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WorkVasubandhu

Abhidharmakośa-Bhāṣya

Six hundred verses setting out a rival school's system, and a prose commentary by the same hand that keeps arguing with them.

by Vasubandhu1,049 passages held

  • Sanskrit, the original language
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Original title
Abhidharmakośabhāṣya
Original language
Sanskrit

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Overview

According to the Life of Vasubandhu that the translator Paramārtha wrote in sixth-century China, the Buddhist scholars of Kashmir rejoiced when the verses of this book reached them, and turned against it when the prose followed. The book has two layers by one author. About six hundred verses, the Abhidharmakośa or "treasury of Abhidharma", condense the system of the Vaibhāṣikas, the school that dominated Buddhist scholasticism in Kashmir. Abhidharma breaks every experience down into a fixed list of momentary factors, and the Vaibhāṣikas held that past and future factors exist as truly as present ones. The bhāṣya is Vasubandhu's own prose commentary on those verses, and it keeps arguing with them. Again and again it reports a Vaibhāṣika position with the particle kila, "so they say", and then sets beside it the view of the Sautrāntikas, Buddhists who trusted the Buddha's discourses over the scholastic treatises. The closing verses admit that the system set out is mostly the one the Kashmiri Vaibhāṣikas established. After that close comes a ninth chapter, a refutation of the person. Its targets are the Vātsīputrīyas, Buddhists who held that a person exists, neither the same as body and mind nor separate from them, and the eternal self of the Vaiśeṣika philosophers. Saṅghabhadra, a Vaibhāṣika master of the same generation, wrote two treatises to refute the commentary, the larger of them the Nyāyānusāra. The tradition says he challenged Vasubandhu to a public debate, and Vasubandhu declined. Paramārtha translated the book into Chinese in the sixth century and Xuanzang, the pilgrim-translator, again in the seventh; in Tibet it became one of the five basic textbooks of monastic study. The Sanskrit was thought lost until Rāhula Sāṅkṛtyāyana, an Indian scholar travelling in Tibet, found a palm-leaf manuscript at Ngor monastery in the 1930s. P. Pradhan published it in 1967, and that Sanskrit, verses and commentary together, is the text held here.

Key concepts

What is a dharma in the Abhidharmakośa?

A dharma is one of the smallest real factors that experience breaks down into: a moment of colour, of feeling, of intention, of attention. Abhidharma lists them and sorts them, and everything else, a pot, a forest or a person, is a name for a collection of such factors. The book's whole method is to ask, of anything at all, which factors it is made of.

What is the difference between conditioned and unconditioned factors?

Conditioned factors arise from causes and pass away; nearly everything is one. The unconditioned factors do neither. The book counts three: space, and two kinds of cessation. One is the stopping of an affliction by insight, which is what nirvana names; the other is a cessation that comes about simply because the conditions for something never meet, as a sight is never had when the eye is turned elsewhere.

Who were the Vaibhāṣikas and the Sautrāntikas?

Both were Buddhist schools of Vasubandhu's day. The Vaibhāṣikas, strongest in Kashmir, took the great Abhidharma treatises as the Buddha's word and held that factors exist in past, present and future alike. The Sautrāntikas trusted the Buddha's discourses over those treatises and granted reality only to the present moment. The verses mostly state the first view; the prose commentary often argues for the second.

What do 'stream' and 'seed' mean in this book?

A stream is the series of moments that we call one person or one thing, each moment arising from the one before. A seed is the capacity a past act leaves in that series, which ripens later without the act itself still existing. The book's own image is the plant: the seed has gone, yet sprout, stem and fruit follow from it through a chain of change.

What are the three realms of existence?

The book divides all rebirth into three realms. The realm of desire holds hells, animals, humans and the lower gods, all moved by sensual craving. The realm of form holds gods who have left that craving behind but still have bodies. The formless realm holds beings with no body at all. The two higher realms match the levels of meditation, so the map of the cosmos is also a map of the mind.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Whether Past and Future Exist

If only the present instant is real, how can a deed done years ago still bear fruit, and how can the mind know what is gone? The answer decides what a moment is.

The Kashmiri Vaibhāṣikas held that past and future factors exist as truly as present ones: the Buddha spoke of past form, every cognition needs an object, and a past deed must exist if it is to ripen. Vasubandhu reports their arguments with a sceptical 'so they say' and answers for the Sautrāntikas. A factor exists only in the instant it acts. What carries a deed forward is no lingering past thing but a stream of moments that changes, as a seed becomes sprout and fruit.

