Vasubandhu

Vasubandhu (4th–5th century CE) was one of the most influential philosophers in the history of Buddhism. Born in Puruṣapura (Peshawar) in Gandhāra, he wrote, first, the Abhidharmakośa (“Treasury of Abhidharma”), the definitive survey of early Buddhist systematic philosophy, which remains the basic textbook of Abhidharma in Tibet and East Asia; and then, after converting to the Mahāyāna under the influence of his elder half-brother Asaṅga, the short treatises — the Twenty Verses (Viṃśatikā), the Thirty Verses (Triṃśikā) and the Treatise on the Three Natures (Trisvabhāvanirdeśa) — that are the classic statements of Yogācāra, the “mind-only” school.

Life

According to the biography by the sixth-century translator Paramārtha, Vasubandhu was one of three brothers, all named Vasubandhu, born to a Brahmin family in Gandhāra and ordained in the Sarvāstivāda school. He studied the Abhidharma of the Vaibhāṣikas in Kashmir and wrote the Abhidharmakośa — 600 verses with an auto-commentary (bhāṣya) in which he often sided against the Vaibhāṣikas with the Sautrāntika view. He was a famous debater and, by tradition, defeated the Sāṃkhya philosopher Vindhyavāsin. His brother Asaṅga, a Mahāyāna master, sent word that he was ill; when Vasubandhu came, Asaṅga explained the Mahāyāna to him, and Vasubandhu was converted. Ashamed of having attacked the Mahāyāna, he wanted to cut out his tongue; Asaṅga told him to use it to teach instead. He spent his later years in Ayodhyā under royal patronage, perhaps of the Gupta kings, and died at eighty.

Thought

The Abhidharmakośa

The Abhidharmakośa systematises the Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma in eight chapters: elements, faculties, the world, karma, latent tendencies, the path, knowledge and meditation, with a ninth chapter refuting the Pudgalavādins’ “person”. In his commentary, Vasubandhu criticises the Sarvāstivāda doctrine that past and future dharmas exist, defends momentariness (everything perishes the instant it arises, because destruction needs no cause), and analyses karma and rebirth without a self.

Representation only

In the Twenty Verses, Vasubandhu argues that there are no external objects — only representations (vijñapti). He answers four objections from realists — that without external objects, experiences would not be fixed in place, fixed in time, shared by many minds, or effective — using the example of dreams, in which objects appear in definite places and times and have real effects, and of shared visions in hell. He then argues that external objects, analysed into atoms, are incoherent: partless atoms cannot combine, and atoms with parts are not atoms.

The Thirty Verses

The Thirty Verses set out the Yogācāra theory of consciousness: the storehouse consciousness (ālaya-vijñāna), which holds the seeds of all experience; the afflicted mind (manas), which takes the storehouse for a self; and the six active consciousnesses. All these are transformations of consciousness; and the final verses describe their transformation, at awakening, into wisdom.

The three natures

The Trisvabhāvanirdeśa explains experience through three natures: the imagined (things as we construct them — independent subjects and objects), the dependent (the conditioned flow of consciousness that does the constructing), and the perfected (the dependent free of the imagined — suchness). He compares the process to a magician’s illusion: from a piece of wood, by a mantra, an elephant appears; the elephant is the imagined, its appearance the dependent, and the absence of an elephant in the appearance is the perfected.

Legacy

Vasubandhu’s works were translated into Chinese by Paramārtha and Xuanzang and became foundational for the Yogācāra (Faxiang) school in China and Hossō in Japan; Tibetan tradition counts him among the “Six Ornaments” of India. His student Dignāga founded Buddhist logic. Modern philosophers compare his arguments with Berkeley’s idealism, Kant’s transcendental idealism and Husserl’s phenomenology.