Developing Emotionally Intelligent AI: A Yogācāra-Informed Buddhist Framework for Affective Computing

This paper examines how the current state of affective computing is limited by its reliance on theories that treat emotions as static, isolated states, and argues that the holistic and process-oriented theory of mind from Yogācāra Buddhism offers a more sophisticated alternative, viewing emotion as an experience deeply integrated with cognition, volition, and somatic awareness. As a case study, this paper proposes a framework for sentiment analysis inspired by Yogācāra principles, based upon the Chinese Buddhist text Mahāyāna Treatise on the Hundred Dharmas Illuminating the Gate. This multi-aspect annotation system analyzes emotional expressions across five key dimensions corresponding to Yogācāra’s “ever-present” Mental Factors. By mapping emotions in this compositional manner, the framework provides a more granular and context-rich understanding of human sentiment than current methods allow. This paper thus serves as a call to diversify AI’s theoretical foundations, demonstrating through this Yogācāra case study how engagement with insights from different traditions can resist the top-down “theoretical monopoly” of Western psychological models, which flattens the rich diversity of human affective experience into a single, dominant paradigm.