The Foundation for Yoga Practitioners: The Buddhist Yogācārabhūmi Treatise and Its Adaptation in India, East Asia, and Tibet.
Ulrich Timme Kragh (ed.)
The Foundation for Yoga Practitioners: The Buddhist Yogācārabhūmi Treatise and Its Adaptation in India, East Asia, and Tibet. Harvard Oriental Series 75. Cambridge, Mass.: Department of South Asian Studies, Harvard University, 2013. 1429 pp. isbn 978-0-674-72543-0. $95.00 / £75.95 / €85.50.
In 1971, when the noted Swiss Buddhologist Jacques May published “La philosophie bouddhique idéaliste” (AsiatischeStudien/Étudesasiatiques 25 [1971]: 265– 323), he was able to attempt a thorough survey of the state of the field in fewer than sixty pages. In that broad overview, the Yogācārabhūmi (YBh), considered the source of the Vijñānavāda doctrine that was May’s major concern, was referred to but briefly. By contrast, the volume under review here—a volume that, in
the editor’s extensive introduction (pp. 22–287) and the thirty-four essays that follow, both surveys the field and adds substantially to it—offers through its sheer girth a tangible demonstration of the remarkable expansion of research in this area during the four decades that followed May’s benchmark article. The Foundation for Yoga Practitioners may now be taken as the “go-to” source through which to explore the YBh and its legacy, particularly for those depending primarily on research in European languages (though East Asian scholarship is also very well represented in these pages).The work was first conceived as the proceedings of a 2008 conference on the YBh held at Geumgang University (South Korea) honoring Lambert Schmithausen, whose contributions, together with those
of his many students and others he has influenced, have been rightly thought to have revolutionized the study of theYBh in both its philological-historical and philosophical-hermeneutical dimensions.1 Besides the fifteen scholars who participated on that occasion, an additional nineteen have contributed articles here. The editor, Ulrich Timme Kragh, has endeavored to present the resulting collection as a work of far greater coherence than one expects to find in a volume of proceedings. To achieve this, he has adopted an ambitious, overall plan suggested by the architecture of the YBh and its complex Rezeptionsgeschichte, elucidating the former in considerable detail in the course of his introduction
1 Two major publications of Schmithausen, that had not yet appeared when The Foundation for Yoga Practitioners went to press, may be mentioned here: The Genesis of YogācāraVijñānavāda: Responses and Reflections, Kasuga Lecture Series i (Tokyo: The International Institute for Buddhist Studies, 2014); and Lambert Schmithausen, Collected Papers, Volume i: 1963–1977, ed. Florin Deleanu, Shin’ichirō Hori, Mudagamuwe Maitrimurthi, and Alexander von Rospatt, Studia Philologica Buddhica Monograph Series xxxiva (Tokyo: The International Institute for Buddhist Studies, 2016).
(“The Yogācārabhūmi and Its Adaptation: Introductory Essay with a Summary of the Basic Section”), which provides an original and highly useful summary of the contents of the entire YBh. This in itself represents a significant, new contribution to the field and, for anyone setting out to find just what the imposing text of the YBh actually covers, Kragh’s survey provides, for the first time in English, a precise and thorough orientation. In the course of this, moreover, he specifies, so far as is possible, the relations between the articles contained in the volume and the contents of the YBh itself, while also including capsule biographies of the contributing authors and brief surveys of their earlier scholarship on topics relating to the YBh. The introduction thus provides a valuable resource documenting much of the pertinent work in the Yogācāra field over the past several decades. Kragh has also sought to ensure that the work as a whole be as accessible as possible to researchers internationally by including, throughout the entire volume, English translations of each scholarly citation, whether from Chinese, French, German, Japanese or Korean sources, and translations of the titles of articles cited as well.
Following earlier work by Deleanu, Kragh (pp. 49–50) has taken the title of the YBh to refer to the foundations of yoga practice and not, as has often been the case in earlier scholarship, the steps or stages of the path, an interpretation that was no doubt influenced by the frequent use in Mahāyāna literature of the term bhūmi in regard to the levels of progress of the bodhisattva, a usage that is by no means foreign to the YBh itself. Although I am convinced that this shift of nuance in our understanding of the term in the title of the work is indeed warranted, I am less sanguine in respect to the YBh’s actual connections
with spiritual practice, about which Kragh writes (p. 30): “When it came to present a foundational and systematic overview of Buddhist yoga practice … it was only natural that the composers and redactors of the text saw it as their task to explain the Mahāyāna practice of yoga within the larger frame of Mainstream Buddhist yoga doctrines, thereby resulting in a manual of almost epic proportions.” Try as I may, I find it difficult to regard the peculiar design of the YBh, more a sprawling encyclopedia than a manual, as something “natural.” And, as has been much argued in recent scholarship, the relations between Buddhist scholastic writings that deal theoretically or dogmatically with paths of practice and actual practices are not at all clear and evident.2 This, of course,
2 See, e.g., Robert H. Sharf, “Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience,” Numen 42 (1995): 228–283, esp. 235–246; Georges B.J. Dreyfus, The Sound of Two Hands Clapping: The Education of a Tibetan Buddhist Monk (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), ch. 8, “Commentary and Meditation.” It may be noted that Sharf’s article is particularly is not to say that there are no such relations, just that we must be cautious in our affirmations of what they may have been. The first of the five parts into which the thirty-four contributions that constitute the main body of the volume are divided, “The Yogācārabhūmi: Background and Environment,” groups six essays concerned with varied issues judged by the editor to be pertinent to our understanding of the formation of theYBh corpus.The first of these, “Early Mahāyāna and ‘The Bodhisattvas of the Ten Directions,’” by the late Tilmann Vetter, is removed from the actual study of the
YBh in that it concerns indications of emergent Mahāyāna in a scripture preserved only in Chinese, Shifang pusa 十方菩薩 (contained as a section of t397), which, as Vetter argues, was probably translated by An Shigao (active 148–170 c.e.), more than a century before any part of the YBh is likely to have been composed. Although Vetter’s concern is with what the Shifang pusa has to tell us about early Mahāyāna generally, one interesting detail does seem to anticipate doctrinal developments within Yogācāra, namely, the possible presence of an eightfold, not sixfold, list of faculties, including the five physical senses and three mental faculties, though their exact interpretation remains uncertain (pp. 291, 294, 307). In “Serving And Served Monks In The Yogācārabhūmi,” Noriaki Hakamaya attempts to break into the social world of the YBh in order to investigate what this might reveal of the compilation of the YBh itself. Despite the
considerable interest of this project, the author’s argument is weakened in my view by his repeated, anachronistic references to “Hinduism” and “Hindus”; for, if we are to study the social history of Indian Buddhism, and in particular the Buddhist laity, we must do so on the basis of a more precise knowledge of the social categories present in the times and places concerned, as known through, e.g., epigraphical and literary evidence. Categories such as “Hindu,” which appears only in the wake of the expansion of Islam in the subcontinent, are merely misleading in this context. In the article that follows, “Remarks on the Lineage of Indian Masters of the Yogācāra School: Maitreya, Asaṅga, and Vasubandhu,” Hidenori S. Sakuma succinctly summarizes his argument in these words (p. 337): “To put it simply,
critical of the views expressed in an early article by Schmithausen, “On the Problem of the Relation of Spiritual Practice and Philosophical Theory in Buddhism” (1976), now reprinted in Collected Papers, Volume i. Nevertheless, Schmithausen’s essential point, concerning certain particular philosophical doctrines (those connected with illusionism and idealism) and their possible relations to contemplative experiences, seems to me plausible in itself. But that is a far cry from treating works such as the YBh as either meditation manuals or phenomenological transcriptions.
