Korea Journal of Buddhist StudiesISSN:1598-0642(Print)불교학연구회

The significance of śamatha-vipaśyanā of Yogācāra is that it has strong arguments against theories based on ‘this world exists just as the meaning of word’. The śamatha-vipaśyanā of Yogācāra is to think of Doctrine (敎法), in detail, the contemplation of Dharma (法) and Artha (義). Here, Dharma is to Artha as word is to meaning. At first, the essence (體) of Doctrine (敎法), which Buddha preached, was about the specific phoneme features from his sound, that is, Nāman or Name (名), Pada or Phrase (句), and Vyañjana or Phoneme (文). So, to know the dharma means to exactly understand what distinctive functions Nāman, Pada, and Vyañjana have in the process of showing A meaning. In the second place, the contemplation into the nature of ‘Artha’ suggests a new prospective, which gives an innovative way and also accedes the view of the early Buddhism. The Yogācāra School accepts the viewpoint of early Buddhism that the thing represented by A word is the image (影像) of the object that appears in the mind, not the object itself. Therefore, to know the meaning of a word (語義) is to know about the image of the object appearing as the meaning of word. However, the Yogācāra School insisted that ‘the image of the object appearing as the meaning of word’ did not come from the outside of the world, but ‘the Mind-Only (唯識)’. Since then, the thought of this school was separated from the previous ones. According to the Yogācāra School, it is not only likely to contemplate ‘the image in Samādhi (三摩地影像)’ appearing as the meaning of doctrine, but also understand the image of the object appearing as the meaning of a word in our daily minds (=distracted minds). Both cases are not basically different. This is the doctrine of ‘the Mind-Only (唯識)’.