Chapter 3 · Maitreya, Asaṅga, Vasubandhu — the Founding of the School

Part One · Sources and Formation

Who founded this body of learning? And why were the founders two brothers?

Chapter Two ended on a suspense: the analytic tradition had taken the mind apart with clarity — who, then, would turn the mind, thus taken apart, into a path? The answer is three names — Maitreya, Asaṅga, Vasubandhu — one a bodhisattva whom tradition reveres as the one to be born in a coming age, and a pair of blood brothers. This chapter, following the historical biographies and the treatises' own words, tells this arising once through.

1 · The Tradition of the Yoga Masters — the Weight of the Word "Yoga"

First, the school's name. In India this school was originally called the Yogācāra school, and its practitioners were called yoga masters. "Yoga" today is mostly associated with postures, yet its original sense is "correspondence" — to fit together, to join, to be yoked and walk as one. Correspondence with what? The bodhisattva Jinaputra, who commented on the root treatise, gives the definition at the very opening:

「謂一切乘境、行、果等所有諸法皆名瑜伽，一切並有方便善巧相應義故。」 〔最勝子《瑜伽師地論釋》·T30n1580〕

Object (the reality contemplated), practice (the effort one cultivates), fruit (the stage one realizes) — these three mesh with one another, correspond with one another, and this is named yoga. So a "yoga master" is no gymnast, but a meditative practitioner in whom view, effort, and realized fruit interlock link by link; their learning is arrived at through sitting and through contemplation, not deduced in a study. The encyclopedia of this tradition is that great chart of the seventeen stages at the end of the last chapter — the Yogācārabhūmi, the root treatise of this school.

2 · The Five Treatises of Maitreya and Asaṅga — the Establishing of the Root Treatise

Where did the root treatise come from? First, hear the school's own account. Jinaputra sets it within a larger pendulum-swing:

「龍猛菩薩證極喜地，採集大乘無相空教造《中論》等，究暢真要，除彼有見。」「由是眾生，復著空見。無著菩薩位登初地，證法光定、得大神通，事大慈尊，請說此論」 〔同前·T30n1580〕

After the Buddha's passing, students mostly clung to "existence" — grasping the dharmas as real; Nāgārjuna composed the Middle Treatise and broke this with the teaching of emptiness. But the pendulum swung too far: "by this, sentient beings clung anew to the view of emptiness" — people once again grasped "emptiness" into annihilation. So Asaṅga appeared — "serving the Great Loving Venerable" (taking Maitreya as his master), requesting that this treatise be spoken — to establish a body of learning that could handle both "not really existent" and "not annihilated" at once. This is the school's self-positioning, worth committing to memory: this learning arises from correcting the grasping at emptiness, not from making an enemy of the Emptiness school; it understands itself as the pendulum's return to true, and the three natures of Chapter Seven are precisely the tool of that righting.

The direct transmission from Maitreya to Asaṅga is recorded thus in the biography — and this book transmits it faithfully: tradition records it as Maitreya conferring and Asaṅga receiving.

「往兜率多天諮問彌勒菩薩。彌勒菩薩為說大乘空觀。」「因此為名。名阿僧伽。阿僧伽譯為無著。」「爾後數上兜率多天諮問彌勒大乘經義。」 〔真諦譯《婆藪槃豆法師傳》·T50n2049 0188c05–11·待譯〕

Asaṅga first cultivated the Hīnayāna contemplation of emptiness yet "his mind was still not at ease," ascended to the Tuṣita heaven to ask Maitreya, and awakened through the Great Vehicle's contemplation of emptiness — his name "Asaṅga" (阿僧伽), the biography says, was won precisely from this: awakening within emptiness, he clung no more. Thereafter he went back and forth again and again to seek instruction. The biography also preserves a moving detail:

「唯無著法師得近彌勒菩薩。餘人但得遙聞夜共聽彌勒說法。晝時無著法師更為餘人解釋彌勒所說。」 〔同前·0188c18–20·待譯〕

Hearing the Dharma by night, explaining it to the multitude by day — received by night, taught by day. The treatises transmitted from Maitreya (traditionally called the Five Treatises of Maitreya, with the Yogācārabhūmi as their root), together with those Asaṅga composed himself — the Mahāyānasaṃgraha and the like — thus set up the skeleton of this school. As for Maitreya the person and his heaven, the scholarly world has its own investigations; this book is a school-treatise, transmitting faithfully what is recorded, and does not open a battlefield of textual criticism.

3 · The Ten-Aspect Skeleton Asaṅga Laid Down

"Setting up the skeleton" cannot be merely a biographer's comment; the Mahāyānasaṃgraha, at its very opening, lists all ten items of the skeleton itself:

「一者、所知依殊勝殊勝語；二者、所知相殊勝殊勝語；三者、入所知相殊勝殊勝語；四者、彼入因果殊勝殊勝語；五者、彼因果修差別殊勝殊勝語；六者、即於如是修差別中增上戒殊勝殊勝語；七者、即於此中增上心殊勝殊勝語；八者、即於此中增上慧殊勝殊勝語；九者、彼果斷殊勝殊勝語；十者、彼果智殊勝殊勝語。」

The treatise then discloses each item in turn: the basis of the knowable is the ālaya-vijñāna; the characteristics of the knowable are the three self-natures; entering the characteristics of the knowable is the consciousness-only nature; the cause and fruit of that entry are the six pāramitās; the distinctions of cultivation are the bodhisattva's ten grounds; the higher discipline, higher mind, and higher wisdom are the three trainings; the fruit that is cessation is the non-abiding nirvāṇa; the fruit that is knowledge is the three Buddha-bodies. These are not ten scattered topics but a single graded path: first know the cause and basis of the dharmas, then know the characteristics of the conditionally-arisen dharmas and part from the two extremes of superimposition and denial; next penetrate through, cultivate the six perfections, pass through the ten grounds, and perfect the three trainings, and finally realize nirvāṇa and bodhi. The treatise winds itself up: "Within this teaching the whole of the Great Vehicle attains its consummation."