questions concerning authorship that one might seek to establish definitively from a modern perspective had little meaning for Indian yoga practitioners of yore.” Sakuma believes that the names of the three figures mentioned in his title may sometimes stand in for school affiliations rather than for designations of individual authorship as we tend to think of it. This, I think, is a valuable caution and recalls the British Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli’s clever quip that “Buddhaghosa” was the name of a committee.3 In the case of Vasubandhu, however, the very next article, Hartmut Buescher’s “Distinguishing the Two Vasubandhus,
the Bhāṣyakāra and the Kośakāra, as Yogācāra-Vijñānavāda Authors,” offers a particularly robust defense of the thesis that there were in fact two major authors named “Vasubandhu”—an early Yogācāra commentator referred to here as the bhāṣyakāra and the somewhat later author of the Abhidharmakośa, Viṃśikā, Triṃśikā, etc., called the kośakāra—who were responsible for the bulk of the output attributed to this name. The interventions of Sakuma and Buescher in the authorship debate are to my mind important corrections to a recent trend in favor of the hypothesis that a single Vasubandhu may be treated as the unique author of the many works in question.4
“Two Notes on the Formation of the Yogācārabhūmi Text-Complex” by Noritoshi Aramaki proposes a conceptual analysis focusing upon two major categories, trisvabhāva and ālayavijñāna, in order to clarify the evolution of theYBh. His close readings of select passages will perhaps be obscured for some readers by his adoption of an idiosyncratic translation vocabulary, e.g., “old defiled being-here-and-now” for saṃkleśadharma, “zero-dimension of the communal essence of life-as-such” for śūnyatā, and “conversion” for āśrayaparāvṛtti. He summarizes his argument in writing that the “ontological principle of conversion … has been discovered by Nāgārjuna and … systematized by the YogācāraVijñānavāda philosophers” (p. 434), a position that, exegetical issues aside, seems to resonate with some recent attempts to reconcile the Yogācāra/Madhyamaka divide.5 Terminology is also at issue, but in a quite different manner, in Lambert Schmithausen’s “Kuśala and Akuśala: Reconsidering the Origi-
3 Bhikkhu Ñāņamoli (Osbert Moore), A Thinker’s Note Book: Posthumous Papers of a Buddhist Monk, ed. Nyanaponika, 2nd ed. (Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society, 1980), p. 235. I am grateful to Steven Collins for calling my attention to this passage.
4 For a thoughtful recent statement of the one Vasubandhu hypothesis, refer to Jonathan C. Gold, Paving the Great Way: Vasubandhu’s Unifying Buddhist Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
5 See, for instance, Jay L. Garfield and Jan Westerhoff, eds., Madhyamaka and Yogacara: Allies or Rivals? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). nal Meaning of a Basic Pair of Terms of Buddhist Spirituality and Ethics and Its Development up to Early Yogācāra.” A characteristic example of Schmithausen’s meticulous attention to detail, the essay tracks the variations in the use of the terms in question throughout the corpora of the abhidharma, with reference to Yogācāra sources and Vedic parallels as well.
“The Yogācārabhūmi: The Text,” which is Part ii, is divided into several subsections, introduced by Martin Delhey’s “The Yogācārabhūmi Corpus: Sources, Editions, Translations, and Reference Works.” This essay serves as a highly useful pendant to the editor’s introduction, for it provides a thorough bibliographical survey particularly with reference to the various editions of the texts comprising the YBh. As these important materials have sometimes appeared in obscure and poorly distributed publications, the present conspective overview will be most welcome, particularly for those now entering this area of study.
The first subsection on “The Text” is devoted to “The Yogācārabhūmi: The Basic Section (*Maulyo Bhūmayaḥ)” and includes nine contributions, of which the first three expressly focus upon the Manobhūmi. The first is Kōichi Takahashi’s “The Premise of Vastu in the Manobhūmi,” which seeks to begin the clarification of a key philosophical term, meaning roughly “substance, thing, entity,” in the YBh corpus. The article is particularly noteworthy for its treatment of the question of “false views” (mithyādṛṣṭi), which oppose the perception of the vastu. Dan Lusthaus, “A Note on Medicine and Psychosomatic Relations in the First Two Bhūmis of the Yogācārabhūmi,” examines the manner in which the author(s) of the YBh, called “Asaṅga” by Lusthaus (a convention he explains on p. 578, n. 1), engaged
with ideas of the body, particularly in relation to parallels in early Indian medical literature. The topic thus resonates to some degree with Kritzer’s investigations, later in this section, of citations in the YBh concerning gestation and birth. Lusthaus in part wishes to problematize the frequent description of Yogācāra as “idealism” (p. 587) and one may concur with him that, subsequent developments notwithstanding, the YBh itself only rarely gestures in this direction. In “Parallel Passages between the Manobhūmi and the *Yogācārabhūmi of Saṃgharakṣa,” Nobuyoshi Yamabe offers an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the formation of the Manobhūmi, methodically tabulating parallels between it and not just the *Yogācārabhūmi of Saṃgharakṣa, but a half dozen additional early sources as well, including the Dao ji jing 道地經 (t607) translated by An Shigao, the *Vimuttimagga (t1648), and two versions of the Garbhāvakrāntisūtra.
