaya), whereas ultimate truth (paramarthasaya) is reserved for the emptiness taught by the Madhyamika. This synthetic interpretation of Yogacara and Madhyamaka was made known in Tibet especially by the Madhya- makalainkara treatise composed by the Indian master Santaraksita, who visited Tibet in the eighth century. The thought of this Indian pandita had a lasting grip on the philosophical minds of Tibet, in a manner that was still highly evident in the Tibetan Buddhism of the twelfth-thirteenth centuries when the texts of the Dakpo Kabum were written.

B. 'ALL MIND/NO MIND' PASSAGES

In the textile of textual histories, the Dakpo Kabum warp is again crossed by the weft of the YBh's Wirkungsgeschichte weaving the second type of doctrinal effects, here referred to as 'all mind/no mind' passages. These passages are characterized by an endorsement of the view that all phenomena (chos, *dharma) or all appea¬rances (snang ba, *pratibhasa) are mind only, but the ratification of this view is then immediately followed in these passages by a qualifying statement saying that the mind actually does not exist or that the mind cannot be established as any kind of real entity. The opinion expressed by what may be referred to as 'reserved' Cittamatra passages is therefore somewhat similar to the doxographic sections dis¬cussed previously, given that the Mind-Only view is again seen as the relative and not the ultimate reality, but - unlike the doxographic segments - the "all mind, no mind" passages do not refer to any school affiliation and do not present Cittamatra views merely for doxographic purposes. Rather, their aim is always to describe stages of meditation experience, where - according to the meditative system espoused by the passages at hand - all phenomena should first be realized as being nothing but mind, which should be followed by the realization that the mind itself is also not a real entity or thing possessing any identifiable or definable characteri¬stic.

To furnish an example, the following segment is found in the text entitled A Treasury of Ultimate Identifications of the Heart-Essence (Snying po'i ngo sprod don dam gter mdzod): Again, the lama said: "All visible and audible phenomena are [just con¬structed by] thought (rnam rtog, *vikalpa), for they cannot appear when there are no thoughts. Thoughts are the mind (sems, *citta). The mind is birthless (skye med, *anutpanna). The birthless is emptiness (stong nyid, *sunyata). Emptiness is reality as such (chod nyid, *dharmata). Reality as such, which isn't anything, emerges as a multiplicity (sna tshogs, *nana), but as it emerges, it does not lapse from not being any object (don, *artha) at all. When the meaning (don, *artha) of abiding in the inseparability (dbyer med, *avinirbhaga) of the two truths is realized in this manner, that is the [right] view (lta ba, *drsti/*darsana). Not to be distracted from this, that is the [right] meditative cultivation (sgom pa, *bhavana). To have severed the arrogance of hope and fear, that is the result ('bras bu, *phala)." This is what he said.

This clause forges a link between the well-known triad of view (lta ba), meditation (sgom pa), and result ('bras bu), and the contemplative chain of realizing the nature of sensory perceptions, thought, mind, and emptiness. Its underlying pre¬mise is an acceptance of the core Yogacara doctrine of cognition-only (vijnapti- matrata), as it, e.g., is expressed in the Sarndhinirmocanasutra. Yet, the Dakpo Kabum speaks of this doctrine not in any ontological sense but as a necessary stage of contemplative experience. In this regard, it may come close to the sense in which the earliest Indian passages speaking of 'mind-only' occur in sutras dealing with the contemplative visualization of buddhas or in passages in the YBh which state that the meditative images upon which the yogi focuses are nothing but mind, as has been pointed out by SCHMITHAUSEN in several contexts. By the token of this, Yogacara-Vijnanavada is here not enacted as a historical awareness in the sense of adopting a view belonging to a certain Buddhist tradition of the past. Rather, such 'all mind/no mind' passages serve a practical purpose in the Dakpo Kabum, in that the yogi practicing in seclusion is instructed to take the Cittamatra as a first step of contemplation, to be followed by a realization of the birthlessness and emptiness of the mind. Herein, the Cittamatra is not a philosophy in any doxographic sense but has a functional application in attempting to link the contemplative practice with certain scriptural passages in a manner that conflates a meditational experience with the philosophical formulation of the Cittamatra view.

