Vasubandhu

The Abhidharmakosha

The Abhidharmakosha is a systematic presentation of Abhidharma doctrine in verse, with Vasubandhu's own prose commentary. It sets out the categories of mind and matter, the mechanism of karma, cosmology, the path and the attainments, from the Sarvastivada-Vaibhashika position — and then, in the commentary, criticises that position repeatedly from the Sautrantika standpoint.

The work became the standard textbook of Abhidharma across Asia, studied in Tibetan and East Asian monastic curricula to the present, and it is the principal source for reconstructing the systematic thought of the early schools.

Yogacara

Tradition holds that Vasubandhu was converted to Mahayana by his elder brother Asanga, and thereafter wrote the concise works that define Yogacara: the Vimshatika and Trimshika, twenty and thirty verses on the doctrine that what is taken for external objects is a transformation of consciousness, together with commentaries on Asanga's works and on Mahayana sutras.

Yogacara analyses experience in terms of the storehouse consciousness, in which the residues of past action are held and from which experience arises, and the three natures — the imagined, the dependent and the perfected — by which the relation between deluded and awakened cognition is set out.

The two Vasubandhus

Erich Frauwallner argued in 1951 that the Abhidharma author and the Yogacara author were two different men of the same name, separated by about a century. The proposal has been debated ever since without resolution; some accept it, others hold that a single figure changing position over a long life accounts for the evidence.

Influence

Whichever answer is right, the works attributed to the name form one of the largest and most influential bodies of Buddhist philosophy. The Abhidharmakosha and the Yogacara treatises are foundational texts in traditions that otherwise disagree with each other, which is an unusual position for any author to occupy.