[Buddha-l] Fsat Mnifdlunses?

[Dan Lusthaus]

But why believe me? The supposed defense against or refutation of what I've 
said about Yogacara is: "Oh, that's just Lusthaus."

How about something from someone who's never heard of Lusthaus?

Q:  Yogacara is often considered mind only, that there's nothing outside the 
mind

A:  The only thing that's outside of the mind is reality, but we will go 
into that. Reality cannot be conditioned by the mind. Reality is reality. If 
reality can be conditioned by the mind, then it wouldn't be reality, because 
each time your moods change, reality would be changing as well. Yogacarins 
say both subject and object are a product of the mind, but that doesn't 
necessarily mean that the chair and the table are in your head. We construct 
our experience of the world. We don't experience the world as it is, we 
experience the world as we want to experience it. That's why it's said that 
both subject and object are a product of the mind. We are unable to perceive 
reality, because our mind is continuously constructing things. Due to 
certain common characteristics, human beings share a similar kind of world, 
but still, each individual's experience of the world is different.

http://www.evaminstitute.org.au/spiritual_director/teachings/yogacara_on_tantra1.html


That's Venerable Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche, 9th incarnation of the Trangu 
lineage, once Abbot of Trangu Monastery, who established the Kagyu E-Vam 
Buddhist Institute in Australia in 1982.

See
http://www.evaminstitute.org.au/spiritual_director/teachings/yogacara_on_tantra.html

Apparently people in the West and many Western scholars still NEED Yogacara 
to be idealism for them. It seems that's esp. the case if they themselves 
need "idealism" as a purvapak.sa, a refutable opponent, for their own 
formulations. So Yogacara is supposed to fill that role for their arguments. 
Keep those Yogacaras dumb, annoying, misguided, and barefoot in the Dharma 
kitchen. One notices that invariably, once they look at actual Yogacara 
texts, they quickly conclude that Yogacaras were lousy idealists who offered 
horrendously shoddy arguments for idealism. Doesn't seem to cross their mind 
that maybe rather than Yogacara offering vapid arguments for idealism, the 
case might rather be that Yogacara offers NO arguments for idealism, and 
that the effort by scholars to put such claims in their mouths is what is 
vapid.

I think Traleg Rinpoche is getting it about right.

Dan