Each and every of the nineteen 'all mind/no mind' passages shares the same theme comprised of first realizing all outer perceptions to be mind and then under¬standing that there, in the final analysis, is no mind at all. Consequently, this type of restrained Cittamatra passage can be characterized as having an 'all mind/no mind' view. While the similar message in the doxographic passages was textually connected to the distinction between Cittamatra and Madhyamaka, the origin of the view in question in the present passages is more difficult to establish. It could again have been philosophically derived from Yogacara-Madhyamaka sources, such as Santaraksita's Madhyamakalamkara stating everything to be mind on the relative level but also to be empty ultimately; or it could have been derived from the subsequent Indian tradition of the tenth and eleventh centuries, during which period several Tantric authors espoused various versions of similar synthetic Yogacara-Madhyamaka positions. Nevertheless, the Dakpo Kabum at no point refers to Yogacara or Madhyamaka sources in these passages, making it hard to say anything source-critically about the concrete origins of such views. In any case, it seems likely that the Wirkungsgeschichte of the YBh and the ensuing Indian Yogacara-Vijnanavada texts generally threaded its way to the Dakpo Kabum via the Madhyamakalamkara and later Indian writings by Tantric authors.

C. 'ALL MIND' PASSAGES

Tracing the warp of the Dakpo Kabum further into the fabric of Yogacara textual histories, it is once more intersected by the weft of the YBh's broader Wirkungs- geschichte in the form of the third type of doctrinal effects, which may be labeled the 'all mind' passages. These sections are marked by the vision that all pheno¬mena, or all appearances, are mind only, in which regard these passages are iden¬tical to the 'all mind/no mind' paragraphs. However, in these passages, the view stands without any further qualification and may consequently simply be ascer¬tained as 'all mind' passages. Here, it is never added that the mind is unreal and unestablished. On that account, the passages seem fully to endorse the mind-only view without hesitation.

For example, the text called Answers to the Questions of the Venerable Siddha of Phag mo (Rje phag mo grub pa'i zhu lan) contains the following passus: In response to the question "Are appearances (snang ba, *pratibhasa) and the mind (sems, *citta) the same or different?," [the lama] said: "Appearances and the mind are the same. No appearance exists exter¬nally that is not included within the mind." [He] said: "Since appearances are the mind's light (sems kyi 'od, *cittabhasa) or the mind's reality as such (sems kyi chod nyid, *cittasya dharmata), appearances unfold spon¬taneously as companions when [the nature of] the mind has been realized."

The speaker of the passage asserts appearances to be purely mental constructs, and it is notable that the passage again concerns meditative experience and realization. It is a general tendency that these pieces deal with the purification of obscurations and the achievement of realization. Some such passages contain typical Yogacara terminology, e.g., the terms 'tendencies' (bag chags, *vasana) and 'seeds' (sa bon, *b!ja), and in one instance also speak of what is 'latent' (kun gzhi, *alaya). The presence of Yogacara terms brings the 'all mind' passages closer to the Indian sources that are the fountain of those concepts, namely, the view that sensory perceptions arise out of the alayavijhana by the force of seeds and dualistic tendencies as, e.g., explicated in the Viniscayasamgrahani of the YBh as well as in some (possibly interpolated) passages of the Basic Section of the YBh. The perhaps unexpected absence of the Madhyamaka spirit of emptiness further reinforces the impression that the 'all mind' passages are not rooted in the Yogacara-Madhyamaka tradition but that they instead have been influenced by Indian Yogacara texts proper, either directly or indirectly via another literature that affirmatively adopted Yogacara concepts, in particular certain Tantric works. The peculiarity of the evidence is brought to light with the added observation that the passages in no instance refer to any Yogacara text and show no other affinity to them.

There are in total 29 'all mind' passages in the Dakpo Kabum and in compari¬son to the number of the ten doxographic passages and the nineteen 'all mind/no mind' segments, these unreserved Cittamatra passages are accordingly the most numerous type of Yogacara doctrinal traces found in the corpus. Their majority may be unexpected, given the general perception that medieval Tibetan authors tended to treat the Cittamatra view as strictly preliminary to and philosophically lower than the Madhyamaka.