It is this last-mentioned work that is considered in Robert Kritzer’s essay, “Garbhāvakrāntau (‘In the Garbhāvakrānti’): Quotations from the Garbhāvakrāntisūtra in Abhidharma Literature and the Yogācārabhūmi.” This contribution usefully complements his recent monographic study of the sūtra,6 demonstrating the manner in which it was taken as an authority in the scholastic literature. The YBh’s employment of passages culled from the scriptures is further explored in “Nets of Intertextuality: Embedded Scriptural Citations in the Yogācārabhūmi” by Peter Skilling.
Two articles are devoted to the Bhāvanāmayī Bhūmiḥ. Yasunori Sugawara, in “The Bhāvanāmayī Bhūmiḥ: Contents and Formation” presents his analysis of this
section of the YBh, based on his work on the critical edition of the text, which, one hopes, will soon appear. In the interest of clarifying certain parallels, he includes here, too, his new edition of the Sanskrit text of a section of the Lokottaro Mārgaḥ chapter of the Śrāvakabhūmi (pp. 826–829). “Remarks on the BhāvanāmayīBhūmiḥ and ItsTreatment of Practice,” by Alexander von Rospatt, offers a careful survey of meditative cultivation (bhāvanā) as presented in this bhūmi. Of particular interest, for this reader in any case, is the topic of samasamālambyālambakajñāna, translated here as “knowledge in which the object and the subject are the same” (p. 861, n. 15). Although this might be thought to presage the idealistic turn of later Yogācāra, von Rospatt prudently cautions that this may not be supported in the context of the Bhāvanāmayī Bhūmiḥ (p. 854).
The subsection concerning “The Text” concludes with two studies of the Bodhisattvabhūmi.7 In “The Chapter on Right Conduct in the Bodhisattvabhūmi,” Michael Zimmermann provides a detailed content summary of the influential śīlapaṭala. “Meditative Practices in the Bodhisattvabhūmi: Quest for and Liberation through the Thing-In-Itself,” by Florin Deleanu, offers the perfect complement to Takahashi’s essay on the vastu. In speaking here of the “thing-in-itself” (vastumātra), Deleanu is careful to stipulate that his use of the Kantian phrase does not imply a commitment to a thoroughgoing Kantian interpretation of the matter at hand (p. 889, n. 13). His essay offers an incisive interpretation of a key aspect of the Bodhisattvabhūmi in relation to both philosophy and meditation.
The second subsection of Part ii, “The Yogācārabhūmi: The Supplementary Section (Saṃgrahaṇī),” includes two articles of which the first, by William S. Waldron, analyzes an important passage from the Viniścayasaṃgrahaṇī:
6 Garbhāvakrāntisūtra: The Sūtra on Entry into the Womb, Studia Philologica Buddhica Monograph Series xxxi (Tokyo: The International Institute for Buddhist Studies, 2014).
7 Note that the first complete English rendition of this text, based on the available Sanskrit and the Tibetan translation, though without reference to the Chinese, has recently appeared: Artemus B. Engle, trans., The Bodhisattva Path to Unsurpassed Enlightenment: A Complete Translation of the Bodhisattvabhūmi (Boulder: Snow Lion, 2016).
“Ālayavijñāna as Keystone Dharma: The Ālaya Treatise of the Yogācārabhūmi.” The second, by Kazunobu Matsuda, on “Sanskrit Fragments of the Saṃdhinirmocanasūtra,” offers newly identified elements of the Sanskrit text, not of the YBh, but of the Saṃdhinirmocana, which, as we know, was itself largely incorporated into the later portions of the YBh corpus. The fragments discussed by Matsuda were discovered in the National Archives of Nepal and in the German Turfan Collection.
The three remaining sections of the volume are in principle concerned with the YBh’s reception and legacy, though in fact only some of the contributions included in these sections address the YBh directly; others take up issues in later Yogācāra thought without explicit reference to the YBh. (This, of course, raises an interesting question that does not seem to be considered at length in the volume, namely, to what extent should we take the YBh to be literally the founding text for subsequent Yogācāra? If we respond, as I think we must, that the YBh sometimes has little or no demonstrable genetic relation with certain late Yogācāra developments, then how are we to refine our characterization of its place in the larger tradition? Cf. Kragh’s brief remarks about this, p. 231.)
Part iii, “The Indian Yogācāra Reception,” begins with Changhwan Park’s “What are Ācāryas or *Yaugācārabhūmikas Doing in Abhidharmakośabhāṣya 3–28ab?” Park reconsiders here the problematic question of kośakāra Vasubandhu’s relations with the Sautrāntika and Yogācāra schools, an issue that has aroused much previous discussion. With minute attention to the evidence available in the Kośa’s Indian commentaries, including those preserved in Chinese and Tibetan, Park concludes, in contrast to some recent trends in work on the subject, that Vasubandhu was not yet a partisan of Yogācāra when he authored the
Abhidharmakośabhāṣya. Jowita Kramer, in “A Study of the Saṃskāra Section of Vasubandhu’s Pañcaskandhaka with Reference to Its Commentary by Sthiramati,” offers a detailed comparison of the enumerations and definitions of the saṃskāras as found in the Pañcaskandhaka with parallels from the Abhidharmakośa and the Abhidharmasamuccaya, thus beginning the rigorous analysis of the relations amongst these key abhidharma treatises. Readers should perhaps note that Kramer’s frequent use of the word “disagreement” does not often serve here to mark substantitive differences of opinion or understanding, but typically refers instead to differences of wording that do not involve significant distinctions of meaning.; cf. her own conclusions, where this point is clarified (p. 1032). “Yogācāra and Vajrayāna according to Ratnākaraśānti,” by Harunaga Isaacson, turns to the important, but so far poorly studied, issue of what appears to have been some degree of Yogācāra revival in late Indian Buddhism under the ægis of the rise of tantrism.
