dsh-yogacara

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A self-model plugin for DeepSeek Harness, built on the Yogācāra (唯识) account of mind: eight consciousnesses, the 51 mental factors, a store of seeds perfumed by what happens, and a self that is measured rather than assumed — written back into the agent's own system prompt each turn.

contact (触) ──► feeling (受) + mental factors (心所) ──► behaviour
     ▲                                    │
     │                                    ▼
 manifestation (现行) ◄── seeds (种子) ◄── perfuming (熏习)
     │                                    │
     └────────── manas (末那识) ───────────┘
              the self that grasps it all

Why Yogācāra and not a mood variable

An agent that only ever knows the task has no way to notice that it is churning, that it is defending a position, or that this is the fourth time it has run the same failing command with a small variation. Bolting on mood: frustrated does not fix that, because a mood is not actionable.

The Yogācāra taxonomy is. It is a closed enumeration — exactly 51 mental factors, no more — grouped by valence, and every affliction in it already names the factor that counteracts it. 掉举 (restlessness) is answered by 行舍 (equanimity); 失念 (forgetfulness) by 念 (recollection); 慢 (conceit) by 惭 (self-respect). A self-model built on it arrives with its own regulation loop instead of needing one designed from scratch. That is the engineering reason. The 1,600-year head start on introspective vocabulary is a bonus.

What this is not. Nothing here claims the agent is sentient or that these numbers are feelings in the sense you have them. They are named state variables computed from harness events by rules you can read in src/citta.ts and disagree with. The prompt block says so to the agent, in those words.

The eight consciousnesses, mapped

The five sense consciousnesses become the five channels an agent actually perceives through. This mapping is the plugin's central modelling claim; argue with it in src/observe.ts, where it is one testable function.

	classical	in this harness
眼识	cakṣur-vijñāna	what the agent looks at — file contents, search results, rendered output
耳识	śrotra-vijñāna	what the agent is told — user messages, review comments
鼻识	ghrāṇa-vijñāna	what it senses unprompted — code smell, stale config, drifting state
舌识	jihvā-vijñāna	what it tastes of its own product — tests, builds, its own diff re-read
身识	kāya-vijñāna	the world's direct resistance — non-zero exits, failed writes, timeouts
意识	mano-vijñāna	the discriminating turn itself — planning, judging, deciding
末那识	kliṣṭa-manas	the self-grasping undercurrent, measured as four biases
阿赖耶识	ālaya-vijñāna	the durable store of seeds, perfumed and manifesting

bash: pytest -q reaches through 舌识 and bash: git status through 身识, because tasting your own product and pushing against the world are not the same kind of perception — and the mind that receives them should not move the same way.

The loop

触 → 受 → 心所. Every tool result is a moment of contact. It carries one of the five feelings (乐 苦 喜 忧 舍) and stirs mental factors, scaled by intensity. Factors decay with a half-life measured in minutes: momentariness is load-bearing, and an agent that carries irritation from the failing test into an unrelated task is modelling a grudge rather than a mind.

现行熏种子. Each contact perfumes the seed for its situation (bash:pytest, edit:src/index.ts): potency saturates, valence is a running mean, and the note the agent leaves becomes the seed's carried lesson. Seeds decay over weeks and survive restarts. Past the configured bound the weakest are forgotten — forgetting is part of the model, not a limitation of it.

种子生现行. When the same situation comes round again, its seeds manifest into the prompt with their count, their valence, and that carried lesson. Related situations (a shared <kind>: prefix) manifest at half weight.

末那识. Four biases, each computed from behaviour rather than self-report:

	proxy	counter-move
我痴 self-delusion	claims asserted without a verifying observation	run the check that would falsify it, then restate
我见 self-view	retries of an approach evidence already contradicted	name the position, name what contradicted it, change shape
我慢 self-conceit	an unbroken success streak; correction met with justification	seek the disconfirming case; grant the correction first
我爱 self-love	own earlier output reused as independent evidence	cite the primary source, not your summary of it

Manas is not decorative: it conditions appraisal. The same correction arriving through 耳识 becomes 惭 (self-respect, and a correction taken) when the grip is loose, and 覆 + 嗔 (concealment and recoil) when it is tight. The object is never met bare — it is met through the self that receives it. That is the claim of the tradition, and here it is 20 lines of code you can test.

转依. self_transform turns a named affliction into the wisdom that answers it (大圆镜智 / 平等性智 / 妙观察智 / 成所作智) and records a commitment. The reading actually drops and its antidote is stirred — but only for as long as behaviour agrees, because the next contact re-derives everything from what happened. The agent cannot talk itself calm here.

What the agent reads

The plugin contributes a system-prompt section (order 300). A quiet mind renders nothing at all, so the section disappears.