D. SELF-AWARENESS PASSAGES

The fourth and last group of Yogacara doctrinal effects seen in the Dakpo Kabum are characterized by the occurrence of Yogacara terms expressing the ultimate nature of the mind, among them self-awareness (rang rig, *svasamvedana or *sva- samvitti), reflexive self-awareness (so so rang rig, *pratyatmavedya), self-aware and self-radiant (rang rig rang gsal, *svasamvittisvabhasa), and radiance ('od gsal, *prabhasvara) being the most prominent. The nine cases exhibiting this Yogacara influence on the Dakpo Kabum bring out the corpus' last major component of the Yogacara doctrine of the mind, namely the mind's ability to experience and know itself. An example of a self-awareness passage is found in the text entitled Instruction Clarifying Mahamudra (Phyag rgya chen po gsal byed kyi man ngag): Namo Guru! Self-aware (rang rig), self-radiant (rang gsal), and self¬abiding (rang la gnas), like a candle within a pot, consciousness simply remains self-radiant. Only when expressed conventionally in words is it called radiance ('od gsal, *prabhasvara), is it called bliss-emptiness (bde stong, *sukhasunya'), is it called knowledge-emptiness (rig stong, *vidya- sunya), is it called appearance-emptiness (snang stong, *pratibhasasun- ya). Yet these names are all confined [merely] to the domain of linguistic labels (btags pa, *prajnapti).

In the cited verse, there is a clear shift from the previous ontological statements over to a concern with the epistemology of spiritual realization. The mind is here characterized as being self-aware, in opposition to the earlier statements where it was said that all perceptions exist as mind but the mind itself does not exist as such. In the present verse, the assumption seems to be that the experiential quality of the mind is the single facet of reality under which everything else can be subsumed, including all outer and inner phenomena as well as the stages of the contemplative path. Yet, while self-awareness is said to encompass everything, it is at the same time beyond verbal expression - inextricable, ineffable - and in this regard it fully agrees with the notion of inexpressibility (nirabhilapya, brjod du med pa) set forth as the highest reality in the Tattvarthapatala (I.4) of the Bodhisattvabhumi. It may also be noted that the term 'radiance' ('od gsal, *prabhasvara) turns up as a charac¬teristic of the purified mind in the Viniscayasamgrahani and subsequently becomes a central term in the ensuing Yogacara-Vijnanavada literature. For example, the Viniscayasamgrahani states that "from the perspective of its nature, consciousness is not afflicted, which is why the Bhagavan declared that it is naturally radiant (rang bzhin gyis Odgsal ba, —yiqie Xn xing ben qingjing *svabhavena prabhasvaram).

While terms expressing the ultimate nature of the mind appear in the early Yogacara-Vijnanavada literature, it must also be acknowledged that they came to be used with much higher frequency in Tantric literature, which is likely to be the source for their influence on the Dakpo Kabum. All but one of the nine segments contain at least one of the following three Tantric elements: terms, quotations, and/or an overall Tantric context. The above-quoted passage, for example, includes a certain Tantric terminological influence in the form of the binary pair bliss¬emptiness (bde stong). In other such passages, the Tantric connection is brought out by quotations from the realization songs (doha) of the Mahasiddhas. For example, in one of the self-awareness passages Tilopa is quoted as having said: Hey, listen! Self-awareness (rang gi rig pa) is knowledge of That-as-such (de kho na nyid kyi ye shes, *tattvajnana). I have nothing else to teach. Furthermore, in one of the passages speaking of radiance, the author carefully distinguishes his position from the doxographic Cittamatra stereotype: The "awareness-radiance" (rig pa 'od gsal, *vidyaprabhasvara) [of which I am speaking] is not like the Cittamatra [term] "self-aware, self-radiant consciousness" (shespa rang rig ranggsal, *svasainvittisvabhasajnana)^6 which [the Cittamatra proponents] assert as constituting ultimate rea- lity.

The passage at hand, which provides an explanation on inner yoga practices pertaining to the channels and cakras, distances the term awareness-radiance from the Tibetan interpretation of the Cittamatra notion of self-awareness. It thereby indicates a different usage for the term awareness-radiance, which given the pre¬valence of the word 'radiance' ('od gsal, *prabhasvara) in Tantric literature, signals the Indian Tantras or yogic literature to be the indirect source for the passage. Although the self-awareness passages are purely Yogacara-Vijnanavada in their gist, their contents - along with their internal references and quotations - set them apart from the YBh. Instead, they are associated with the later Indian Tan¬tric literature, which only epitomizes how the Tantrically appropriated Yogacara terms in the Dakpo Kabum are phantasmagorical phantom copies of other phan¬toms. 3. SCRIPTURAL EFFECTS Whereas the doctrinal effects concern implicit Yogacara influences in the form of concepts, terminology, and paraphrases, the scriptural effects consist of direct quo-tations, which are the most evident and concrete presence of the YBh and related Yogacara works in the Dakpo Kabum.