In Part iv, “The East Asian Yogācāra Reception,” three articles (Bing Chen, “Reflections on the Revival of Yogācāra in Modern Chinese Buddhism,” Eyal Aviv, “The Root that Nourishes the Branches: The Role of the Yogācārabhūmi in 20th-Century Chinese Scholastic Buddhism,” and Lawrence Y.K. Lau, “Chinese Scholarship on Yogācāra Buddhism since 1949”) concern aspects of Yogācāra in relation to developments in Chinese Buddhism during the past century, a topic that has been the object of increasing attention in recent years.8 The four contributions that follow (Sangyeob Cha, “The Yogācārabhūmi Meditation Doctrine of the ‘Nine Stages of Mental Abiding’ in East and Central Asian Buddhism,” A. Charles Muller, “The Contribution of the Yogācārabhūmi to the System of the Two Hindrances,”
Sungdoo Ahn, “Theories of the Darśanamārga in theYogācārabhūmi andTheir Chinese Interpretations,” and MakotoYoshimura, “The Wéishì School and the Buddha-Nature Debate in the Early Tang Dynasty”) treat topics in the YBh and broader Yogācāra thought in relation to their reception in medieval East Asia. The closing articles in this section deal, respectively, with recent Korean scholarship on Yogācāra (Seongcheol Kim, “A Brief History of Studies on the Yogācāra School in Modern Korea”) and a renowned Japanese scholar’s interpretations of the śāstrārambha of the Mahāyānasūtrālaṃkāra (Leslie S. Kawamura, “Gadjin M. Nagao on msa i.1 and i.2”). While Kawamura’s essay is of course of much interest for its presentation of the substance of Nagao’s readings of the two verses in question, its larger importance lies in its value as an illustration of Nagao’s methodology and the exemplary rigor that characterized his scholarly craft. The contributions of Lau and Kim may be noted in particular for the extensive bibiographies that accompany them (pp. 1137–1164, 1268–1295), providing essential resources for research on Yogācāra studies in contemporary China and Korea.
The fifth and final section of the volume, entitled “The Tibetan Yogācāra Reception,” begins with an essay by Dorji Wangchuk, “On the Status of the
Yogācāra School in Tibetan Buddhism,” succinctly surveying the treatment of Yogācāra in Tibetan doxographical literature. In “Yogācāra in the Writings of the Eleventh-Century Rnying ma Scholar Rong zom Chos kyi bzang po,” Orna Almogi turns to a major figure in the development of the Rnying-ma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, providing thorough readings of his discussions of Yogācāra as culled from a variety of his works. “All Mind, No Text—All Text,
No Mind: Tracing Yogācāra in the Early Bka’ brgyud Literature of Dags po”
8 See, in particular, John Makeham, ed., Transforming Consciousness: Yogācāra Thought in Modern China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); and idem., trans., Xiong Shili, New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).
by the editor Ulrich Timme Kragh examines the corpus of writings forming the Collected Works of the early Bka’-brgyud master Sgam-po-pa Bsod-namsrin-chen (1079–1153)—but in fact, as Kragh has shown elsewhere,9 mostly to be attributed to disciples and successors—with a view to ferreting out the Yogācāra elements that may be identified within them. Leonard W.J. van der Kuijp’s “Notes on Jñānamitra’s Commentary on the Abhidharmasamuccaya” concerns the transmission history one of the most influential works relating to the YBh corpus in Tibet, the Abhidharmasamuccaya, but with reference to the apparently unavailable commentary by an obscure Indian author named Jñānamitra. Van der Kuijp’s abundant references to the commentarial history of the Abhidharmasamuccaya in Tibet, however, make this a valuable contribution to our knowledge of its Tibetan reception overall.
It may be remarked that, despite the positive value of these four contributions to Tibetan Buddhist studies, the place of the YBh itself within Tibetan Buddhism is relatively little engaged here, though it is discussed to some extent by Kragh (pp. 245–246, 1362–1369). This seems unfortunate, for, while contemporary scholars of Buddhism have ready access to general information on the transmission and diffusion of the YBh in East Asia, its history in Tibetan Buddhist milieux remains more obscure. To have addressed this issue adequately would have required fuller attention to Bka’-gdams-pa sources than we find here, as well as consideration of the reception of the YBh among scholars of the Jo-nang-pa and Dge-lugs-pa schools. In all events, to fill this lacuna remains a task for the future.
Without quibbling over the details of a volume that very successfully brings extensive new resources to the fore, we may nevertheless briefly note that the book’s utility might have been (and still might be) enhanced in some respects. The editor himself (p. 20) mentions the desirability of an index, which indeed would present the best means to fully valorize the rich contents of the work. However, to avoid the time and expense involved in preparing a print index, and also to provide an even more useful reference tool, mounting a searchable version of the volume online would be the ideal solution.
Additionally, there are several other ways in which simple digital technology might be employed to better facilitate the use of the research contained here. A notable example is seen in Yamabe’s extensive tabulation of parallel passages between the Manobhūmi and the *Yogācārabhūmi of Saṃgharakṣa (pp. 606–
9 Tibetan Yoga and Mysticism: A Textual Study of the Yogas of Nāropa and Mahāmudrā MeditationintheMedievalTraditionof Dagspo, Studia Philologica Buddhica Monograph Series xxxii (Tokyo: The International Institute for Buddhist Studies, 2015).
733), which, as mentioned above, includes parallels from other works as well. This is very awkward to consult practically in its present, printed form, which requires turning the volume sideways and perusing over a hundred pages of tabulated text. A searchable electronic version, however, would present an elegant means to realize the full value of the considerable labor that Yamabe has expended here. In a similar vein, one may observe, as noted by the editor (p. 19), that each article is accompanied by a separate bibliography, though it would have been a relatively easy task to have have merged them all into one comprehensive file at the end of the work. However, the utility of the essays of Delhey, Lau and Kim as distinct topical bibliographies perhaps argues in favor of the editor’s decision to retain separate lists of references.
