Asanga

Works

Asanga's writings set out the Yogacara analysis of experience. The Mahayanasamgraha organises the school's doctrine systematically. The Abhidharmasamuccaya presents Abhidharma from a Mahayana standpoint. The Yogacarabhumi, an enormous compendium on the stages of the yogic path, is attributed to him in the Chinese tradition and to Maitreya in the Tibetan.

He is also associated with the five treatises the Tibetan tradition attributes to the bodhisattva Maitreya, which Asanga is held to have received in a vision or in the Tushita heaven. Scholars divide over whether Maitreya denotes a human teacher, a visionary source, or Asanga himself.

Yogacara doctrine

The school is named for the practice of yoga, and its analysis grows from meditative observation of how cognition works. Its central claim is that what appears as an external object is not independent of the consciousness that cognises it, and that grasping the duality of subject and object is the root of delusion.

The alaya-vijnana, storehouse consciousness, holds the seeds of past action, which ripen as experience — an account that answers how karma is carried without a permanent self. The three natures describe how the same dependent process appears when misconstrued and when seen correctly.

Whether Yogacara amounts to philosophical idealism has been argued for a century, in Asia and in Western scholarship, and the question turns on passages that can bear more than one reading.

Influence

With his brother Vasubandhu, Asanga established one of the two great Mahayana philosophical systems. Yogacara shaped Chinese Buddhism through Xuanzang, whose journey to India in the seventh century was undertaken largely to obtain Yogacara texts, and it remains a central subject of study in Tibetan monastic education.