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The Three Natures of Yogacara Buddhism
How contemplating the interrelation of everything leads to understanding emptiness
“The imagined, the other-dependent and the consummate: these are the three natures which should be deeply understood.… Like an elephant that appears through the power of a magician’s mantra — only the percept appears. The elephant is completely non-existent. The imagined nature is the elephant; the other-dependent nature is the visual percept; the non-existence of the elephant therein is explained to be the consummate.”
— Verses from Yogacara philosopher Vasubandhu’s Treatise On The Three Natures.
In Buddhism, one of the most important first steps toward enlightenment is seeing reality for what it is. If you can, then you will understand the behaviors that cause suffering and be able to extinguish them.
Buddhism tells us that our suffering is the result of attachments to impermanent and empty things — or, when we chase things that aren’t really real or substantial.
The doctrine of the Three Natures is one way to come to understand that emptiness.
The First Nature: What You Imagine To Be True
Your “imagined” reality is the one you’ve so far constructed to understand the world, due to the conditioning of your upbringing and the deep-seated desires of your heart. Jordan Peterson talks a lot about how our belief system affects how we perceive things, and this is the same kind of conversation.
When you look out into the world, you expect to see things that are separate from you. These things are also separate from each other, and have their own identity consisting of a list of traits. A cup is separate from a table because of its shape and function, and both are things outside of you that you are perceiving.
(This is called “dualistic” thinking — the perceiver and the perceived. More on that later.)
In other words, the Imagined Nature of reality is just what you see as your everyday reality, as defined by all the concepts you’ve learned to categorize things with.