Such relatively minor points aside, the editor and his collaborators have our heartfelt felicitations for their exceptional efforts, truly gambhīrodāra, which, taken together, clearly define and further advance the state of the Yogācāra Studies field.
Matthew T. Kapstein
École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris and, The University of Chicago m-kapstein@uchicago.edu
Ulrich Timme Kragh (ed.)
The Foundation for Yoga Practitioners: The Buddhist Yogācārabhūmi Treatise and Its Adaptation in India, East Asia, and Tibet. Harvard Oriental Series 75. Cambridge, Mass.: Department of South Asian Studies, Harvard University, 2013. 1429 pp. isbn 978-0-674-72543-0. $95.00 / £75.95 / €85.50.
In 1971, when the noted Swiss Buddhologist Jacques May published “La philosophie bouddhique idéaliste” (AsiatischeStudien/Étudesasiatiques 25 [1971]: 265– 323), he was able to attempt a thorough survey of the state of the field in fewer than sixty pages. In that broad overview, the Yogācārabhūmi (YBh), considered the source of the Vijñānavāda doctrine that was May’s major concern, was referred to but briefly. By contrast, the volume under review here—a volume that, in
the editor’s extensive introduction (pp. 22–287) and the thirty-four essays that follow, both surveys the field and adds substantially to it—offers through its sheer girth a tangible demonstration of the remarkable expansion of research in this area during the four decades that followed May’s benchmark article. The Foundation for Yoga Practitioners may now be taken as the “go-to” source through which to explore the YBh and its legacy, particularly for those depending primarily on research in European languages (though East Asian scholarship is also very well represented in these pages).The work was first conceived as the
proceedings of a 2008 conference on the YBh held at Geumgang University (South Korea) honoring Lambert Schmithausen, whose contributions, together with those of his many students and others he has influenced, have been rightly thought to have revolutionized the study of theYBh in both its philological-historical and philosophical-hermeneutical dimensions.1 Besides the fifteen scholars who participated on that occasion, an additional nineteen have contributed articles here. The editor, Ulrich Timme Kragh, has endeavored to present the resulting collection as a work of far greater coherence than one expects to find in a volume of proceedings. To achieve this, he has adopted an ambitious, overall plan suggested by the architecture of the YBh and its complex Rezeptionsgeschichte, elucidating the former in considerable detail in the course of his introduction
1 Two major publications of Schmithausen, that had not yet appeared when The Foundation for Yoga Practitioners went to press, may be mentioned here: The Genesis of YogācāraVijñānavāda: Responses and Reflections, Kasuga Lecture Series i (Tokyo: The International Institute for Buddhist Studies, 2014); and Lambert Schmithausen, Collected Papers, Volume i: 1963–1977, ed. Florin Deleanu, Shin’ichirō Hori, Mudagamuwe Maitrimurthi, and Alexander von Rospatt, Studia Philologica Buddhica Monograph Series xxxiva (Tokyo: The International Institute for Buddhist Studies, 2016).
(“The Yogācārabhūmi and Its Adaptation: Introductory Essay with a Summary of the Basic Section”), which provides an original and highly useful summary of the contents of the entire YBh. This in itself represents a significant, new contribution to the field and, for anyone setting out to find just what the imposing text of the YBh actually covers, Kragh’s survey provides, for the first time in English, a precise and thorough orientation. In the course of this, moreover, he specifies, so far as is possible, the relations between the articles contained in the volume and the contents of the YBh itself, while also including capsule biographies of the contributing authors and brief surveys of their earlier scholarship on topics relating to the YBh. The introduction thus provides a valuable resource documenting much of the pertinent work in the Yogācāra field over the past several decades. Kragh has also sought to ensure that the work as a whole be as accessible as possible to researchers internationally by including, throughout the entire volume, English translations of each scholarly citation, whether from Chinese, French, German, Japanese or Korean sources, and translations of the titles of articles cited as well.
Following earlier work by Deleanu, Kragh (pp. 49–50) has taken the title of the YBh to refer to the foundations of yoga practice and not, as has often been the case in earlier scholarship, the steps or stages of the path, an interpretation that was no doubt influenced by the frequent use in Mahāyāna literature of the term bhūmi in regard to the levels of progress of the bodhisattva, a usage that is by no means foreign to the YBh itself. Although I am convinced that this
shift of nuance in our understanding of the term in the title of the work is indeed warranted, I am less sanguine in respect to the YBh’s actual connections with spiritual practice, about which Kragh writes (p. 30): “When it came to present a foundational and systematic overview of Buddhist yoga practice … it was only natural that the composers and redactors of the text saw it as their task to explain the Mahāyāna practice of yoga within the larger frame of Mainstream Buddhist yoga doctrines, thereby resulting in a manual of almost epic proportions.” Try as I may, I find it difficult to regard the peculiar design of the YBh, more a sprawling encyclopedia than a manual, as something “natural.” And, as has been much argued in recent scholarship, the relations between Buddhist scholastic writings that deal theoretically or dogmatically with paths of practice and actual practices are not at all clear and evident.2 This, of course,
2 See, e.g., Robert H. Sharf, “Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience,” Numen 42 (1995): 228–283, esp. 235–246; Georges B.J. Dreyfus, The Sound of Two Hands Clapping: The Education of a Tibetan Buddhist Monk (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), ch. 8, “Commentary and Meditation.” It may be noted that Sharf’s article is particularly
is not to say that there are no such relations, just that we must be cautious in our affirmations of what they may have been.
