Cleaning Out the Storehouse
Author: Ben Connelly Publisher: Tricycle Publish Date: 2016 Review Date: Status:⌛️
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The Buddhist concept of “storehouse consciousness” (alaya vijnana) arose about 2,000 years ago to help explain why people return so often to the same emotional states and viewpoints.
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The term “storehouse consciousness” refers to the unconscious level of experience where our habits are maintained and where they transform.
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instead of being mere repeaters of our habits and conditioning we can be intentional participants in the way our habits are formed.
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Although Yogacara is almost extinct as a distinct school of Buddhism, it was and remains profoundly influential, particularly on the Tibetan and Zen Buddhist traditions.
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Although Yogacara is almost extinct as a distinct school of Buddhism, it was and remains profoundly influential, particularly on the Tibetan and Zen Buddhist traditions.
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Conventionally we believe that we see true reality through the senses and then the mind figures out how to get what it wants out of it. Yogacara thought, however, says that human beings perceive a world that is determined by the habits of emotion, perception, and thought held in the storehouse, which would explain how the same piece of news brings up opposite responses in people of different political persuasions or how one person can joyfully jump in a puddle while another glumly trudges along in the rain.
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The conditioning that creates our habits is staggeringly vast. Think of all that had to happen for you to be able to interpret the letters in this word as having meaning. Seeing black marks and imputing meaning to them is a habit of mind that happens unconsciously. Millions of years of evolution, both physical and cultural, come into play so that you can understand each word.
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The storehouse helps us understand how we have a sense of a continuous self: one of the most pervasive habits of consciousness is to divide the elements of experience into self and other, and construct the sense that this self continues, separate from what it believes is other, over time.
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However, the storehouse and the conditioning it holds is always utterly unique in every moment. It is not a continuous self. It is a central tenet of Buddhist thought that the idea of a lasting, separate self is an illusion, and many Yogacara teachings emphasize that we can become confused and think the storehouse is our self.
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The storehouse, to quote many Yogacara texts, is like a flowing river. And as the early Greek philosopher Heraclitus noted, you can never step in the same river twice.
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the storehouse is like the river that runs through my hometown. I go and walk along the woody bottoms and I take it for granted as I walk that it’s the Mississippi, the very same river that Huck Finn plied, but sometimes as I sit in meditation on the sandy bank, it’s clearly just water as it is right now, with no name, no past, no future. The Mississippi’s flow forms its banks, its shape, and it is ever changing as it picks up sand here and dumps it there, and as rain fills it and it empties out in the Gulf. Our habits are similar: they have formed over geological time, but right now they are unique, and right now we have an amazing opportunity to consciously participate in how they flow.
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The classic metaphor for how this transformation occurs is one of seeds, fruit, and cultivation. Any intentional, emotional, or cognitive impulse in us plants a seed in the storehouse that will cause a similar intention, emotion, or thought to arise in the future in the form of fruit. In each moment our experience is determined to a great extent by seeds from the past that are bearing fruit right now. In each moment, too, we can plant a seed intentionally that will create fruit in the future. We can plant seeds of mindfulness, of kindness, of humility, of energy, of trust, of letting go—an array of beneficial possibilities.
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If we are not attentive to planting these kinds of seeds, however, we will unconsciously plant more seeds like the ones that have borne fruit from our past. When we are angry, worried, or greedy, if we are not consciously involved in what kind of seeds we plant, we will probably just unconsciously plant more angry, worried, greedy seeds.
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Yet there’s also a lot of science about how our perception is colored by our unconscious habits. A stereotyping and prejudice research laboratory at the University of Chicago, for example, conducted one well-known study in which college students and other residents of the community were briefly shown images of young men who were either armed or unarmed. Their task was to very quickly identify which people were holding guns and which were holding playing cards. They were much more likely to be wrong and think a person was holding a gun if the person in the photograph was black.