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Buddhism
January 2009 
What is Alayavijnana?
Posted on Aug 6th, 2008
by 
True Eloquence
True Eloquence
Usually, it is translated as "the store-house consciousness". It is where all the karmic seeds (bijas) are stored. Mhm...what does it mean by that?...Okay, for instance, you've done something to someone when you were like 15 years old, and after many years, you met him/her again, and suddenly you remembered that action (remorseful or rewarding...depending on that particular action). So now where did that come from? That did not just come by itself. That memory/experinece must have been stored somewhere in the sub-consciousness. According to Yogacara, it was stored in "Alayavijnana" and it came from there...yeah. Anyway, we have an earliest description of what is it like in the "Mahayana-abhidharma-sutra". Lets see how it was defined there:
"anadikaliko dhatuh
sarvadharma-samsrayah/
sati tasmim gatih sarva
nirvana-adhigamas capi//
(Causal Element of beginless time
is the basis of all dharma.
Where it is there,
there is the whole phenomena of existence, as well as the realization of nirvana)
So, it looks like we have been accumulating karma from a beginless time. The mutual perfuming of the seeds (causal elements) give rise to all the dharmas (conditioned things). Because of that (positive and negative), we have Samsara on one hand and nirvana on the other. But it is all stored in that alayavijnana. The whole world of our experinece is built in the "alayavijnana". All kinds of seeds are stored there and these seeds have the potentiality to give rise to anything anytime. That's why we experience all kinds of things (not everything at the same time), just like the waves in the ocean, it is always there, but they arise at different occassions due to the wind, etc. Now there is only one way left for us. That is to transform all the grossness, heaviness, badness, non-pliability (dausthulya) into calmness, lightness, pliability, workibility (prasrabdhi). And that transformation (asraya-paravrtti) is in a state of full purification (parinispanna). It is described as "such-ness" (tathata), because it is simply ineffable.
"anadikaliko dhatuh
sarvadharma-samsrayah/
sati tasmim gatih sarva
nirvana-adhigamas capi//
(Causal Element of beginless time
is the basis of all dharma.
Where it is there,
there is the whole phenomena of existence, as well as the realization of nirvana)
So, it looks like we have been accumulating karma from a beginless time. The mutual perfuming of the seeds (causal elements) give rise to all the dharmas (conditioned things). Because of that (positive and negative), we have Samsara on one hand and nirvana on the other. But it is all stored in that alayavijnana. The whole world of our experinece is built in the "alayavijnana". All kinds of seeds are stored there and these seeds have the potentiality to give rise to anything anytime. That's why we experience all kinds of things (not everything at the same time), just like the waves in the ocean, it is always there, but they arise at different occassions due to the wind, etc. Now there is only one way left for us. That is to transform all the grossness, heaviness, badness, non-pliability (dausthulya) into calmness, lightness, pliability, workibility (prasrabdhi). And that transformation (asraya-paravrtti) is in a state of full purification (parinispanna). It is described as "such-ness" (tathata), because it is simply ineffable.
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