Flowers Perfume Sesame: On the Contextual Shift of Perfuming from Abhidharma to Yogācāra

Abstract

In the Abhidharma texts, that flowers perfume sesame is used as a simile describing the mechanism of perfuming (vāsanā/paribhāvanā) in the context of meditative cultivation. According to the Sarvāstivādins, the meditative perfuming requires the co-existence of the perfumer and the perfumed. In comparison, the Yogācāra-vijñānavādins employ the same simile to explain their doctrine of the perfuming of all dharmas in ālayavijñāna, which demands the bīja as the perfumed and the manifested dharmas as the perfumer to be simultaneous. My hypothesis is that the Yogācāra idea of the perfuming of all dharmas is derived from the Abhidharma doctrine of meditative perfuming through the Sautrāntika theory of perfuming in non-concentrated (asamāhita) state. The idea of equating vāsanā and bīja probably took place under the doctrine of successive causality during the sectarian communication among the Sarvāstivādins, the Dārṣṭāntika-Sautrāntikas, and the early Mahāyānists. The Vaibhāṣika principle of simultaneous perfuming, which requires that the perfumed must co-exist with the perfumer, makes it possible in the Yogācāra-vijñānavāda that a bīja in ālayavijñāna is simultaneous with its manifestation.