  • time
  • causation
  • impermanence
  • abhidharma
  • classification
  • scriptural interpretation
  • scriptural authority
  • buddhist epistemology

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Intention, Action and Rebirth

What makes an act one's own, and how does it reach across death to shape the next life and even the shape of the world?

Action, in Vasubandhu's account, is first of all intention, and a deed of body or speech is that intention carried outward. From that starting point the book builds a whole universe. A being passes from death to the next birth through an intermediate existence, and the realms, continents and world-ages of its cosmology arise and pass away through the actions of the beings who live in them: the variety of the world, it says, is born of action.

  • karma
  • intention
  • rebirth
  • dependent origination
  • buddhist cosmology
  • cosmology
  • suffering

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Afflictions and the Way Out

What ties a person to rebirth is not the world but a few tendencies lying dormant in the mind. Can they be uprooted, and by what kind of seeing?

Craving, aversion, pride, ignorance, wrong view and doubt are the roots of existence in this book, latent tendencies that sleep until conditions wake them. Some are cut the moment the four noble truths are seen; others yield only to long cultivation. Meditation supplies the means, and each level of absorption is mapped onto a heaven where one could be reborn, so practice itself can bind. The goal is a cessation won by insight, and the book argues hard over whether that cessation is a thing at all.

  • afflictions
  • defilements
  • meditation
  • concentration
  • liberation
  • nirvana
  • wisdom
  • spiritual attainment
  • mental factors
  • mental states
  • buddhist psychology
  • knowledge

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Refuting the Person

Without a self, who remembers, who acts, who is reborn? The closing chapter answers each question while granting the self nothing.

Vasubandhu's chief opponents here are fellow Buddhists, the Vātsīputrīyas, who held that a person exists who is neither identical with body and mind nor separate from them, as fire is neither its fuel nor apart from it. He replies that 'person' is a name for the aggregates taken as a series. Memory needs no rememberer behind it, only a later state of mind that grows out of an earlier perception in the same stream, and 'Devadatta walks' describes a series of moments, not a walker.

  • aggregates
  • consciousness
  • perception
  • knowledge
  • scriptural interpretation

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Within this work

passages held
1,049
distinct concepts
713
by passages held, corpus-wide
#59

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “karma” and “rebirth”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 28 pairings. 81 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
karmarebirth52
causationkarma35
liberationmeditation30
meditationrebirth27
karmameditation24
consciousnessmeditation20
buddhist cosmologyrebirth17
buddhist cosmologykarma14
buddhist cosmologymeditation14
classificationconsciousness11
causationclassification10
causationmeditation10
classificationkarma10
causationconsciousness9
consciousnessrebirth9
karmaliberation9
causationrebirth8
buddhist cosmologycausation7
classificationmeditation7
liberationrebirth6
classificationrebirth5
causationliberation4
classificationliberation4
consciousnesskarma4
buddhist cosmologyconsciousness2
buddhist cosmologyliberation2
consciousnessliberation2
buddhist cosmologyclassification1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. Abhidharmakośa-Bhāṣya (Abhidharmakośabhāṣya) you are here SA
  2. Distinguishing the Middle from the Extremes (Madhyāntavibhāgakārikābhāṣya)

    The one Yogācāra book on the shelf that is a commentary on someone else's verses: the teaching Vasubandhu received through his brother Asaṅga, explained line by line.

     SA
  3. Pañcaskandhaka-prakaraṇa (Pañcaskandhaprakaraṇa)

    A pocket version of the inventory that his Abhidharmakośa-Bhāṣya argues through at length, redrawn on the Yogācāra scheme of his brother Asaṅga.

     SA
  4. Tri-svabhāva-nirdeśa (Trisvabhāvanirdeśa)

    Counted by one report as his last work and doubted by some scholars as his at all, it takes the three natures that his longer books touch on and makes them the whole subject.

     SA
  5. Triṃśikā-kārikā (Triṃśikāvijñaptikārikā)

    Thirty verses and no prose: the most compressed statement of his mature teaching on the mind, left for others to explain.

     SA
  6. Viṃśatikā-kārikā-vṛtti (Viṃśatikā)

    Where his Thirty Verses lay out the system, this book defends its starting point, arguing against Buddhist and Brahmanical realists alike.

     SA
  7. 十地經論 (Daśabhūmikabhāṣya)

    The one book on his shelf that explains a scripture, the word of the Buddha and his bodhisattvas, rather than a treatise. Lost in Sanskrit, it is known through Chinese and Tibetan translations.

     ZH
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