Pañcaskandhaka-prakaraṇa

A short catechism of every factor in mind and world, with the storehouse consciousness counted among them.

Sanskrit, the original language

Original title: Pañcaskandhaprakaraṇa
Original language: Sanskrit

Overview

Each entry in this short prose manual opens with a question, such as what form is or what feeling is, and answers it with a definition. It is an independent treatise, not a commentary: Vasubandhu lists every factor that Buddhist analysis finds in a person and the world, and arranges them under the five aggregates, the heaps of form, feeling, perception, mental formations and consciousness into which the Buddha divided a human being. The list departs from the one in his Abhidharmakośa-Bhāṣya and follows instead the Abhidharmasamuccaya, the Abhidharma compendium of his elder brother Asaṅga. Under consciousness it defines the ālayavijñāna, the storehouse consciousness that holds the seeds of all later experience. That is a doctrine of the Yogācāra school, which traces experience to the mind alone, and it has no place in the system the earlier book sets out. Sthiramati, a sixth-century Yogācāra scholar, wrote a commentary on it. For centuries the manual itself was known only in Tibetan and Chinese translation; its Sanskrit survived in a single manuscript in the Potala collection in Lhasa, and Li Xuezhu and Ernst Steinkellner published it in 2008; that Sanskrit text is the one held here.

Key concepts

What are the five aggregates?

They are the five groups into which the Buddha divided a person: form, the body and the material world it meets; feeling, pleasant, painful or neither; perception, which grasps marks such as blue or yellow; formations, the many other factors of mind, from intention to envy; and consciousness, the awareness of an object. The manual defines each in turn and finds nothing in a person that falls outside them.

What is a mental factor?

A mental factor is something that arises together with a moment of consciousness and colours it. The manual sorts them into groups: five present in every mind, such as contact and attention, which it defines as the mind's bending toward its object; five tied to particular objects; eleven wholesome ones, such as faith and non-greed; six root afflictions; and the secondary afflictions and four variable factors.

How do root afflictions differ from secondary ones?

The six root afflictions are greed, aversion, pride, ignorance, wrong view and doubt, the sources of a troubled mind. The secondary afflictions are narrower states that grow out of them, such as anger, resentment, envy, stinginess, deceit and dishonesty. Naming them separately lets a person see exactly which form a trouble has taken, envy rather than a general unhappiness, and so which remedy it calls for.

What are the twelve sense bases and eighteen elements?

They are two further ways of dividing the same contents as the aggregates. The twelve bases pair six senses, eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind, with their six kinds of object. The eighteen elements add the six kinds of consciousness that arise between each sense and its object, so seeing becomes three things: the eye, the colour seen and the eye-consciousness of it. None of the three is a seer.

Themes of the book

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

An Inventory of a Person

If everything a person is can be listed, factor by factor, is anything left over that deserves to be called a self? The manual answers by listing and finding none.

Vasubandhu works through the five aggregates, the heaps of form, feeling, perception, formations and consciousness, one question at a time. An aggregate, he explains, is a heap: like things of past, present and future gathered under one name. Among the formations he lists the mental factors one by one, envy, stinginess and deceit with the rest, and among consciousnesses he adds a storehouse holding the seeds of all formations. What the list never contains is a self; self-view itself appears in it as one more afflicted factor, the habit of taking the heaps as 'I' and 'mine'.

aggregates
elements
sense bases
consciousness
perception
mental factors
afflictions
material form
attention
self-view
self-grasping
storehouse consciousness
cessation
buddhist metaphysics
impermanence

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 20
distinct concepts: 63
by passages held, corpus-wide: #783

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)
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
Pañcaskandhaka-prakaraṇa (Pañcaskandhaprakaraṇa) you are here 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