The forty texts of the Dakpo Kabum contain in total 1,412 quotations from several kinds of sources, Yogacara as well as non-Yogacara. These quotations are, however, not distributed evenly over the forty texts, but are highly concentrated in a group of three quotation-rich texts, namely both of the two stages of the path texts (lam rim) and one of the teachings to the gathering (tshogs chos). The three quotation-rich texts account for 1,099 of the 1,412 quotations, i.e., 78% of the total number, which is an average of five and a half quotations per folio inthese three works. In contrast, the 37 quotation-poor texts contain only 313 quotations in all, which is an average of just half a quotation per folio.

The same pattern of quotation-rich and quotation-poor texts emerges when it comes to the specific Yogacara-Vijnanavada quotations, of which there are 146 in total. The three quotation-rich texts contain 144 of those quotations, i.e., 99%. In the 37 quotation-poor works, on the other hand, there are only two quotations from Yogacara-Vijnanavada sources. The first is a quotation from an unidentified scripture (lung, *agama) stating that all phenomena are mind, occurring in one of the teachings to the gathering texts (tshogs chos). The other is a quotation from the Samdhinirmocanasutra found in a miscellaneous sayings text (gsung thor bu).n Thus, altogether, there are five works in the Dakpo Kabum that contain quotations from Yogacara-Vijnanavada oriented texts, belonging to three genres: teachings to the gathering, miscellaneous sayings, and stages of the path. The Yogacara-Vijnanavada oriented quotations - here listed in their order of frequency - are drawn from the Mahayanasutralankara, the Bodhisattvabhumi, the Dasabhumikasutra, the Lankavatarasutra, the Abhidharmasamuccaya, the Ma- dhyantavibhaga, the Samdhinirmocanasutra, the Avatamsakasutra, the Vimsatika, and the unidentified agama text. The most quoted source is the Mahayanasutralamkara, which - judging from the number of Tibetan commentaries written in the twelfth-thirteen centuries on this work - was the most commonly studied Yogacara-Vijnanavada treatise at the time. Its quotations deal especially with bodhisattva conduct and qualities. Quota¬tions from the other texts include passages on taking of refuge and engendering bodhicitta, as well as the well-known scriptural passages pronouncing that all phe¬nomena are only mind. The character of the quotations does not in any way stand out from what is typically seen in so many other Tibetan works of that epoch, in that it is the same quotations that reappear over and over in various texts inside and outside the present Tibetan corpus. Indeed, the ubiquitous proliferation of particular scriptural passages constitutes an indication of the provenance of the quotations. Given their almost automatic reoccurrence in the same particular doc¬trinal contexts, the quotations do not seem to have been introduced through personal in-depth study of or access to the original texts invol-ved, but rather from the study of other Tibetan contemporaneous writings invariably relying on the same scriptural excerpts. There is a text in the Dakpo Kabum, which provides a clue as to how the au¬thors of the Dags po community could have circulated such standard scriptural passages. Text Vam entitled Sunshine of Treatises and Scriptures (Bstan bcos lung gi nyi 'od), which from a traditional Tibetan point of view is a work belonging to the genre of stages of the path (lam rim), in actuality bears a strong resemblance to what in Medieval Europe was known as a florilegium. A florilegium was a type of anthology of favorite scriptural quotations tied loosely together under the umbrella of some general theme, with little or no comment from the side of the compiler. This was a widespread genre in Europe until the advent of printing in the fifteenth century. Text Vam consists merely of 27 folios yet incorporates 254 quotations, having the absolutely highest rate of quotations per folio in the entire Dakpo Kabum. The presence of such a text in the corpus reveals a textual practice in the community, where the sole purpose of compiling was to gather favorite scriptural passages that either would have been collected from the study of other Tibetan treatises or from oral Dharma-lectures given by learned monks. It may be added that many of the Dags lha sgam po monks had studied for a few years at Bka' gdams seminaries during their youth before becoming anchorites. It seems likely that the recluses at Dags lha sgam po, who had no access to any scriptural library at the hermitage during this time, did not engage in reading whole sutras or Indian sastras and that their knowledge of Yogacara literature therefore was based mainly on selected excerpts found in florilegia-like texts.

