WorkVasubandhu

Triṃśikā-kārikā

Thirty verses on how one stream of consciousness builds both a self and a world, read in China through ten commentaries fused into one.

by Vasubandhu4 passages held

Sanskrit, the original language

Original title: Triṃśikāvijñaptikārikā
Original language: Sanskrit

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Overview

When Xuanzang, the Chinese pilgrim-translator, came home from India in the seventh century, he brought ten Indian commentaries on these thirty verses, and he did not translate them one by one. On the advice of his student Kuiji he fused them into a single treatise, the Cheng weishi lun, which follows mainly the reading of Dharmapāla, a master of the great monastery of Nālandā. It became the founding text of the Consciousness-Only schools: Faxiang in China and Hossō in Japan. The verses are an independent treatise. They claim that what we call a self and what we call things are ways of speaking about the transformations of consciousness, and nothing more. Consciousness transforms in three ways. The first is the storehouse consciousness, the ālayavijñāna, which carries the seeds left by past actions and flows on like a stream. The second is a mind that constantly takes the storehouse for a self, and so is always stained by self-love, self-conceit, a false view of self and blindness about it. The third is the six familiar kinds of awareness that perceive objects. The middle verses restate the doctrine of the three natures of things; the last ones trace the path out. Even the thought that everything is only representation, held up before the mind as an object, keeps a practitioner from release, which comes only when consciousness no longer grasps any object at all. Sylvain Lévi, the French Indologist, found the Sanskrit in Nepal in 1922, together with the commentary of Sthiramati, a sixth-century Yogācāra scholar whose reading often differs from Dharmapāla's; only the thirty verses themselves are held here.

Key concepts

What are the three transformations of consciousness?

They are the three ways consciousness changes form, and together they make up everything we call self and world. The first is the storehouse consciousness, where the results of past acts ripen. The second is the mind that thinks 'I', taking the storehouse for a self. The third is the perception of objects through the six familiar kinds of awareness: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching and thinking.

What is the storehouse consciousness?

It is the deepest layer of mind, ālayavijñāna in Sanskrit, which holds the seeds of all experience. Its contents and the world it holds are too subtle to be noticed, and its feeling is always neutral. The verses picture it as a torrent that flows on through life after life, carrying everything with it, and say it ceases only when a person becomes an arhat, a saint who has ended rebirth.

What is the mind that thinks 'I'?

It is the second transformation, called manas, a mind that rests on the storehouse and constantly takes it for a self. Four afflictions go with it always: the false view of a self, blindness about the self, self-conceit and self-love. It runs beneath ordinary thought, so selfishness is built in rather than chosen, and it falls silent only in deep meditative cessation, on the path beyond the world, and in the arhat.

What does 'representation only' mean?

It is the claim, vijñaptimātra in Sanskrit, that what we take for an outside world is consciousness appearing to itself. Whatever is imagined by any act of imagining does not exist as imagined; only the imagining goes on. The verses add a warning: holding even this thought before the mind as an object keeps a person from it. One is established in representation only when nothing is grasped at all.

What are seeds and the impressions they leave?

Every act leaves an impression, vāsanā, a kind of scent that lingers in the storehouse as a seed. The verses name two sorts: impressions of past deeds, which decide the next birth, and impressions of the habit of splitting experience into a grasper and a grasped. When one life's ripening is spent, these impressions together produce the next, which is how the cycle keeps going without any self to carry it.

Themes of the book

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

How One Stream Builds a Self and a World

Where do 'I' and 'things' come from, if not from a self and a world already there? The verses trace both to consciousness changing form, and then trace the way out.

Self and things, the opening verse says, are figures of speech laid over the transformations of consciousness, and those transformations are three. A storehouse consciousness carries the seeds of past acts and flows on like a torrent; a second mind constantly takes it for a self, stained by self-love, self-conceit, a false view of self and blindness about it; six kinds of awareness rise on it like waves on water. Freedom is not a better object but none: when consciousness grasps nothing, its very basis turns around.

consciousness
store consciousness
representation-only
yogācāra
mental factors
karma
self-grasping
conceptual construction
dependent arising
three natures
emptiness
suchness
nondual knowledge
transformation of the basis
liberation

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Within this work

passages held: 4
distinct concepts: 15
by passages held, corpus-wide: #839

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)
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) you are here 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

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