The structure of this book's second half comes precisely from here: Chapters Six and Eight walk the basis of the knowable, Chapter Seven the characteristics of the knowable, Chapter Ten entering the characteristics of the knowable, Chapter Eleven the six perfections, ten grounds, and three trainings, and Chapter Twelve the fruit of cessation and the fruit of knowledge. If one remembers only that Asaṅga was Maitreya's receiver and fails to see these ten aspects, one will miss his core contribution as a system-builder.

4 · Vasubandhu Turns from the Small to the Great — from the Kośa to Consciousness-Only

The younger brother, Vasubandhu (婆藪槃豆, also rendered Tianqin 天親), spent the first half of his life in another camp. He took ordination in the Sarvāstivāda, was "broadly learned, widely versed, and thoroughly conversant with the ancient records," composed the Abhidharmakośa — that peak-work of the analytic tradition whose opening verse Chapter Two quoted — and for long years thought little of the Great Vehicle, "ever giving rise to slander." In his later years the elder brother Asaṅga contrived to let him hear the essentials of the Great Vehicle, and the biography records the moment of the turn:

「即於此時悟知大乘理。應過小乘。」「始驗小乘為失大乘為得。」 〔《婆藪槃豆法師傳》·T50n2049 0190c23–26·待譯〕

What followed was remorse. He thought of the tongue he had used for years to slander the Great Vehicle — this very tongue:

「我昔由舌故生毀謗。今當割舌以謝此罪。」 〔同前·0190c29–0191a01·待譯〕

The elder brother's reply is the sharpest line in the whole biography:

「汝設割千舌亦不能滅此罪。」「汝舌能善以毀謗大乘。汝若欲滅此罪當善以解說大乘。」 〔同前·0191a01–05·待譯〕

Cutting out a thousand tongues would not extinguish this sin — the sin is extinguished not by excision but by turning it to a new use: the same tongue, once skilled at slander, becomes hereafter skilled at exposition. (Readers who have read Chapter Twelve will recognize this structure: defilement and purity rest on one and the same thing, and by turning-away and turning-toward one abandons and gains without destroying the basis — the remedy the elder brother prescribed for the younger is the very epitome of this school's learning of the fruition-stage. Only a single note is made here, no more added.) Vasubandhu acted according to the teaching:

「阿僧伽法師殂歿後。天親方造大乘論。」「又造唯識。釋攝大乘三寶性甘露門等諸大乘論。」 〔同前·0191a05–09·待譯〕

Only after the elder brother's death did the younger set to composing the Great Vehicle treatises in earnest — note the title the biography itself points out: "he further composed the Consciousness-Only." The name of this very school of ours is written into the catalogue of works from after his change of heart.

5 · Refutation and Establishment — the Division of Labor Between the Brothers' Two Treatises

The two core treatises Vasubandhu left this school happen to be one of refutation and one of establishment. The opening line of the Twenty Verses on Consciousness-Only:

「安立大乘三界唯識，以契經說三界唯心，心、意、識、了，名之差別。」

Declaring its thesis at the outset, it "establishes" consciousness-only, and yet the work of the whole treatise is refutation — dismantling, one by one, the grasping at "a real external object existing outside the mind." The example the author uses belongs to a family the reader will meet again in Chapter Ten: "like one with an eye-disease who sees hairs, flies, and the like" — a person with a cataract in the eye sees strands of hair and darting flies in the empty air, each seen vividly, yet all that is grasped is utterly unreal. In twenty-three verses the Twenty Verses takes up the outsiders' four objections and their various retorts, and dismantles the intuition that "the object lies outside the mind" inch by inch.

The Thirty Verses on Consciousness-Only, by contrast, is establishment. Its structure the treatise itself marks out at its own opening:

「謂此三十頌中，初二十四行頌明唯識相；次一行頌明唯識性；後五行頌明唯識行位。」 〔T31n1586 卷首〕

Characteristics — how experience appears (the eight consciousnesses and three transformations, twenty-four verses, Chapter Six of this book); nature — its ultimate real nature (the consciousness-only nature, one verse, Chapter Seven); stages — the five stages of practice that rest upon it (five verses, Chapter Eleven). Thirty verses, the whole map of a school. The broom that sweeps away grasping and the map that founds the school issue from one and the same hand; and the extensive exposition of every station on that map later crystallized into ten masters' commentaries, blended and translated by Xuanzang into the Treatise Establishing Consciousness-Only (成唯識論) — but that is the matter of the next chapter.

Back to the question that opened the chapter: who founded this body of learning? Now the account can be closed. The tradition of the meditators gave the soil; the pendulum of emptiness and existence gave the timing; the elder brother, learning from Maitreya, set up the framework (the root treatise and the Mahāyānasaṃgraha), and the younger brother, changing his heart, ran refutation and establishment together (the Twenty Verses and the Thirty Verses). Why two brothers? Perhaps because this discipline itself needs two hands — one to take apart, one to build. To follow the primary texts: on the reading-path the second station, the Twenty Verses on Consciousness-Only, the third station, the Thirty Verses on Consciousness-Only, and the eighth station, the Yogācārabhūmi, are waiting.

Author · Shi Huijing CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · 二〇二六 · 夏