WorkVasubandhu

Distinguishing the Middle from the Extremes

A commentary on verses said to come from the future Buddha: the mind's false imagining exists, its split into subject and object does not.

by Vasubandhu87 passages held

Sanskrit, the original language

Original title: Madhyāntavibhāgakārikābhāṣya
Original language: Sanskrit

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Overview

Vasubandhu's commentary opens by honouring two figures: the composer of the verses, whom it calls a son of the Buddha, and the one who taught them to him and his fellow students. The tradition names them as Maitreya, the bodhisattva who will be the next Buddha, and Asaṅga, Vasubandhu's elder brother, to whom Maitreya is said to have revealed five treatises; historians variously credit a teacher called Maitreyanātha or Asaṅga himself. The root text is the Madhyāntavibhāga, "distinguishing the middle from the extremes", about 112 verses in five chapters. The bhāṣya is Vasubandhu's prose commentary on it, and both are held here together in Sanskrit. The first verse carries the whole book: the imagining of what is unreal does exist; the split into a perceiving subject and perceived objects is not found in it; emptiness is found in it, and it is found in emptiness. Vasubandhu draws the consequence at once: nothing is wholly empty and nothing wholly non-empty, and that is the middle path, which keeps the verse in line with the Perfection of Wisdom sutras. The extremes are the views on either side: that the world of subjects and objects is simply real, and that nothing exists at all because everything is empty. The last chapter takes a list of opposed pairs from an older Mahayana sutra, the Ratnakūṭa, and shows how the path avoids each one. Sthiramati, a sixth-century Yogācāra scholar, later wrote a sub-commentary on Vasubandhu's commentary. Its Sanskrit came back to light through an incomplete manuscript copy that the French Indologist Sylvain Lévi obtained in Kathmandu in 1928, and Susumu Yamaguchi edited it in 1934. The verses with Vasubandhu's own commentary waited longer. Rāhula Sāṅkṛtyāyana, an Indian scholar travelling in Tibet, found a manuscript of them there, and Gadjin Nagao edited them in Tokyo in 1964.

Key concepts

What is the 'imagining of the unreal'?

It is the mind's ongoing activity of constructing a perceiver on one side and perceived things on the other, abhūtaparikalpa in Sanskrit. Vasubandhu's commentary says it really exists: the constructing goes on. What it constructs does not. The verses then show that this one activity, under different names, is what ordinary experience consists of, so that the whole world of experience is the imagining at work.

What does emptiness mean in Distinguishing the Middle from the Extremes?

Emptiness here is not nothingness. It is the absence, within the imagining of the unreal, of the perceiver and the perceived it seems to show. The imagining is therefore empty of duality, and emptiness is found in it. The commentary insists on both halves: something real is empty, and its emptiness is itself real, which is why the book can call the result a middle path.

Which extremes does the middle path avoid?

Two above all: that the world of subjects and objects is simply real, and that nothing exists because everything is empty. The verses keep between them by saying nothing is wholly empty and nothing wholly non-empty. The last chapter extends this to a list of opposed views, such as that the self is the same as the body or different from it, and that things last forever or are annihilated.

What are superimposition and denial?

They are the book's two basic errors. Superimposition, samāropa, adds what is not there, such as a lasting self or a world standing apart from the mind. Denial, apavāda, removes what is there, such as the imagining itself or the emptiness found in it. The verses treat the second as seriously as the first, because a person who denies everything has also missed what is real.

What are the two obscurations?

They are the two veils the path has to remove. The obscuration of the afflictions is made of greed, hatred, pride and the like, which bind a person to rebirth. The obscuration of what is to be known is a subtler veil over knowing itself, which keeps the mind from seeing things fully. The verses match each obstacle with a remedy, so the list of veils is also a plan of practice.

Themes of the book

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

False Imagining and the Middle Way

Something is really going on in the mind, yet the world of selves and things it shows is not there. How can both be true at once without falling into realism or into nothing at all?

The root verse grants existence to one thing, the imagining of what is unreal, which Vasubandhu glosses as the mind's constructing of a perceiver and a perceived. The two sides it constructs do not exist; emptiness, their absence, is found within it. From this he draws the middle path: nothing is wholly empty, since the imagining and its emptiness are real, and nothing is wholly non-empty, since the duality is not. The closing chapter walks a list of opposed extremes, such as adding to what is there and denying it, and shows the path between each pair.

emptiness
middle way
subject-object duality
nonduality
three natures
ontology
truth
self
non-self
causation

Enter a dialogue

What Blocks the Path and How It Clears

If emptiness is always present, what keeps it hidden, and can the hiding be removed without the hidden thing changing?

The middle chapters turn the ontology into a practice. They list what obscures, from the afflictions that bind a person to the obscuration of what is to be known, a veil over knowing itself, and they set a remedy against each, beginning with the four foundations of mindfulness. Emptiness itself is called defiled while stains remain and pure once they are gone. To the objection that it would then change, the verses answer with water, gold and space, which are purified without becoming something else.

spiritual obstacles
obscurations
defilement
afflictions
purification
perfections
bodhisattva path
meditation
mindfulness
concentration
spiritual stages
liberation
awakening
mahayana

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 87
distinct concepts: 153
by passages held, corpus-wide: #536

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: “emptiness” and “middle way”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 18 pairings. 89 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
emptiness	middle way	4
emptiness	three natures	3
afflictions	liberation	2
bodhisattva path	emptiness	2
bodhisattva path	perfections	2
meditation	perfections	2
afflictions	bodhisattva path	1
afflictions	meditation	1
bodhisattva path	liberation	1
bodhisattva path	meditation	1
bodhisattva path	middle way	1
emptiness	liberation	1
emptiness	meditation	1
liberation	meditation	1
liberation	middle way	1
liberation	perfections	1
meditation	three natures	1
middle way	perfections	1

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.

Abhidharmakośa-Bhāṣya (Abhidharmakośabhāṣya)
The standard Abhidharma textbook for later Buddhist scholars in China and Tibet. Scholars usually place it before the shorter works in which Vasubandhu argues that only the mind's own representations exist.
SA
Distinguishing the Middle from the Extremes (Madhyāntavibhāgakārikābhāṣya) you are here SA
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
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
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
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
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

— or open another of their works