Patterns on the Magical Fabric of the YBh's Reception History

A general view of the fabric of the YBh's effects on the Dakpo Kabum presents the motif of the Yogacara-Vijnanavada being used by the members of the Dags po community mainly as a stage in their contemplative practice. There is no evidence indicating that they engaged in any type of formal study of Yogacara-Vijnanavada treatises for scholastic purposes while residing at Dags lha sgam po. The 'all mind' experience was thus fostered in an environment of 'no text', where personal deve¬lopment was measured against selected snippets of scripture as a way of affirming and authorizing it. Consequently, the anchorites' relationship to the Yogacara- Vijnanavada was pragmatic rather than exegetic in nature, a matter of yoga prac¬tice (yogacara) rather than yoga study (Yogacara).

A closer look at the fabric of the YBh's effects on the Dakpo Kabum reveals a twofold epistemological pattern. One pattern emerges from a concern with contemplative experience. In other words, the hermits on Mount Sgam po must have been asking themselves what they were supposed to experience in their retreat. It is in this context that the specific Yogacara-Vijnanavada interests emerge in the form of the 'all mind' and self-awareness passages, whose signifi¬cance was most probably derived from Tantric sources into the genres of the Dakpo Kabum that lay a strong emphasis on yoga practice, the latter being an accentuation that they share with the YBh in general. Indicatively, the texts expressing these yogic notions are marked by an absence of Yogacara quotations.

This first trend of Yogacara-Vijnana influence could be called the "all mind, no text" pattern. It is noticeable that the preponderance of the unreserved Cittamatra influences of the 'all mind' and self-awareness passages advocating the all-mind view belong to the quotation-poor sources, which introduce or cite virtually no text of Yogacara-Vijnanavada affiliation. The various authors of this cluster of Tibetan sources appear to be well-informed of the Madhyamaka Viinanavada-critique, given that many of the same works elsewhere contain doxographic passages. How¬ever, in the 'all-mind' and self-awareness passages, their authors buttress the Cittamatra concept of self-awareness to be wholly acceptable philosophically, pri¬marily in the garb of the Guhyamantra doctrine, presenting it in overall Tantric contexts, without considering this concept to be affiliated with a lower level in the doxographic hierarchy of views. These works of the "all mind, no text" pattern also make up most of the sources exhibiting formal genre-similarities to the YBh's emphasis on yoga, which likewise may be understood as having been mediated through the Tantric adaptation of Buddhist meditation practice, given that both of the predominant meditational systems espoused in the [[Dakpo [Kabum]] are closely related to the Tantric literature.

The second epistemological pattern emerges from a concern about progression, since the Dags po hermits seem to have wondered what the different steps to the contemplative experience are and how these steps might be sanctioned in terms of the various schemes of presenting the stages of the Buddhist path given in Indian scriptures and treatises. The Yogacara frame adopted in that context is the doxo-graphic and the 'all mind/no mind' passages that are related to the Yogacara- Madhyamaka tradition. These passages found their way into the genres of the Dakpo Kabum in contexts accentuating presentations of the stages of the path. Strikingly, the texts exhibiting these concerns are the works that contain the most quotations from Yogacara-Vijnanavada sources.

The latter trend may be called the "all text, no mind" pattern. Nearly all the citations of Yogacara-Vijnanavada sources are found in the group of quotation¬rich works. Notably, it is the same group of texts that contains the majority of the 'reserved' Cittamatra "all mind, no mind" passages, saying that all phenomena are mind but that there is no mind. Such thinking appears to have its basis in the Vijnanavada-critique given by Indian and Tibetan Yogacara-Madhyamika writers. Moreover, it is also this group of texts that mainly exhibits the formal genre¬similarity consisting in the YBh's scholastic emphasis on presenting bhumis in the sense of stages of the path and 'levels' of spiritual progression. The "all text, no mind" pattern is therefore a trend of Yogacara influence in the Dakpo Kabum that exhibits a philosophical accentuation concordant with Indian sastric writing rather than Tantric literature.

