- Length
- 1400 pagesPruden's English of La Vallee Poussin's French, 4 vols, 1988-90
- Reading
- SpecialistWritten for a school and normally read with a commentary
- Availability
- Specialist pressIn print from an academic publisher, priced accordingly
Abhidharmakosa
A textbook that argues with itself. Vasubandhu set out the entire system of the dominant Buddhist scholastic school in six hundred verses and then wrote a commentary demolishing large parts of it, which produced both the standard reference work of Buddhist philosophy across Asia and a running argument that lasted centuries.
- Date
- c. 380-400
- Author
- Vasubandhu
- Region
- Gandhara and northern India
- Language
- Sanskrit
- 654 Chinese, Xuanzang The version that carried the text across East Asia Attested
- 1923 French, Louis de La Vallee Poussin Made from the Chinese; still the scholarly foundation Attested
- 1988 English, Leo Pruden Translated from La Vallee Poussin's French; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Exchange — Both: answers an earlier work and drew a later one
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
- Transmission
- Recovered — Lost to circulation and recovered from a surviving copy
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
The standard textbook of Buddhist scholastic philosophy across Asia for fifteen centuries, in Tibetan and Chinese; the Sanskrit was lost and recovered only in the twentieth century.
What the book says
Six hundred verses summarising the whole of Buddhist scholastic analysis, with a prose commentary by the same author that repeatedly disagrees with the verses. The verses present the orthodox system of the dominant northern school: everything that exists is analysed into a fixed list of ultimate constituents, each with its own defining characteristic, and the chapters work through them in order - the elements of experience, the faculties, the structure of the cosmos and its rebirths, the mechanics of action and its consequences, the defilements that keep the process running, the path that stops it, and the knowledge and meditative attainments of those advanced along it. The commentary is where the book becomes something else. Having set out the orthodoxy accurately, Vasubandhu proceeds to criticise it, generally from the standpoint of a rival school, on point after point: whether the past and future exist, whether an unconditioned element can be a real thing, whether the defining characteristics of a moment are themselves real. A final chapter, sometimes counted separately, argues against the existence of a self and takes on both Buddhist and non-Buddhist opponents. The result is a textbook that undermines the syllabus it teaches.
What it argues
In the verses, that experience decomposes without remainder into a finite list of momentary constituents, and that the person is nothing over and above them. In the commentary, that the orthodox account of those constituents does not hold up. The most consequential disagreement is about time: the school held that past and future entities are real, since otherwise we could not think about them and past actions could not bear fruit later. Vasubandhu argues that this makes it impossible to say what distinguishes a present thing from a past one, and proposes instead that only the present moment exists and that continuity is carried by a causal series. The final chapter argues that no self can be found, against Buddhist schools who thought one was needed to explain memory and moral responsibility, and against Hindu opponents who thought one obvious.
What it answered
How to Make Our Ideas Clear 1878the Vaibhasika compilers
The Kashmiri orthodoxy, from inside. Vasubandhu had been trained in it, expounds it accurately enough that the work became the school's own textbook, and then dismantles specific doctrines while accepting the framework. That double posture is why the book had the career it did: opponents could use the exposition and defenders could not do without it.
What answered it
How to Make Our Ideas Clear 1878Sanghabhadra
Sanghabhadra, immediately and at enormous length, defending every position Vasubandhu had attacked. The dispute is one of the sharpest in Indian philosophy and both sides are technically formidable; the irony is that Sanghabhadra's work survives only in Chinese translation while his opponent's became the curriculum. Later Buddhist philosophy in Tibet and East Asia largely worked through Vasubandhu's presentation rather than around it.
How it argues
By exposition followed by objection, in a form the text invents for the purpose. The verses are memorisable and neutral; the prose is combative. Vasubandhu's method is to state a doctrine, produce the strongest case for it, raise an objection from a rival school, follow the exchange through several rounds, and then indicate where he thinks the balance falls - often without announcing a conclusion. The effect is closer to a transcript of a debate than to a treatise, and it makes the book usable by people who disagree with its author.
The moment
Northern India and Gandhara in a period when Buddhist scholasticism had reached extraordinary technical sophistication and was fragmenting into schools that differed over increasingly fine points. Vasubandhu is traditionally said to have later converted to the idealist Yogacara school under his brother's influence and to have written its foundational texts, which is either the most consequential change of mind in Buddhist philosophy or evidence that two men have been conflated.
How it travelled
Everywhere, and then home. Translated into Chinese twice - the second time by Xuanzang in the seventh century, after he had gone to India partly to resolve questions the text raised - and into Tibetan, it became the standard scholastic textbook from Japan to the Himalaya. The Sanskrit disappeared with Buddhism in India and was assumed lost. In the mid-1930s Rahula Sankrityayan, travelling through Tibetan monasteries photographing manuscripts, found the verses and the commentary at Ngor and announced it in 1935; the Sanskrit was finally published in 1967, more than fifteen centuries after it was written and forty years after the standard modern translation had been made from the Chinese.
The strongest objection
That the momentary constituents are as vulnerable as the self they were introduced to replace. Vasubandhu dissolves the person into elements and then, in the commentary, dissolves several of the elements too - and Nagarjuna had already made the general argument that nothing analysed dependently can have an intrinsic nature, which applies to the constituents as much as to the person. The Abhidharma project needs a floor, and the text's own critical energy makes it hard to see where the floor is. Sanghabhadra's objection is the mirror image: without really existing past and future, the causal series that carries moral consequence across lifetimes has nothing to hold it together.
Why read it
Only in part, and only if the subject interests you: fourteen hundred pages of scholastic argument is not a book anyone reads through. The ninth chapter on the absence of a self is self-contained, is the most philosophically direct thing in it, and is the best statement in Buddhist literature of an argument that has recently become interesting again to philosophers of mind.
- First printed
- 1967
- First in English
- 1988
- Digitised
- Partial
The Sanskrit was believed irrecoverably lost for centuries and the work was known through Chinese and Tibetan translations. Rahula Sankrityayan found manuscripts of the verses and the commentary at Ngor monastery in Tibet during his expeditions of the mid-1930s, announcing the discovery in 1935; P. Pradhan's Sanskrit edition followed in 1967.
La Vallee Poussin's French of 1923-31, made from the Chinese before the Sanskrit was available, remains the scholarly foundation. Pruden's English translates the French; Lodro Sangpo's is more recent. All are in copyright.
Where it stands
Live as the foundation of monastic philosophical education in Tibetan Buddhism, and live in scholarship, where the recovery of the Sanskrit and the argument over Vasubandhu's identity have kept it central to Buddhist studies for a century.
On quoting this book
The Sanskrit is public domain but was published only in 1967, and every translation is in copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether one Vasubandhu wrote this and the Yogacara treatises, or two men have been conflated, has been argued since the 1950s and is not settled; the dating of either or both moves with it. Whether the ninth chapter belongs to the work or was added is disputed. And the question of where Vasubandhu himself stood - whether the commentary represents a settled position or a working through of objections he had not resolved - is genuinely open, since the text so often declines to announce a verdict.