Asaṅga

Asaṅga is, with his half-brother Vasubandhu, the founder of the Yogācāra school. According to traditional biographies, he was born in Puruṣapura (present-day Peshawar) in Gandhāra, probably in the fourth century CE, and became a monk first in a mainstream school before turning to the Mahāyāna. Tibetan and Chinese tradition tells that after many years of fruitless meditation he met the future Buddha Maitreya, who took him to the Tuṣita heaven and taught him the texts known as the Five Treatises of Maitreya.

The works attributed to him, or associated with him, include the vast Yogācārabhūmi, “Stages of Yoga Practice”, the Mahāyānasaṃgraha, a summary of the Mahāyāna in Yogācāra terms, and the Abhidharmasamuccaya, a compendium of doctrine. Scholars debate which works are his and which belong to his circle or to “Maitreya”, a figure some regard as a human teacher.

Asaṅga is also remembered for bringing Vasubandhu to the Mahāyāna. Together they gave Yogācāra its classic form, and their work shaped Indian Buddhist philosophy for centuries, and through translation the Buddhism of China and Tibet.

The Yogācārabhūmi in particular is a vast encyclopaedia of the path, describing seventeen stages or “grounds” of practice from the ordinary mind to buddhahood. Whatever its authorship, it shows the school’s roots in meditation: its analysis of consciousness begins from what practitioners observe of the mind, not from speculation about the world.