Vimśatikāvijñaptimātratāsiddhi (IAST

IAST

The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration is a transliteration scheme that allows a lossless romanization of Indic scripts as employed by the Sanskrit language.-Popularity:...

; Sanskrit

Sanskrit

Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...

 Devanagari

Devanagari

Devanagari |deva]]" and "nāgarī" ), also called Nagari , is an abugida alphabet of India and Nepal...

: विम्शतिकाविज्ञप्तिमात्रतासिद्धि) has been rendered into English as "Twenty Verses on Consciousness Only" is an important work within Buddhadharma discourse

Discourse

Discourse generally refers to "written or spoken communication". The following are three more specific definitions:...

. The work was composed by Vasubandhu

Vasubandhu

Vasubandhu was an Indian Buddhist monk, and along with his half-brother Asanga, one of the main founders of the Indian Yogācāra school. However, some scholars consider Vasubandhu to be two distinct people. Vasubandhu is one of the most influential figures in the entire history of Buddhism...

  (fl. 4th c.) and is notable within the discourse of Yogachara and has influenced subsequent Buddhadharma discourse of other schools.

Anacker (1984: p.159) in making reference to the works of Dharmapala and Hsuan-tsang, holds that:

Perhaps no work of Vasubandhu's has been more consistently misunderstood than The Twenty Verses. It has frequently been used as an authoritative source for opinions that are in fact not even there. The main point here is not that consciousness unilaterally creates all forms in the [U]niverse, as has been supposed by Dharmapala and Hsuan-tsang, but rather than an object-of-consciousness is "internal", and the "external" stimuli are only inferrable. What is observed directly are always only perceptions, colored by particular consciousness- "seeds". The very fact that these "seeds" are spoken of at all indicates a double influence. On one hand, every consciousness-moment deposts a "seed": on the other, each "seed" influences every subsequent consciousness-moment, until a "revolution at the basis" of consciousness is achieved.

Lusthaus

Dan Lusthaus

Dan Lusthaus, a graduate of Temple University's Department of Religion, is a specialist in Yogācāra Buddhism. The author of several articles and books on the topic, Lusthaus has taught at UCLA, Florida State University, the University of Missouri, and in the Spring of 2005 he was a professor at...

 (undated: unpaginated) holds that:

Vasubandhu's most original and philosophically interesting treatise is his Twenty Verses (Vi.m`satikaa). In it he defends Yogaacaara from objections by Realists. Yogaacaara claims that what we think are external objects are nothing more than mental projections. This has been mistaken for an Idealist position because interpreters focus on the word 'object' instead of 'external.' Vasubandhu does not deny that cognitive objects (vi.saya, aalambana, etc.) exist; what he denies is that they appear anywhere else than in the very act of consciousness which apprehends them. He denies that such cognitive objects have external referents (bahya-artha). What Vasubandhu means is that cognition never takes place anywhere except in consciousness. Everything we know we have acquired through sensory experience (in Buddhism the mind is considered a special type of sense). We are fooled by consciousness into believing that those things which we perceive and appropriate within consciousness are actually 'outside' our cognitive sphere. Put another way, we mistake our interpretations of things for the things themselves. Consciousness is driven by karmic intentionalities (the habitual tendencies produced by past actions), and how we perceive is shaped by that conditioning. The goal of Yogaacaara is to break out of this cognitive narcissism

Narcissism

Narcissism is a term with a wide range of meanings, depending on whether it is used to describe a central concept of psychoanalytic theory, a mental illness, a social or cultural problem, or simply a personality trait...

and finally wake up to things as they are, devoid of erroneous conceptual projections.