Compendium of the Mahayana (Mahayanasamgraha)

Introduction

The Mahayanasamgraha is a Sanskrit treatise whose original is lost; it survives in Tibetan and several Chinese translations. In ten chapters it systematises Yogacara teaching: the storehouse consciousness as the basis of experience, the three natures, the entry into the insight that everything is “mere representation”, the perfections and stages of the bodhisattva, the three trainings, non-conceptual knowledge and the bodies of the Buddha. Vasubandhu and Asvabhava wrote commentaries on it. Paramartha’s Chinese translation of the 6th century founded a school of its own, the Shelun school, and Xuanzang translated it again in the 7th century. Étienne Lamotte’s French translation (1938–39) opened it to Western scholarship.