India · c. 4th c. CE
Asaṅga
Co-founder of Yogācāra, elder half-brother of Vasubandhu
He systematised Yogācāra—the storehouse consciousness, the three natures and the bodhisattva path—drawing, tradition says, on teachings revealed to him by the future Buddha Maitreya.
Life and thought
Asaṅga, a 4th-century monk from Puruṣapura (modern Peshawar), was the elder half-brother of Vasubandhu. Tradition says he meditated for twelve years without success before the future Buddha Maitreya appeared to him and taught him a set of texts; scholars still debate how much of what is ascribed to “Maitreya” Asaṅga wrote himself. Tradition also credits him with winning his brother over from Abhidharma realism to the Mahāyāna.
Asaṅga organised the Yogācāra (“practice of yoga”) school around the analysis of experience in meditation. Beneath the six ordinary kinds of consciousness lies a “storehouse consciousness” (ālaya-vijñāna) holding the seeds of past actions, which explains continuity and karma without a permanent self. Everything can be described in three ways: as imagined (falsely split into a grasping subject and grasped objects), as dependent (the flow of experience itself), and as perfected (that flow free of the split). Liberation is a “turning around” of the storehouse. His Compendium of the Mahāyāna set all this out as a system.