Vasubandhu

Vasubandhu (4th–5th century CE) was one of the greatest Buddhist philosophers of India, whose career successively reshaped three scholastic traditions: Vaibhāṣika (Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma), Sautrāntika, and Yogācāra. His masterwork of Abhidharma thought, the Treasury of the Abhidharma with its commentary (the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya), remains to this day the primary resource for knowledge of non-Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy among Tibetan and East Asian schools; his concise Yogācāra treatises set a new standard for that school, which became mainstream Buddhist metaphysics in India for half a millennium afterwards. His biography is disputed in the sources, and he has always been a subject of scholarly disputation. ¹

The Treasury of the Abhidharma

• Disproof of the self. Against both Brahmanical substance-selves and the Pudgalavādins (“personalists”, who held persons real in dependence on the aggregates and neither identical nor different from them), Vasubandhu argues the notion of “self” or “person” should not be taken to designate anything other than the aggregates themselves; talk of persons is admissible only as a conventional designation of the aggregate-collection. (Modern interpreters read the Pudgalavāda position as analogous to non-reductive supervenience on the aggregates.) ¹
• Momentariness and continuity. Buddhist philosophers held change to be logically impossible (to be is to express certain inalienable characteristics); Vasubandhu added the distinctive argument that things must self-destruct, since destruction cannot be caused — a cause and a result are real entities, but destruction’s ostensible object is a non-existent. Given self-destruction, the impossibility of change yields momentariness. Apparent continuity — including memory, the reference of names, and karmic causality across lifetimes — is explained as a stream of new, same-kind elements replacing one another, like the successive stills of a film. ¹
• No creator god. The Treasury includes one of the tradition’s classic disproofs of a creator god. ¹

Yogācāra philosophy

• Appearance-only. In the Twenty Verses Vasubandhu defends vijñaptimātra: whatever seems independent of mind is better explained as mental construction; the causal story behind experience (subliminal impressions ripening from the storehouse consciousness, ālayavijñāna) is itself mental. ¹
• Three natures. In the Thirty Verses and Three Natures Exposition he maps each apparent entity onto three interconnected natures — the fabricated (“how it appears”), the dependent (“what appears”, the causal process), and the perfected (the non-existence of the fabricated in the dependent, i.e. suchness). The three are “one reality viewed from three distinct angles”. ¹
• Idealism, with a caveat. His view is idealist at two levels (experience; the causal supports of experience), “but only in the realm of conventions”: ultimately even the idea of “mind” is mistaken — reality is an inconceivable ineffable tathatā. The school’s “idealism” is peculiarly Buddhist: consciousness is not an individual or universal mental substance. ^{1 2}

Influence

• In the Yogācāra tradition’s lineage he stands with his half-brother Asaṅga at the head of the school’s founding systematisers; the “logico-epistemological” branch (Dignāga, Dharmakīrti) and the later Yogācāra-Mādhyamikas (Śāntarakṣita, Kamalaśīla) continue the tradition he shaped. ^{2 3}
• In the two-truths scheme of his school, external objects are rejected even conventionally — what is conventionally real are mental representations; the nondual perfected nature is the ultimate. ³

See Also

• buddhist-metaphysics — the school-by-school survey this page supports
• nagarjuna — Madhyamaka founder; the anti-foundationalist contrast to Yogācāra’s foundationalism
• emergence — modern parts-and-wholes/reduction framework; the person–aggregates relation as dependence without identity

References

• Gold, J. C. (2021). “Vasubandhu.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (substantive revision 7 Jan 2021). ¹
• Szanyi, S. (2024). “Yogācāra.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (first published 7 Jul 2024). ²
• Thakchoe, S. (2022). “The Theory of Two Truths in India.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (substantive revision 16 May 2022). ³

Footnotes

1. raw/articles/sep-vasubandhu.md ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

2. raw/articles/sep-yogacara.md ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. raw/articles/sep-two-truths-india.md ↩ ↩² ↩³