A Study Of The Middle Way Thought In The The Tattvārthapa(?)ala Of The Yogācārabhūmi

In primitive Buddhism,there are such concepts of the Middle Way as "the middle way of suffering and happiness","the middle way of permanent breakage" and "the middle way of no memory",which govern the perception and practice of the Buddha’s teachings and practice.The Hinayana school of Buddhism,represented by the Sutra school,analysed the Buddha’s teachings by means of "the doctrine of separation",which led to the proposition that "I am empty and the Dharma exists".Mahayana Buddhism promotes the idea of the emptiness of the I am and the emptiness of the Dharma,and rejects the entity view of sectarian Buddhism from the standpoint that the Dharma is not self-existent.Both the early Prajna sutras and Long Shu Bodhisattva believed that the Hinayana idea of dharma-existence originated from the attachment to verbal hypotheses,and that the fixed instructions of language led to either/or thinking and conceptual contradictions.Therefore,Mahayana Buddhism focuses on the way of covering up explanations and proclaiming the true nature of all dharmas as unearned and empty,with its Middle Way view of emptiness aiming at eliminating the prejudice of falsehoods and returning to the absence of words.The early Mahayana Yogacara treatise on the Middle Way,"The True Meaning",corrected the early Mahayana view of the Middle Way by criticising Long Shu’s idea of the Middle Way as one of destruction without establishment,and arguing that the victorious emptiness of all dharmas appears as "empty and non-empty",and that what is empty is the "hypothetical self-nature" of all dharmas.The empty dharma is the "self-nature of hypothesis" and the non-empty dharma is the "self-nature of non-speech",which is also known as the Middle Way of "having and not having".The True Meaning contains not only the Middle Way of knowledge,but also the Middle Way of practice.From the standpoint of the Mahayana Bodhisattva’s path,the master of the treatise states that the Bodhisattva neither flows through life and death nor attains nirvana quickly,but only accumulates the bodhisattva’s sustenance with the victory of emptiness in life and death,maturing and ripening all sentient beings in the middle path.This is the same as the realm of the victorious emptiness of all dharmas,the realm of the non-differentiated wisdom,the realm of the wisdom of the pure knowledge of obstacles,a realm that only bodhisattvas and Buddhas can practise and realise,the key to which lies in the reflection on language.According to the theorist,delusional distinctions are the root cause of the world of the body and the world of sentient beings,and language is the bridge and vehicle for them,capable of shaping the consciousness of all beings.The bodhisattva,on the other hand,"takes only what is,and only what is",so that sentient beings have a dual world of illusion and reality,and thus the Yogic theory of the "four contemplations" and "four realities" is based on reflection on language.