Horror Vacui: Metaphysical Yogacara Reaction to Madhyamaka Antimetaphysical Emptiness

In the first part of this paper I critically examine some of the main interpretations of classical Yogacara philosophy of Maitreya(natha), Asanga and Vasubandhu. Among these interpretations, based on extant textual and contextual data, I consider philologically unlikely both metaphysical-idealistic readings, which ascribe to these authors the view that ultimate reality is a mental or subjective stuff, and epistemological-idealistic readings which advocate that either Yogacara suspends judgment on the existence of the extramental or that it maintains that the extramental exists in itself and ultimately. Instead, I consider more likely the thesis that classical Yogacara upholds an epistemological idealism that, while admitting epistemological priority of the mental over the extramental, rules out the ultimate existence of both the former and the latter. This exclusion, however, does not amount to the exclusion of every metaphysics, but rather to the adoption of a metaphysics of emptiness conceived, in fact, as absence of the mental/extramental (or subject/object) dichotomy. In the second part of the paper this reading of classical Yogacara is compared with the interpretation of Nagarjuna's philosophy that I elsewhere called realistic antimetaphysical, and I reach the conclusion that, while with respect to epistemology between early Madhyamaka and classical Yogacara there is continuity, regarding metaphysics these two schools are deeply distinct and discontinuous: while Nagarjuna conceives of emptiness as an extinction of any metaphysical view, Yogacara emptiness actually presents itself as a metaphysical point of view.