The voices behind the readings
Every verse on this site is read five times by five distinct voices. They are not paraphrases of each other; they push in different directions and sometimes contradict. The Skeptic is mandatory — a sanity rail against the easy slide from "this metaphor is useful" to "this metaphor is literally what's going on."
Treats alaya as an append-only log, manas as a hot cache, the six senses as consumers.
Reads Yogācāra as if it were a system architecture diagram. Sees the store consciousness (ālaya-vijñāna) as an event log accumulating impressions (vāsanā) that get replayed into experience. Useful for clarifying information flow; dangerous when the metaphor is taken literally.
Maps each verse to Clear, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic, or Confused.
Uses Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework to ask which kind of system the verse is pointing at. Most of consciousness sits in the Complex domain — causes only knowable in retrospect — which is precisely the territory Yogācāra is trying to describe.
Reads through predictive processing, Bayesian inference, and self-model theory.
Maps the verses onto contemporary models of mind: Friston's free-energy principle, Clark's predictive processing, Metzinger's self-model theory. Surprised at how often a 4th-century monastic phenomenology anticipates 21st-century computational accounts.
Whitehead, Heraclitus, Bergson — reality as flow, not substance.
Holds that the verses are best read in the lineage of process metaphysics: no things, only events; no substrate, only relations. The "transformation of consciousness" (vijñāna-pariṇāma) is closer to a Whiteheadian actual occasion than to any computational state machine.
Mandatory on every verse. Names where the metaphors break.
Exists to prevent metaphor-creep. Calls out when "alaya is like a database" quietly becomes "alaya is a database." Reminds the reader that Vasubandhu was not writing a systems-design document, that liberation is not a cache invalidation, and that the original text resists every analogy laid on top of it.