أسانغا

الأعمال

• نحو 370خلاصة المهايانا (Mahāyānasaṃgraha)

  خلاصة منهجية لليوغاكارا: وعي المخزن والطبائع الثلاث وطريق بلوغ البوذية.

الموقف

Asanga is regarded as the founder of the Yogacara (“practice of yoga”) school, one of the two great philosophical currents of Indian Mahayana beside Madhyamaka. Where Madhyamaka stressed that nothing has intrinsic nature, Yogacara asked how experience is structured. Its answer is that what appears to us as an external world of objects facing a subject is a construction of consciousness. Below the six kinds of sense awareness and the mind lies a “storehouse consciousness” (alaya-vijnana), which holds the seeds left by past actions; from these seeds, experience arises again and again. Reality is described by three natures: the imagined nature of things as subject and object, the dependent nature of the flow of consciousness, and the perfected nature, which is the dependent nature free of that imagined duality. Liberation is achieved through practice as a fundamental change in the underlying basis. The Compendium of the Mahayana (Mahayanasamgraha) sets out this system; the Compendium of Abhidharma (Abhidharmasamuccaya) recasts the older Buddhist analysis of mental states. Modern scholars treat many attributions with caution: the vast Yogacarabhumi is now seen as a compilation by several hands, and the “Five Treatises of Maitreya” may have several authors. Through Paramartha and Xuanzang his works shaped Chinese Buddhism, and Tibetan tradition counts him among the “six ornaments” of Indian Buddhism.

الحياة والسياق

Asanga probably lived in the 4th century CE; firmer dates are not known. According to the 6th-century biography of Vasubandhu by the translator Paramartha and the travel account of Xuanzang in the 7th, he was born into a Brahmin family in Purushapura (today Peshawar) in Gandhara and was the eldest of three brothers, Vasubandhu being the second; later Tibetan historians make the two half-brothers with the same mother. He was ordained in a mainstream Buddhist school, probably the Mahishasaka. The legend tells that, dissatisfied with his understanding of emptiness, he meditated for twelve years in a cave, and that the future Buddha Maitreya then took him to the Tushita heaven and taught him the Mahayana texts that Asanga transmitted. Xuanzang places these events in a monastery near Ayodhya. Later he is said to have won his brother Vasubandhu for the Mahayana. Whether “Maitreya” was a human teacher, as Erich Frauwallner argued, or a figure of visionary experience is still debated.

أعمال رئيسة أخرى

• Compendium of Abhidharma (Abhidharmasamuccaya)
• Stages of Yogic Practice (Yogacarabhumi, attributed in part)
• Five Treatises of Maitreya (transmitted by Asanga according to tradition)