Asaṅga in Three Ideas
the essentialsStages of yoga practice
The Yogācārabhūmi maps seventeen stages of the path, from the senses to nirvāṇa.
The storehouse
A subliminal consciousness carries the seeds of karma and experience from life to life.
Compassion before vision
Twelve years of meditation brought nothing; one act of compassion for a dying dog brought the vision of Maitreya.
Asaṅga (4th century CE) was, with his younger half-brother Vasubandhu, the founder of the Yogācāra school of Mahāyāna Buddhism. Born in Gandhāra (Peshawar), he was ordained in the Mahīśāsaka school and later embraced the Mahāyāna. His works — some of which Tibetan tradition attributes to the future Buddha Maitreya, who revealed them to him — include the encyclopaedic Yogācārabhūmi (“Stages of Yoga Practice”), the Mahāyānasaṃgraha (“Compendium of the Great Vehicle”), the Abhidharmasamuccaya, and (among the “Maitreya” texts) the Abhisamayālaṃkāra, the Madhyāntavibhāga and the Ratnagotravibhāga.
The legend of the dog
Asaṅga’s most famous story, told by Tibetan historians, is about compassion. Seeking a vision of Maitreya, the future Buddha, he meditated in a cave for three years without success, and left in despair. On the road he saw a man rubbing an iron bar with a cloth to make a needle, and, inspired by his patience, returned. After three more years, he left again, saw water dripping on a rock and wearing it away, and returned; and so on, for twelve years. Finally giving up, he found on the road a dog, its hindquarters covered with maggot-infested wounds, snapping at anyone who came near. Overcome with compassion, he cut flesh from his own thigh for the maggots to feed on, and, so as not to crush them with his fingers, closed his eyes and bent to remove them with his tongue. When he opened his eyes, the dog had become Maitreya, who told him that he had been with him all along but that Asaṅga’s obscurations had prevented him from seeing; to prove it, Asaṅga carried him on his shoulder through the town, and people saw only a dog — one old woman, a dog with sores. Maitreya then took him to the Tuṣita heaven and taught him the five treatises.
Thought
Asaṅga’s Mahāyānasaṃgraha is the first systematic exposition of the Yogācāra system: the storehouse consciousness (ālaya-vijñāna) as the basis of all experience; the three natures (imagined, dependent, perfected); the path of the bodhisattva through ten stages; the transformation of the basis at awakening; and the three bodies of the Buddha. His Yogācārabhūmi, one of the largest Buddhist treatises, maps the stages of meditative practice from the five sense consciousnesses to the final nirvāṇa, and its “Bodhisattva Stages” (Bodhisattvabhūmi) became a handbook of Mahāyāna ethics. See Yogācāra.
Curiosities
did you know?- The legend: after twelve years in a cave without a vision of Maitreya, Asaṅga found a dog with maggot-infested wounds. Unwilling to hurt the maggots, he bent to remove them with his tongue — and the dog became Maitreya, who said he had been there all along, unseen.
Questions to Argue About
debate club →- Why would compassion open vision when meditation could not?
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