The Tree of Enlightenment

Lankavatara Sutra and a number of other discourses form the
canonical foundation of the Yogachara or Vijnanavada school,
though obviously elements of one school can be found in the
doctrine of the other, and vice versa.
e doctrine for which the Lankavatara is famous is the doctrine
of the primacy of consciousness. is is sometimes called
the doctrine of Mind Only, or of the sole reality of consciousness.
e sutra states in unequivocal terms that the three worlds,
or spheres – the sphere of sense desire, the sphere of form, and
the formless sphere – are just mind itself. In other words, all the
manifold objects of the world, the names and forms of experience,
are merely manifestations of the mind. e Lankavatara
says that our inability to free ourselves from the discrimination
between the conceptions of subject and object is the cause of our
rebirth in the cycle of birth and death. As long as we are unable
to free ourselves from discrimination, we continue to be reborn
in samsara. It is therefore the ability to free ourselves from the
dualistic conceptions of subject and object that is the key to
enlightenment.
But what is this ‘Mind Only’ of which the Lankavatara
Sutra speaks? Is it the empirical mind, the mind that participates
in the activities of the six consciousnesses? It is clearly not this
mind. e mind of which the sutra speaks both transcends and
annihilates the conceptions of the dualities of existence and nonexistence,
identity and difference, permanence and impermanence.
It transcends the concepts of self, substance, and karma.
It even transcends the concept of causation. According to the
sutra, all these concepts are the products of false imagination, or
discriminating thought (vikalpa). e mind of which the sutra
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