Asanga

Asanga was born in the fourth century CE in Purushapura, in the region of Gandhara in what is now northern Pakistan, the son of a Brahmin father and, in most accounts, the half brother of Vasubandhu, who would become as influential a Buddhist philosopher as Asanga himself. He first ordained within an early Buddhist school before turning to the Mahayana teachings that would define his later work. Tradition holds that Asanga withdrew to meditate on the coming Buddha Maitreya for twelve years, seeking a vision that would confirm the path he had chosen, and that he came close to abandoning the effort more than once, discouraged by the absence of any sign. The turning point, as later Buddhist biographers tell it, came when Asanga found a wounded dog by the roadside, its wound crawling with maggots, and his compassion for the suffering animal broke through where years of solitary meditation had not. Maitreya appeared to him in that moment, present all along but unseen until compassion opened Asanga's eyes to what discipline alone could not, and carried him to the Tushita heaven, where over what Asanga experienced as a single afternoon Maitreya transmitted the group of texts later called the Five Treatises of Maitreya, among them the Mahayanasutralankara and the Madhyantavibhaga, works Asanga brought back to write down and teach.

Asanga's Yogachara, also called Vijnanavada or the Mind Only school, became one of the two great philosophical schools of Indian Mahayana Buddhism, standing alongside and in creative tension with Madhyamaka, the school associated with Nagarjuna two centuries earlier. Where Madhyamaka concentrated on emptiness, the claim that no phenomenon possesses independent, inherent existence, Yogachara asked a different question: given that emptiness is true, how does ordinary experience arise at all, and what is actually doing the perceiving. Asanga's answer, elaborated with Vasubandhu across a body of systematic treatises, proposed a layered model of consciousness, including a foundational storehouse consciousness, alayavijnana, that carries the latent impressions of past action forward and gives rise to the appearance of a stable external world. The school's influence proved lasting far beyond India itself: Yogachara doctrine and vocabulary were carried into Chinese Buddhism, most directly through the pilgrim and translator Xuanzang, and from there into Japanese and Korean traditions of Buddhist philosophy, and its account of mind continues to be read today, including by scholars comparing it with modern philosophy of mind, as one of the most sophisticated psychological models Buddhist thought ever produced.