Yogācāra

This article provides an introduction to Yogācāra. Indian Buddhist thinkers considered a wide range of philosophical problems, and each school was concerned with distinctive issues and adopted characteristic approaches. The Middle Way School (Madhyamaka) was mainly concerned with dialectical debate and applied a reductio ad absurdum (prasaṅga) approach to the analysis of various philosophical systems. The Yogic Practice (Yogācāra) tradition, the other major philosophical strand of ancient and medieval Indian Buddhism, produced a number of influential treatises on epistemology and logic, and it dismissed the Madhyamaka focus on argument as a waste of time and as antithetical to the pursuit of liberation from cyclic existence, which for its proponents was founded on introspective meditation.