Vasubandhu

Vasubandhu was one of the most versatile philosophers of Indian Buddhism. Traditional biographies make him the younger half-brother of Asaṅga, born in Puruṣapura in Gandhāra in the fourth or fifth century CE. As a scholar of the mainstream Sarvāstivāda and Sautrāntika schools he wrote the Abhidharmakośa, “The Treasury of Abhidharma”, with his own commentary; it became the standard textbook of Abhidharma in India, China and Tibet.

According to the same biographies, Asaṅga later converted him to the Mahāyāna, and he wrote the concise works that became the classic statements of Yogācāra: the Viṃśatikā, “Twenty Verses”, which argues that the world of objects is “representation only”; the Triṃśikā, “Thirty Verses”, a summary of Yogācāra psychology; and the Trisvabhāvanirdeśa, on the three natures.

Because the works attributed to him are so varied, the scholar Erich Frauwallner proposed that there were two Vasubandhus, an older Yogācāra teacher and a younger Abhidharma author; the theory is debated. In East Asia, Xuanzang’s Faxiang school built on Vasubandhu’s Thirty Verses, and in Tibet his Abhidharmakośa remains a core text of monastic education.

Vasubandhu is a rare case of a philosopher who wrote the standard textbook of one system and the classic statements of its rival. Read together, his works show the questions that led Buddhist philosophers from the analysis of experience into momentary events toward the Yogācāra account of mind.