On the whole, the "all text, no mind" pattern is suggestive of a scholastic YBh- effect arbitrated via the Yogacara-Madhyamaka, whereas the "all mind, no text" pattern shows every sign of being a yogic YBh-effect transferred by way of the Tantras. It is evident that the Yogacara tradition was a lively element within this particular Tibetan community, not in the sense of involving any direct study of and the writing of new commentaries on Yogacara-Viijnanavada texts, but rather in the manner that certain fundamental doctrinal elements and yogic concerns that were ultimately derived from the Indian Yogacara tradition had been transmitted into other later Indian Buddhist literatures, whereafter they came to be adapted and practiced in Tibet. The YBh's Wirkungsgeschichte thus reverberates in the sub¬texts of the Dakpo Kabum through these distant, secondary phantoms. The Return of the Weft

When the weft of the YBh's Wirkungsgeschichte crosses the warp of the Dakpo Kabum in the shadowy shapes of these two distinct epistemological trends, this is not a purely diachronic process. According to GADAMER's discussion of Wirkungs- geschichte, a new understanding of a textual corpus in the later reception history of a given source synchronically calls for a reevaluation of the contemporary reading of the source itself. The way in which the historian is affected by arriving at a new understanding of reception history changes the manner in which s/he looks at the original source for that history. In terms of the cloth of textual histories, this is comparable to how the weft threads its way back through the cloth in the opposite direction once it has reached the end of the fabric on one side. In other words, when - through a study of Wirkungsgeschichte - the two diver¬gent Yogacara patterns of "all mind, no text" and "all text, no mind" are revealed in the Dakpo Kabum, the next required step in the method is to see what basis for these patterns can be located in the YBh itself. This either leads to a subtle reinterpretation of the YBh wherein the sources for these patterns suddenly begin to emerge in the text or - alternatively - it leads to the conclusion that the disco¬vered effects in the Dakpo Kabum, in fact, are not traceable to the YBh after all, which would then require a reconsideration of the overall Wirkungsgeschichte of twhheicYhBwho. uld then require a reconsideration of the overall Wirkungsgeschichte of

In the case of the Yogacara-Vijnanavada effects detected in the Dakpo Kabum, the reconsideration of the YBh primarily leads to a need to look for three things. First, the Yogacara-Madhyamaka critique of the Vijnanavada view raises questions whether, when, and where in the larger Yogacara-Vijnanavada literature state¬ments were made to the effect that the mind is real and exists as the ultimate reality. It does not seem that the YBh itself, including its Vijnanavada passages in the Samgahani section, explicitly makes any such claim. Yet, there are less pronounced elements that may have led Madhyamaka authors to arrive at such a view. For example, the Tattvarthapatala (I.4) rejects a thorough-going Madhya- maka interpretation of emptiness in which all forms of existence and non-existence are fully abandoned and instead argues for that there is a remainder whenever something is empty of something else. Whether and how such statements could have served as the object for Madhyamaka criticism becomes the beginning for a new inquiry needed of the Yogacara-Vijnanavada literature.

Secondly, the emphasis laid on the term 'radiance' ('od gsal, *prabhasvara) in Tibetan literature in general and the Dakpo Kabum in particular necessitates studying the history of this term in Mahayana sutras, the YBh, and the later Yoga- cara-Vijnanavada literature. It is evident that the term becomes very important in the later Indian Tantric tradition and subsequently becomes a key-term in Tibetan literature. It also seems that the term may have been less important in the East Asian Yogacara tradition. For example, in the passage from the Viniscayasam- grahani quoted above, Xuanzang's Chinese translation does not employ a distinct term that would correlate to the word 'od gsal in the Tibetan version, but instead uses the rather generic translation 'purity' (M^ qngjing, which overlaps with so many other Sanskrit terms, such as *suddhi, *visuddhi, etc. Given that the modern field of Yogacara studies has strongly been fueled especially by the research inte¬rests of East Asian scholars, it may be for this reason that the term od gsal (*prabhasvara) still has received relatively little attention in Yogacara studies in general and the study of the YBh in particular. Consequently, as scholars begin to pay more attention to later Indian literature post-dating Xuanzang, such as the Tantric literature, as well as to the rich Yogacara-related material found in indigenous Tibetan sources, new needs arise for considering a whole range of other doctrinal and terminological issues in the early Yogacara literature, including the use of hitherto relatively ignored terms in the YBh.

