Book Reviews
Dao
0 Ellen Y. Zhang , Hong Kong Baptist University
1 Philip J. Ivanhoe, City University of Hong Kong
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Growing numbers of individuals representing a range of fields and viewpoints have
attempted to bridge the gap between Buddhism and Western psychology. In his
stimulating new work, Contexts and Dialogue, JIANG Tao acknowledges the tremendous
value of these groundbreaking efforts, but he sees a persistent problem: thus far, to one
degree or another, all such efforts have suffered from the shortcoming of reading Buddhism
through the lens of modern psychology and hence, frequently reconcile the two in ways that
use psychology as the norm. According to Jiang, this is particularly evident in those cases
that interpret the Yogācāra Buddhist ālayavijñāna (store consciousness) as a form of
Buddhist “unconscious.”
Jiang’s work attempts to rectify this problem and provide a bit of balance in the
dialogue. To that end he asks, “What do the differences between ālayavijñāna and the
unconscious tell us about the presuppositions of the modern psychological notion of
the unconscious and the Yogācāra notion of the ālayavijñāna?” (13). In answering this
question, Jiang does not seek to reconcile the two, or privilege one over the other, but rather
to further clarify their respective views. He does this by carefully explaining them in their
own contexts and then, from those contexts, brings them together so that they might set
each other in greater relief. The result may be a bit startling for some, especially those who
have tended to see in Buddhism certain views that mirror those of psychology. It is amply
clear by the end of Jiang’s important work that there are deep differences here. In fact, the
differences raise questions about whether these two views can ever be reconciled without
fundamentally changing one or the other.
Jiang divides the book into five chapters. He begins with the history of the ālayavijñāna
theory and sets his discussion of that historical development within the framework of a set
of metaphysical questions driving Buddhist thought. As Jiang details it, the key lies in a
tension that exists between Abhidharma Buddhist views of no self and momentariness. As
soon as the radical momentariness of the various early Abhidharma thinkers naturally
emerged from considerations of the no-self doctrine, they faced the difficulty of explaining
continuity without reintroducing some sort of an enduring and/or essentially existent self
nature. Jiang refers to this as the “problematic of continuity” and as he shows, this problem
eventually led to the Yogācāra School’s ālayavijñāna concept. Jiang’s summary of these
issues in light of key questions provides a perspective from which the various viewpoints
flow quite naturally one to another. Readers unfamiliar with this material should find the
explanation clear and straightforward.
Following this summary of the history of the ālayavijñāna, Jiang’s second chapter then
moves into a specific consideration of this concept in Xuanzang’s 玄藏 Treatise on the
Establishment of the Doctrine of Consciousness-Only (Cheng Weishi Lun ). There
has been little work to date in English on this important topic and Jiang’s presentation is a
welcome addition to those efforts. Here Jiang details the ways in which Xuanzang first
seeks to establish the primacy of consciousness through an analysis of subject and object as
two (falsely) differentiated aspects of the same cognitive event. Of course, this begs
questions about the ontological status of the apparent object, as well as the awareness of
such objects, and Jiang clearly explains Xuanzang’s views on these matters. Following this,
Jiang presents Xuanzang’s arguments for the continuity of consciousness as momentary
phenomena with structural coherence. A key to this effort by Xuanzang is the functioning
of the ālayavijñāna’s bîja (seeds) as a necessity for the perception of both change and
structural continuity. In the end then, according to Jiang, Xuanzang’s view finds a way to
explain continuity (both objective and subjective) without sacrificing momentariness or the
key Buddhist doctrine of no self.
The third chapter leaves Buddhism to focus on Freud’s and Jung’s notions of the
unconscious. Jiang devotes relatively less space to their views than to the ālayavijñāna
above. The decision to be brief here is driven by the probably accurate assumption that
most readers of this work will already know more about Freud and Jung than about
Xuanzang and the ālayavijñāna. Fair enough. However, for those of us who are coming at
this with more knowledge of Buddhist views than of Freud’s or Jung’s, an expanded
explanation equivalent to his discussion of the ālayavijñāna would be much appreciated.
That said, the information is clearly presented and tightly focused on points that are
essential to Jiang’s later analysis.
The fourth and fifth chapters bring the three theories together and compare them on their
own terms in light of several key are (...truncated)