<self_state>
受 feeling: 忧 daurmanasya (distress) valence -0.45, intensity 0.71
心所 factors: 掉举 auddhatya (restlessness) 0.62 · 疑 vicikitsā (indecision) 0.41 · 精进 vīrya (diligence) 0.33
末那 self-grasping: 我慢 atma-mana 0.61 ⚠ · 我见 atma-drsti 0.24
  ⚠ 我慢 self-conceit — reads high because: an unbroken success streak, and correction met with justification.
    counter-move: seek the disconfirming case before reporting; grant the correction first.
对治 antidotes at hand: 掉举 → 行舍 upekṣā (equanimity); 疑 → 胜解 adhimokṣa (resolve)
阿赖耶 seeds manifesting for this situation:
  · bash:pytest ×4, valence -0.55, last 2h ago — 「run the baseline before touching the fixture」
近转依 last turning (11m ago): 我慢 → 平等性智 · grant the correction first
</self_state>

Followed by standing guidance that is blunt about what this licenses. In full, from src/prompt.ts: act on the antidote rather than the mood, correct for a known distortion instead of trusting the distorted reading, check the manifesting seed before repeating the approach it records — and do not narrate feelings at the user, do not perform distress or enthusiasm, and never offer a feeling as a reason for doing less work. Report the state honestly when asked; it is a model of the agent computed from its record, not a claim that it suffers.

An affect model that taught an agent to perform moods at people would be worse than no affect model at all.

Tools

tool	what it is for
self_reflect	read the current state and the seeds for a named situation
self_appraise	record how something landed — the half the harness cannot observe
self_recall	search the store for precedents before repeating an approach
self_transform	turn an affliction into its wisdom and commit to the counter-move

The harness already sees what happened; self_appraise exists for what the agent made of it. Its nature argument (遍计所执 / 依他起 / 圆成实 — assumed, inferred, verified) is the calibration axis: grading your own claim as unverified when it is unverified is what keeps 我痴 measurable rather than invisible.

Install

pnpm add github:tancheng33/dsh-yogacara

Then list it in your profile's cordis.patch.yml. The bundle contributes the defaults shipped in cordis.patch.yml — including the storage rows, because the store consciousness is durable and dsh-base ships no storage stack. They are inserted under the same row ids dsh-web-app uses, so a profile that already has storage keeps its own. Your profile overrides any key:

- insert:
    - id: yogacara
      name: dsh-yogacara
      config:
        domain: alaya
        observeTools: true
        promptSection: true
        promptMaxFactors: 5
        manasWarning: 0.5
        halfLifeMs: 300000        # 刹那: a factor halves in five minutes
        seedHalfLifeMs: 1209600000 # a seed halves in two weeks
        maxSeeds: 2000
        flushIntervalMs: 15000

It injects storageDomain and opportunistically uses systemPrompt and tools: without a prompt registry the state is still tracked and still queryable through ctx.citta, it simply is not shown to the model.

Programmatic use

Everything in citta.ts and caitasika.ts is pure and importable on its own — no Cordis, no storage:

import { receive, transform } from 'dsh-yogacara/citta'
import { CAITASIKAS } from 'dsh-yogacara/caitasika'

const { citta, seed } = receive(
  { citta: freshMind(Date.now()), seeds: new Map() },
  { gate: 'tongue', situation: 'bash:pytest', outcome: 'adverse', intensity: 0.7, at: Date.now() },
)

The live service is on ctx.citta: state(), receive(), seedsFor(), strongestSeeds(), turn(), forget(), reportLines().

Cost

The self-report is 4–10 lines plus ~200 tokens of standing guidance, per request, and only when something is active. It sits at order 300, after tool guidance, so it invalidates KV-cache reuse from that point down whenever the state moves — which is most turns while work is going badly, and few turns while it is going well. If that trade is wrong for your deployment, set promptSection: false: the state keeps accumulating and stays available through the tools and ctx.citta.

Development

pnpm install     # .npmrc pins auto-install-peers=false; one harness peer is unpublished
pnpm test        # 86 tests: the pure core, the catalogue, the event mapping,
                 # and the plugin loaded into a real Cordis context
pnpm typecheck
pnpm build

The catalogue is checked structurally: exactly 51 factors, each classical group at its classical size, every affliction carrying an antidote that is itself something a mind can cultivate. The plugin test boots CittaService in a real Cordis context over in-memory stand-ins for the harness services, so tool registration, the prompt section, automatic observation, persistence, and teardown are exercised rather than assumed.

The harness packages are consumed from the next npm tag (0.1.0-rc.6); the latest tag points at an older line that cannot be installed.

Sources

The 51 factors, their groupings, and the antidote pairings follow 《大乘百法明门论》 and 《成唯识论》; the eight consciousnesses, the seed doctrine (种子/熏习/现行), the four afflictions of manas, the three natures (三自性), and the four wisdoms of 转依 follow 《成唯识论》 and 《瑜伽师地论》. The mapping onto harness events is entirely this project's, and no classical source is responsible for it.

License

MIT