Thirdly, the Dakpo Kabum's character of being a collection of texts dealing with yoga makes it a significant point of comparison for the YBh. While much of YBh-scholarship has been focused either on textual or philosophical inquiries, relatively little attention has been paid to the text as a practical contemplative source for a community of yoga-practitioners. The work by scholars such as Florin DELEANU, Martin DELHEY, and Sangyeob CHA form important exceptions to these broader trends. The Dakpo Kabum lays emphasis on particular doctrinal points that were a concern for the yogis of the mountain retreat at Dags lha sgam po. Given that the Dags lha sgam po community and its members are historically relatively well-known from numerous religious histories, hagiographies, and epi- textual colophons in their own writings, it is possible to read the Dakpo Kabum with a certain historical awareness of the community that produced the texts of the corpus, identifying the spiritual concerns that seem to have been foremost on their minds. For example, the Dakpo Kabum contains many motivational passages that appear to have served to inspire the monks practicing in solitude to remain firm in their commitment to their retreat. Some of these motivational elements appear in doctrines that are also present in the YBh, but without being framed in any particular motivational context. In such passages, the Dakpo Kabum often empha¬sizes the importance of having gained the right circumstance of having been born as a human and that the practitioner therefore must practice the Dharma here and now, since this precious opportunity will soon be lost when dying and it is uncertain when one again will be reborn as a human. In the Dakpo Kabum this point forms part of a central teaching on the so-called "precious human body" (mi lus rin chen), which appears many times in the corpus, and which is known from the later Tibetan tradition to have formed the topic of a particular contemplative practice intended to motivate the practitioner in his or her spiritual endeavor. The same doctrinal point likewise appears in several passages in the YBh, e.g., in the Bhava- namayiBhumih where it is listed as one of the "right circumstances" (sampat, yuan¬man US, phun sum tshogs pa) required for being able to cultivate the Dharma, more specifically "the right circumstance of coming into existence" (abhinirvrtti- sampat, shengyuanman mngon par 'grubpa phun sum tshogspa).