The first of the five parts into which the thirty-four contributions that constitute the main body of the volume are divided, “The Yogācārabhūmi: Background and Environment,” groups six essays concerned with varied issues judged by the editor to be pertinent to our understanding of the formation of theYBh corpus.The first of these, “Early Mahāyāna and ‘The Bodhisattvas of the Ten Directions,’” by the late Tilmann Vetter, is removed from the actual study of the YBh in that it concerns indications of emergent Mahāyāna in a scripture preserved only in Chinese, Shifang pusa 十方菩薩 (contained as a section of t397),
which, as Vetter argues, was probably translated by An Shigao (active 148–170 c.e.), more than a century before any part of the YBh is likely to have been composed. Although Vetter’s concern is with what the Shifang pusa has to tell us about early Mahāyāna generally, one interesting detail does seem to anticipate doctrinal developments within Yogācāra, namely, the possible presence of an eightfold, not sixfold, list of faculties, including the five physical senses and three mental faculties, though their exact interpretation remains uncertain (pp. 291, 294, 307). In “Serving And Served Monks In The Yogācārabhūmi,” Noriaki Hakamaya attempts to break into the social world of the YBh in order to investigate what this might reveal of the compilation of the YBh itself. Despite the considerable interest of this project, the author’s argument is weakened in my view by his repeated, anachronistic references to “Hinduism” and “Hindus”; for, if we are to study the social history of Indian Buddhism, and in particular the Buddhist laity, we must do so on the basis of a more precise knowledge of the social categories present in the times and places concerned, as known through, e.g., epigraphical and literary evidence. Categories such as “Hindu,” which appears only in the wake of the expansion of Islam in the subcontinent, are merely misleading in this context.
In the article that follows, “Remarks on the Lineage of Indian Masters of the Yogācāra School: Maitreya, Asaṅga, and Vasubandhu,” Hidenori S. Sakuma succinctly summarizes his argument in these words (p. 337): “To put it simply,
critical of the views expressed in an early article by Schmithausen, “On the Problem of the Relation of Spiritual Practice and Philosophical Theory in Buddhism” (1976), now reprinted in Collected Papers, Volume i. Nevertheless, Schmithausen’s essential point, concerning certain particular philosophical doctrines (those connected with illusionism and idealism) and their possible relations to contemplative experiences, seems to me plausible in itself. But that is a far cry from treating works such as the YBh as either meditation manuals or phenomenological transcriptions.
questions concerning authorship that one might seek to establish definitively from a modern perspective had little meaning for Indian yoga practitioners of yore.” Sakuma believes that the names of the three figures mentioned in his title may sometimes stand in for school affiliations rather than for designations of individual authorship as we tend to think of it. This, I think, is a valuable caution and recalls the British Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli’s clever quip that “Buddhaghosa” was the name of a committee.3 In the case of Vasubandhu, however, the very next article, Hartmut Buescher’s “Distinguishing the Two Vasubandhus, the Bhāṣyakāra and the Kośakāra, as Yogācāra-Vijñānavāda Authors,” offers a particularly robust defense of the thesis that there were in fact two major authors named “Vasubandhu”—an early Yogācāra commentator referred to here as the bhāṣyakāra and the somewhat later author of the Abhidharmakośa, Viṃśikā, Triṃśikā, etc., called the kośakāra—who were responsible for the bulk of the output attributed to this name. The interventions of Sakuma and Buescher in the authorship debate are to my mind important corrections to a recent trend in favor of the hypothesis that a single Vasubandhu may be treated as the unique author of the many works in question.4
“Two Notes on the Formation of the Yogācārabhūmi Text-Complex” by Noritoshi Aramaki proposes a conceptual analysis focusing upon two major categories, trisvabhāva and ālayavijñāna, in order to clarify the evolution of theYBh. His close readings of select passages will perhaps be obscured for some readers by his adoption of an idiosyncratic translation vocabulary, e.g., “old defiled being-here-and-now” for saṃkleśadharma, “zero-dimension of the communal essence of life-as-such” for śūnyatā, and “conversion” for āśrayaparāvṛtti. He summarizes his argument in writing that the “ontological principle of conversion … has been discovered by Nāgārjuna and … systematized by the YogācāraVijñānavāda philosophers” (p. 434), a position that, exegetical issues aside, seems to resonate with some recent attempts to reconcile the Yogācāra/Madhyamaka divide.5 Terminology is also at issue, but in a quite different manner, in Lambert Schmithausen’s “Kuśala and Akuśala: Reconsidering the Origi-
3 Bhikkhu Ñāņamoli (Osbert Moore), A Thinker’s Note Book: Posthumous Papers of a Buddhist Monk, ed. Nyanaponika, 2nd ed. (Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society, 1980), p. 235. I am grateful to Steven Collins for calling my attention to this passage.
4 For a thoughtful recent statement of the one Vasubandhu hypothesis, refer to Jonathan C. Gold, Paving the Great Way: Vasubandhu’s Unifying Buddhist Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
5 See, for instance, Jay L. Garfield and Jan Westerhoff, eds., Madhyamaka and Yogacara: Allies or Rivals? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
nal Meaning of a Basic Pair of Terms of Buddhist Spirituality and Ethics and Its Development up to Early Yogācāra.” A characteristic example of Schmithausen’s meticulous attention to detail, the essay tracks the variations in the use of the terms in question throughout the corpora of the abhidharma, with reference to Yogācāra sources and Vedic parallels as well.
“The Yogācārabhūmi: The Text,” which is Part ii, is divided into several subsections, introduced by Martin Delhey’s “The Yogācārabhūmi Corpus: Sources, Editions, Translations, and Reference Works.” This essay serves as a highly useful pendant to the editor’s introduction, for it provides a thorough bibliographical survey particularly with reference to the various editions of the texts comprising the YBh. As these important materials have sometimes appeared in obscure and poorly distributed publications, the present conspective overview will be most welcome, particularly for those now entering this area of study.
The first subsection on “The Text” is devoted to “The Yogācārabhūmi: The Basic Section (*Maulyo Bhūmayaḥ)” and includes nine contributions, of which the first three expressly focus upon the Manobhūmi. The first is Kōichi Takahashi’s “The Premise of Vastu in the Manobhūmi,” which seeks to begin the clarification of a key philosophical term, meaning roughly “substance, thing, entity,” in the YBh corpus. The article is particularly noteworthy for its treatment of the question of “false views” (mithyādṛṣṭi), which oppose the perception of the vastu. Dan Lusthaus, “A Note on Medicine and Psychosomatic Relations in the First Two Bhūmis of the Yogācārabhūmi,” examines the manner in which the author(s) of the YBh, called “Asaṅga” by Lusthaus (a convention he explains on p. 578, n. 1), engaged with ideas of the body, particularly in relation to parallels in early Indian medical literature. The topic thus resonates to some degree with Kritzer’s investigations, later in this section, of citations in the YBh concerning gestation and birth. Lusthaus in part wishes to problematize the frequent description of Yogācāra as “idealism” (p. 587) and one may concur with him that, subsequent developments notwithstanding, the YBh itself only rarely gestures in this direction. In “Parallel Passages between the Manobhūmi and the *Yogācārabhūmi of Saṃgharakṣa,” Nobuyoshi Yamabe offers an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the formation of the Manobhūmi, methodically tabulating parallels between it and not just the *Yogācārabhūmi of Saṃgharakṣa, but a half dozen additional early sources as well, including the Dao ji jing 道地經 (t607) translated by An Shigao, the *Vimuttimagga (t1648), and two versions of the Garbhāvakrāntisūtra.
