唯識Yogācāra — the mind-only school, read in lineage order

1. What This School Is

Dharma-characteristics Consciousness-only, known in India as the Yogācāra school, was carried on in China as the Cien school. Its transmission of learning is recorded by the scriptures, treatises, and histories themselves: the Buddha's preaching of the Saṃdhinirmocana, the Laṅkāvatāra, and the other scriptures is its source; Maitreya conferred and Asaṅga received, establishing the root treatise, the Yogācārabhūmi, and composing the Mahāyāna-saṃgraha; Vasubandhu, turning from the Lesser into the Great, composed the Viṃśatikā and the Triṃśikā, wielding refutation and establishment together; the ten great treatise-masters expansively glossed the Triṃśikā, and the line of Dharmapāla was transmitted down to Śīlabhadra; Xuanzang journeyed west and received it in person, then returned to the Tang and set up a translation bureau — 「肇自貞觀十九年，終于顯慶之末，部將六十，卷出一千」"beginning in the nineteenth year of Zhenguan and ending at the close of Xianqing, the works nearly sixty, the fascicles coming forth to a thousand" — and blended the ten houses into the Cheng weishi lun; his foremost disciple Kuiji 「綜其綱領、甄其品第，兼撰義䟽傳之後學」"gathered together its guiding threads, sifted its order of chapters, and further composed an exegetical commentary to hand it down to later students", and so the single Cien school was established. The full account of this transmission from one to the next is given in chapters three and four of this school's guided reading.

2. Stance Toward the Source Texts

The source-text stance of this school's translation and commentary can be put in a single sentence: to take the Tang-dynasty Chinese translations of Xuanzang's line as the primary core, and to incorporate the relevant ancient translations faithfully.

This has three senses. First, what is translated and annotated stands, character for character, upon the Chinese scriptures and treatises themselves (base text: the CBETA electronic Tripiṭaka P5 collated edition, corresponding to the Taishō canon, T volumes), borrowing nothing from second-hand paraphrase. Second, it does not take modern Sanskrit critical editions, modern English translations, or the results of Tibetan-translation collation as the final authority for determining the meaning of this school's texts — an edition produced by an ancient translation bureau, where dozens of masters learned within and without together attested to the meaning, is self-sufficient in its authority; present-day research may serve as a side-reference, but not as the measure. Third, variant translations and variant editions are collated faithfully and recorded faithfully (for instance, the section-by-section collation of Paramārtha's recension of the Mahāyāna-saṃgraha, T1595, and the four variant translations of the Saṃdhinirmocana); a textual variant is precisely where the meaning lies, so the choices made are set down plainly in the apparatus layer, with no covert alteration.

Proceeding from this stance, the work of this school is twofold: to unfold in modern Chinese (the vernacular and the exposition, making the meaning of the ancient Chinese translations readable for people today), and to render into modern English (so that English readers may directly check and read this first-hand Chinese transmission, the translational measure being established from this school's own Chinese-translation corpus and the ancient masters' commentaries themselves).

3. The Corpus of This School · Ten Texts

The order of dependence (a reading order may follow it): Hundred Dharmas → Triṃśikā → Viṃśatikā ↔ Madhyāntavibhāga → Mahāyāna-saṃgraha → Cheng weishi lun; the scriptural sources (Saṃdhinirmocana · Laṅkāvatāra) and the root treatise (Yogācārabhūmi) run through them throughout. Each text is built according to the five-layer format, its unpublished layers shown according to their actual state of completion (see the Reading Guide page); the school-level guided reading, the Twelve Chapters on Consciousness-only, threads the whole school together across twelve chapters.

Shi Huijing · 指月 · Yogācāra · Introduction · Summer 2026