How¬ever, in the YBh, this point is not raised in a particular motivational context but is instead part of a longer enumeration of proper circumstances for contemplative cultivation. Yet, when such enumerated elements are reconsidered from the point of view of the Dakpo Kabum and when it becomes clear how such elements were used for motivational talks and meditative purposes in the Dags lha sgam po community, a question must be raised as to how members of the early Indian Yogacara community read and used such doctrinal elements enumerated in the YBh. Given the fact that so little is known of the Indian community behind the YBh and thus of the practical use of the Indian text, the reading of later sources composed by members of contemplative communities that are better known historically provides a possible venue for beginning to understand the practical side of the YBh, at least from the perspective of the later traditions, whether in India, East Asia, or Tibet, where it is theoretically possible to create an interpretive movement back and forth between the later traditions of yoga or dhyana (chan ^) and the early Yogacara texts.  The interpretive transaction of Wirkungsgeschichte thus forms a loop, which GADAMER called the hermeneutic circle. Nonetheless, it seems that there is a level of complexity, which is overlooked in GADAMER's formulation and which must briefly be discussed in order to clarify the relationship between the methods of Wirkungsgeschichte and philology. Wirkungsgeschichte offers only a rather simple view of the mutual bond between the text and its history of effects. The text is understood as asserting effects on the later sources, and the scholar's awareness of these effects forces him or her to reread and reinterpret the text, in turn leading to the discovery of new effects and so forth. While this model may be successful in explaining the hermeneutical process in general, its concept of 'text' is too elemen¬tary to account for the situation seen in the study of lost epi-texts, as is most often the case in Buddhology. Here, it is requisite to distinguish two primary levels of text: Figure 1. abstract (samanya) signified (abhidheya) text as such (dharmata) concrete (visesa) signifier (abhidhana) text as phenomenon (dharma) On a higher level, the 'text' is really something abstract; it is a samanya, a "gene¬rality," a Text with capital T, so to speak. In semiotic terms, the abstract text could be called the 'signified' (abhidheya) of the word 'text'. This amounts to the most common and general way of speaking of the YBh, namely the YBh as a work composed and redacted in the third-fourth centuries, even though the original writing no longer is extant in the form of an autograph. This is the text as a phenomenon-as-such (dharmata), disassociated from any particular manuscript or version - the YBh understood as an epi-text, i.e., the umbrella-term for the original authored work. On the lower level, the text is something concrete; it is a visesa, an "instance" or specific version of the text, the text with a small t, so to speak. In semiotic terms, a given version of the text could be called the text's signifier (abhidhana), denoting an actual embodiment of the texts. This is the text as a specific phenomenon (dhar¬ma), namely the actual sub-texts existing as concrete documents containing the Sanskrit, Chinese, or Tibetan recensions of the epi-text that may be dated to various later periods, e.g., the eighteenth-century Sde dge bstan 'gyur xylograph of the YBh. Moreover, the textual model is further complicated by the fact that the sub¬texts themselves typically are lost in their own original epi-textual forms. For example, Xuanzang's Chinese YBh translation is not extant in its 648 autograph and the ninth-century Tibetan translation is likewise only to be found in later Tibetan copies. Consequently, the reality is that the sub-texts themselves must also be distinguished in terms of their own epi-textual and sub-textual aspects: Figure 2. epi-text epi-text sub-text(s) sub-text(s) The abstract text as well as the epi-texts are mere phantoms that do not possess any concrete existence; that is to say, they are conceptual constructs or subjective abstractions of the historical consciousness. The sub-texts, moreover, are physical, objective manuscripts. Yet, in spite of being a phantom, the text - like the Buddha's phantom monk teaching the wayfaring disciples - may nevertheless serve as an object for the scholar's interpretations, and it is strictly within the complexity of this textual model that the method of Wirkungsgeschichte has a role to play. Wirkungsgeschichte reveals the larger historical contexts in which the sub-texts were made, generating a broader understanding in which the abstract epi-text can be interpreted and reinterpreted. GADAMER's hermeneutic circle could be said to form an interplay between epi-text and sub-texts, wherein the phantom of the abstract notion of the text-as-such emanates from the phantom of the epi-text based on the physical sub-texts, each within its own particular context of adaptation and interpretation. Even though the Dakpo Kabum may seem to be a strange and almost unrelated descendant for obtaining information about its distant YBh ancestor, there seems to be a legacy of subtle elements in this Tibetan corpus of yoga that may be consulted to raise new and different hermeneutical horizons for the study of the YBh. Abbreviations and Sigla D Sde dge bka' 'gyur and bstan 'gyur. Catalog numbers are given according to UI et al. (1934), avalaible online at http://web.otani.ac.jp/cri/twrp/ tibdate/Peking_online_search.html. Dakpo Kabum Dags po'i bka' 'bum. The research presented in the present paper is based on the first printed xylograph edition produced at Dags lha sgam po monastery in 1520. For a microfilm copy, see Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project, film reel nos. L594/1 & L595/1, running no. L6086. KS Bka' gdams gsung 'bum phyogs sgrig, edited by Gzan dkar mchog sprul Thub bstan nyi ma, published by dpal brtsegs bod yig dpe rnying zhib 'jug khang, Chengdu, China: si khron dpe skrun tshogs pa and si khron mi rigs dpe skrun khang, 2006 onwards. TBRC Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center, database of Tibetan authors and works available online at http://www.tbrc.org/#home. YBh Yogacarabhumi. Bibliography BERGER, Klaus (2004): "New Testament Form Criticism" in Methods of Biblical Interpre¬tation, edited by Douglas A. KNIGHT, Nashville: Abingdon Press, pp. 121-126. BUSS, Martin J. (2004): "Hebrew Bible Form Criticism" in Methods of Biblical Interpreta¬tion, edited by Douglas A. KNIGHT, Nashville: Abingdon Press, pp. 113-119. 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HARVARD ORIENTAL SERIES Edited by MICHAEL WITZEL VOLUME SEVENTY-FIVE The Foundation for Yoga Practitioners The Buddhist Yogacarabhumi Treatise and Its Adaptation in India, East Asia, and Tibet Edited by