It is this last-mentioned work that is considered in Robert Kritzer’s essay, “Garbhāvakrāntau (‘In the Garbhāvakrānti’): Quotations from the Garbhāvakrāntisūtra in Abhidharma Literature and the Yogācārabhūmi.” This contribution usefully complements his recent monographic study of the sūtra,6 demonstrating the manner in which it was taken as an authority in the scholastic literature. The YBh’s employment of passages culled from the scriptures is further explored in “Nets of Intertextuality: Embedded Scriptural Citations in the Yogācārabhūmi” by Peter Skilling.
Two articles are devoted to the Bhāvanāmayī Bhūmiḥ. Yasunori Sugawara, in “The Bhāvanāmayī Bhūmiḥ: Contents and Formation” presents his analysis of this section of the YBh, based on his work on the critical edition of the text, which, one hopes, will soon appear. In the interest of clarifying certain parallels, he includes here, too, his new edition of the Sanskrit text of a section of the Lokottaro Mārgaḥ chapter of the Śrāvakabhūmi (pp. 826–829). “Remarks on the BhāvanāmayīBhūmiḥ and ItsTreatment of Practice,” by Alexander von Rospatt, offers a careful survey of meditative cultivation (bhāvanā) as presented in this bhūmi. Of particular interest, for this reader in any case, is the topic of samasamālambyālambakajñāna, translated here as “knowledge in which the object and the subject are the same” (p. 861, n. 15). Although this might be thought to presage the idealistic turn of later Yogācāra, von Rospatt prudently cautions that this may not be supported in the context of the Bhāvanāmayī Bhūmiḥ (p. 854).
The subsection concerning “The Text” concludes with two studies of the Bodhisattvabhūmi.7 In “The Chapter on Right Conduct in the Bodhisattvabhūmi,” Michael Zimmermann provides a detailed content summary of the influential śīlapaṭala. “Meditative Practices in the Bodhisattvabhūmi: Quest for and Liberation through the Thing-In-Itself,” by Florin Deleanu, offers the perfect complement to Takahashi’s essay on the vastu. In speaking here of the “thing-in-itself” (vastumātra), Deleanu is careful to stipulate that his use of the Kantian phrase does not imply a commitment to a thoroughgoing Kantian interpretation of the matter at hand (p. 889, n. 13). His essay offers an incisive interpretation of a key aspect of the Bodhisattvabhūmi in relation to both philosophy and meditation.
The second subsection of Part ii, “The Yogācārabhūmi: The Supplementary Section (Saṃgrahaṇī),” includes two articles of which the first, by William S. Waldron, analyzes an important passage from the Viniścayasaṃgrahaṇī:
6 Garbhāvakrāntisūtra: The Sūtra on Entry into the Womb, Studia Philologica Buddhica Monograph Series xxxi (Tokyo: The International Institute for Buddhist Studies, 2014). 7 Note that the first complete English rendition of this text, based on the available Sanskrit and the Tibetan translation, though without reference to the Chinese, has recently appeared: Artemus B. Engle, trans., The Bodhisattva Path to Unsurpassed Enlightenment: A Complete Translation of the Bodhisattvabhūmi (Boulder: Snow Lion, 2016). “Ālayavijñāna as Keystone Dharma: The Ālaya Treatise of the Yogācārabhūmi.” The second, by Kazunobu Matsuda, on “Sanskrit Fragments of the Saṃdhinirmocanasūtra,” offers newly identified elements of the Sanskrit text, not of the YBh, but of the Saṃdhinirmocana, which, as we know, was itself largely incorporated into the later portions of the YBh corpus. The fragments discussed by Matsuda were discovered in the National Archives of Nepal and in the German Turfan Collection.
The three remaining sections of the volume are in principle concerned with the YBh’s reception and legacy, though in fact only some of the contributions included in these sections address the YBh directly; others take up issues in later Yogācāra thought without explicit reference to the YBh. (This, of course, raises an interesting question that does not seem to be considered at length in the volume, namely, to what extent should we take the YBh to be literally the founding text for subsequent Yogācāra? If we respond, as I think we must, that the YBh sometimes has little or no demonstrable genetic relation with certain
late Yogācāra developments, then how are we to refine our characterization of its place in the larger tradition? Cf. Kragh’s brief remarks about this, p. 231.) Part iii, “The Indian Yogācāra Reception,” begins with Changhwan Park’s “What are Ācāryas or *Yaugācārabhūmikas Doing in Abhidharmakośabhāṣya 3–28ab?” Park reconsiders here the problematic question of kośakāra Vasubandhu’s relations with the Sautrāntika and Yogācāra schools, an issue that has aroused much previous discussion. With minute attention to the evidence available in the Kośa’s Indian commentaries, including those preserved in Chinese and Tibetan, Park concludes, in contrast to some recent trends in work on the subject, that Vasubandhu was not yet a partisan of Yogācāra when he authored the
Abhidharmakośabhāṣya. Jowita Kramer, in “A Study of the Saṃskāra Section of Vasubandhu’s Pañcaskandhaka with Reference to Its Commentary by Sthiramati,” offers a detailed comparison of the enumerations and definitions of the saṃskāras as found in the Pañcaskandhaka with parallels from the Abhidharmakośa and the Abhidharmasamuccaya, thus beginning the rigorous analysis of the relations amongst these key abhidharma treatises. Readers should perhaps note that Kramer’s frequent use of the word “disagreement” does not often serve here to mark substantitive differences of opinion or understanding, but typically refers instead to differences of wording that do not involve significant distinctions of meaning.; cf. her own conclusions, where this point is clarified (p. 1032). “Yogācāra and Vajrayāna according to Ratnākaraśānti,” by Harunaga Isaacson, turns to the important, but so far poorly studied, issue of what appears to have been some degree of Yogācāra revival in late Indian Buddhism under the ægis of the rise of tantrism.
