Asanga

• 1. Introduction

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  Asanga, the 4th-century Indian scholar, left his monastery by night to receive teachings from a bodhisattva in Tushita Heaven. By day, he lectured to great audiences in a mango grove outside the city of Ayodhya. That account, preserved in the writings of the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, captures everything unusual about Asanga: a man who moved between the visible and invisible worlds, between rigorous philosophical argument and profound visionary experience. He is remembered as the founder of the Yogachara school, one of the most influential intellectual currents in Mahayana Buddhism. He is also counted among the seventeen masters of Nalanda, the great monastery in what is now Bihar. The questions his life raises are still alive today. Did he receive his foundational teachings from a historical human teacher, or from a deity encountered in meditation? Which of the vast body of texts attributed to him did he actually write? And how did a scholar born into a Brahmin family, possibly in what is now Peshawar, reshape the philosophical foundations of an entire religious tradition?

• 2. Origins and Conversion

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  Some sources record Asanga's birthplace as Purushapura, the city now called Peshawar in Pakistan, which at the time formed part of the ancient kingdom of Gandhara. Yet the historian Buton Rinchen Drub placed both Asanga and his half-brother Vasubandhu in Central India, a disagreement that scholars have never fully resolved. What is clear is that Asanga was born into a Brahmin family and that current scholarship places him firmly in the 4th century CE. His earliest monastic affiliation was probably with the Mahishashaka school or the Mulasarvastivada school, though scholars note there is not enough surviving data to settle that question with certainty. The 6th-century monk Paramartha, whose narrative provides some of the most detailed early accounts of Asanga's life, wrote that Asanga started as a Mahishashaka monk before turning toward Mahayana teachings. The Chinese monk Xuanzang, who traveled to India to study in the Yogachara tradition, confirmed a similar trajectory. Asanga's half-brother Vasubandhu began as a monk in the Sarvastivada school; it was only after meeting Asanga and one of Asanga's disciples that Vasubandhu is said to have taken up Mahayana Buddhism.

• 3. Visions and Teachers

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  Paramartha records that Asanga spent many years in serious meditation and study under various teachers, and that he remained unsatisfied with his own understanding. What followed, according to Paramartha, was a series of journeys to Tushita Heaven, where Asanga received direct teachings from Maitreya Bodhisattva on emptiness and on the Mahayana sutras. Xuanzang's account places this activity in and around a great mango grove five or six li to the southwest of Ayodhya, identifying an old monastery there as the site where Asanga received his instructions. The identity of the Maitreya figure in these accounts has divided scholars. Frauwallner held that this figure, sometimes called Maitreya-natha, was an actual historical person and teacher. Others argue that Maitreya functioned as the tutelary deity of Asanga and of numerous other Yogachara masters. The 6th-century Indian monk Sthiramati noted this interpretation. Whatever the correct reading, the experience set Asanga in motion. According to Taranatha's History of Buddhism in India, Asanga went on to found 25 Mahayana monasteries across the subcontinent.

• 4. Building Institutions

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  Among the monasteries Asanga founded, Veluvana in the Magadha region of what is now Bihar became especially prominent. It was at Veluvana that he hand-picked eight chosen disciples, each of whom would become famed in their own right and carry Mahayana teachings further across the region. The establishment of 25 monasteries, as recorded by Taranatha, represents an institutional achievement as significant as any philosophical one. Asanga was not only a meditator and a scholar; he was an organizer of communities. The monastery at Nalanda, located also in modern-day Bihar, counted him among its seventeen great masters, placing him in a lineage of scholars who defined the intellectual character of Indian Buddhism for centuries.

• 5. The Philosophical Legacy

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  Asanga's most widely accepted work is the Mahayanasangraha, a systematic exposition of the major tenets of the Yogachara school arranged in ten chapters. It is considered his magnum opus and survives in one Tibetan translation and four Chinese translations. A second firmly attributed text, the Abhidharma-samuccaya, summarizes the main Mahayana Abhidharma doctrines. Walpola Rahula noted that its thought stands closer to that of the Pali tradition than does the Theravadin Abhidhamma. A third work, known in Chinese as the Xianyang shengjiao lun, survives only in Xuanzang's Chinese translation, though parallel Sanskrit passages can be located in the Yogacarabhumi. Beyond these three, a large body of texts came to be attributed either to Asanga directly or to Maitreya with Asanga as the transmitter. Chinese and Tibetan traditions do not always agree on which texts belong in which category, and modern scholars have questioned many of the attributions after critical textual study.

• 6. Disputed Texts

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  The so-called Five Dharmas of Maitreya form the most contested portion of Asanga's legacy. According to D.S. Ruegg, these five works are mentioned in Sanskrit sources only from the 11th century onwards. The Mahayanasutralankara-karika, which presents the Mahayana path from the Yogachara perspective, has been questioned by scholar Mario D'amato, who places it after the Bodhisattvabhumi but before the composition of Asanga's Mahayanasangraha. The Abhisamayalankara, a verse text attempting a synthesis of Prajnaparamita doctrine and Yogachara thought, may have been written by Arya Vimuktisena, the 6th-century author of the first surviving commentary on the work. Makransky notes that only the later 8th-century commentator Haribhadra attributed the text to Maitreya, possibly to grant it greater authority. The Ratnagotravibhaga presents a different problem: while the Tibetan tradition attributes it to Maitreya via Asanga, the Chinese tradition attributes it to a certain Saramati, a figure of the 3rd-4th century CE, according to the Huayan patriarch Fazang. S.K. Hookham observes that modern scholarship favors Saramati as the actual author, and that there is no evidence for the attribution to Maitreya before the time of Maitripa in the 11th century. The Yogacarabhumi shastra, a massive and encyclopaedic work on yogic practice that has long carried Asanga's name, is now considered by most modern scholars to be a compilation drawn from numerous authors across different periods.

• 7. Asanga and Vasubandhu

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  Vasubandhu stands as perhaps the most consequential relationship in Asanga's life. The two were half-brothers, and Asanga is traditionally credited with drawing Vasubandhu from the Sarvastivada school into Mahayana Buddhism. Both came to be regarded as the major classical Indian Sanskrit exponents of Mahayana Abhidharma and of Vijnanavada, the doctrine that only awareness exists, also known by the terms Vijnaptimatrata-vada, the doctrine of mere representation. Asanga and Vasubandhu are named together in tradition as the foundational figures whose writings shaped the Yogachara school's systematic form. The transformation of Vasubandhu, brought about through meeting with Asanga and one of Asanga's disciples, illustrates how Asanga's influence operated not only through texts and institutions but through the conversion of individual thinkers whose own subsequent work reshaped Buddhist philosophy for generations.