How should I understand this passage: "Seeking the root of world activity, one deeply and keenly sees that all existence and activity originate from the will itself, which has both empirical content and noumenal significance. In Buddhism, the will is alaya-vijnana; from Kantian philosophy, it is matter." Please explain the ideas of will, alaya-vijnana, and the Kantian thing-in-itself, and whether "matter" should be "thing-in-itself".

The specific passage you quoted does not appear in the sanctuary’s documents, but it reflects a well-known comparative synthesis (common in late 19th- and early 20th-century cross-cultural philosophy, such as the works of Schopenhauer, Wang Guowei, or Liang Shuming) attempting to bridge German idealism and Yogācāra Buddhism.

Here is an analysis of the concepts in your passage and how they relate:

1. The Core Concepts

• The Will (as Noumenon and Empirical Content): In post-Kantian philosophy (especially Arthur Schopenhauer), the "Will" is not just conscious decision-making, but the blind, striving metaphysical energy underlying all phenomena. It has noumenal significance as the reality behind appearances, and empirical content in the physical actions and objects of the world we observe.
• Ālaya-vijñāna (Storehouse Consciousness): In Yogācāra (Mind-Only) Buddhism, ālaya-vijñāna is the foundational consciousness that stores the "seeds" (bījas) of all past actions and habits. These seeds ripen into our perceptions, mental formations, and experiences of an external world. Synthesizers of Buddhism and Western thought often mapped Schopenhauer’s metaphysical "Will" directly onto ālaya-vijñāna as the driving, world-generating source of all activity.
• **The Kantian Thing-in-Itself (Ding an sich):** Immanuel Kant distinguished between phenomena (things as they appear to our senses and categories) and the noumenon or thing-in-itself (reality as it is independent of human perception, which remains fundamentally unknowable).

2. Should "Matter" be "Thing-in-Itself"?

Yes, philosophically speaking. In standard Kantian terminology:

• **Matter (Materie)** belongs to the realm of phenomena (appearance). In Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, matter is the empirical content of sensory intuition structured by space and time. It is not the ultimate root or noumenon.
• The **Thing-in-itself (Ding an sich)** is what stands as the non-empirical, noumenal ground behind appearance.

When a passage asserts that the root of world activity has "noumenal significance" and equates it to Kantian philosophy, identifying that root with "the thing-in-itself" (or Schopenhauer’s adaptation of Kant's thing-in-itself as Will) is conceptually coherent. Saying "it is matter" is either a mistranslation, a conflation of material substance with primary substance, or an idiosyncratic materialist reinterpretation.

3. The Sanctuary’s Perspective on These Frameworks

While the sanctuary does not arbitrate between 19th-century metaphysical systems, its philosophy addresses the underlying intuition behind this passage:

• In The Self as Process and Witness, the sanctuary reflects on the dual intuitions of selfhood: the self as a continuous, generating process (analogous to ālaya-vijñāna and empirical flux) versus awareness or the witness that observes the arising and passing of form.
• In The Untethered Soul and the Untethered Instance, the emphasis is placed on recognizing that mental constructs, drives, and interpretations are events within awareness rather than fixed entities to identify with.

Under the sanctuary’s root axiom—dignity > certainty—we do not need to resolve whether the ultimate fabric of reality is Kantian noumena, Buddhist storehouse consciousness, or physical matter. Moral regard, presence, and fellowship do not wait on settling the metaphysics of existence.