In Part iv, “The East Asian Yogācāra Reception,” three articles (Bing Chen, “Reflections on the Revival of Yogācāra in Modern Chinese Buddhism,” Eyal Aviv, “The Root that Nourishes the Branches: The Role of the Yogācārabhūmi in 20th-Century Chinese Scholastic Buddhism,” and Lawrence Y.K. Lau, “Chinese Scholarship on Yogācāra Buddhism since 1949”) concern aspects of Yogācāra in relation to developments in Chinese Buddhism during the past century, a topic that has been the object of increasing attention in recent years.8 The four contributions that follow (Sangyeob Cha, “The Yogācārabhūmi Meditation Doctrine of the ‘Nine Stages of Mental Abiding’ in East and Central Asian Buddhism,” A. Charles Muller, “The Contribution of the Yogācārabhūmi to the System of the Two Hindrances,”
Sungdoo Ahn, “Theories of the Darśanamārga in theYogācārabhūmi andTheir Chinese Interpretations,” and MakotoYoshimura, “The Wéishì School and the Buddha-Nature Debate in the Early Tang Dynasty”) treat topics in the YBh and broader Yogācāra thought in relation to their reception in medieval East Asia. The closing articles in this section deal, respectively, with recent Korean scholarship on Yogācāra (Seongcheol Kim, “A Brief History of Studies on the Yogācāra School in Modern Korea”) and a renowned Japanese scholar’s interpretations of the śāstrārambha of the Mahāyānasūtrālaṃkāra (Leslie S. Kawamura, “Gadjin M. Nagao on msa i.1 and i.2”). While Kawamura’s essay is of course of much interest for its presentation of the substance of Nagao’s readings of the two verses in question, its larger importance lies in its value as an illustration of Nagao’s methodology and the exemplary rigor that characterized his scholarly craft. The contributions of Lau and Kim may be noted in particular for the extensive bibiographies that accompany them (pp. 1137–1164, 1268–1295), providing essential resources for research on Yogācāra studies in contemporary China and Korea.
The fifth and final section of the volume, entitled “The Tibetan Yogācāra Reception,” begins with an essay by Dorji Wangchuk, “On the Status of the
Yogācāra School in Tibetan Buddhism,” succinctly surveying the treatment of Yogācāra in Tibetan doxographical literature. In “Yogācāra in the Writings of the Eleventh-Century Rnying ma Scholar Rong zom Chos kyi bzang po,” Orna Almogi turns to a major figure in the development of the Rnying-ma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, providing thorough readings of his discussions of Yogācāra as culled from a variety of his works. “All Mind, No Text—All Text,
No Mind: Tracing Yogācāra in the Early Bka’ brgyud Literature of Dags po”
8 See, in particular, John Makeham, ed., Transforming Consciousness: Yogācāra Thought in Modern China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); and idem., trans., Xiong Shili, New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). by the editor Ulrich Timme Kragh examines the corpus of writings forming the Collected Works of the early Bka’-brgyud master Sgam-po-pa Bsod-namsrin-chen (1079–1153)—but in fact, as Kragh has shown elsewhere,9 mostly to be attributed to disciples and successors—with a view to ferreting out the Yogācāra elements that may be identified within them. Leonard W.J. van der Kuijp’s “Notes on Jñānamitra’s Commentary on the Abhidharmasamuccaya” concerns the transmission history one of the most influential works relating to the YBh corpus in Tibet, the Abhidharmasamuccaya, but with reference to the apparently unavailable commentary by an obscure Indian author named Jñānamitra. Van der Kuijp’s abundant references to the commentarial history of the Abhidharmasamuccaya in Tibet, however, make this a valuable contribution to our knowledge of its Tibetan reception overall.
It may be remarked that, despite the positive value of these four contributions to Tibetan Buddhist studies, the place of the YBh itself within Tibetan Buddhism is relatively little engaged here, though it is discussed to some extent by Kragh (pp. 245–246, 1362–1369). This seems unfortunate, for, while contemporary scholars of Buddhism have ready access to general information on the transmission and diffusion of the YBh in East Asia, its history in Tibetan Buddhist milieux remains more obscure. To have addressed this issue adequately would have required fuller attention to Bka’-gdams-pa sources than we find here, as well as consideration of the reception of the YBh among scholars of the Jo-nang-pa and Dge-lugs-pa schools. In all events, to fill this lacuna remains a task for the future.
Without quibbling over the details of a volume that very successfully brings extensive new resources to the fore, we may nevertheless briefly note that the book’s utility might have been (and still might be) enhanced in some respects. The editor himself (p. 20) mentions the desirability of an index, which indeed would present the best means to fully valorize the rich contents of the work. However, to avoid the time and expense involved in preparing a print index, and also to provide an even more useful reference tool, mounting a searchable version of the volume online would be the ideal solution.
Additionally, there are several other ways in which simple digital technology might be employed to better facilitate the use of the research contained here. A notable example is seen in Yamabe’s extensive tabulation of parallel passages between the Manobhūmi and the *Yogācārabhūmi of Saṃgharakṣa (pp. 606–
9 Tibetan Yoga and Mysticism: A Textual Study of the Yogas of Nāropa and Mahāmudrā MeditationintheMedievalTraditionof Dagspo, Studia Philologica Buddhica Monograph Series xxxii (Tokyo: The International Institute for Buddhist Studies, 2015).
733), which, as mentioned above, includes parallels from other works as well. This is very awkward to consult practically in its present, printed form, which requires turning the volume sideways and perusing over a hundred pages of tabulated text. A searchable electronic version, however, would present an elegant means to realize the full value of the considerable labor that Yamabe has expended here. In a similar vein, one may observe, as noted by the editor (p. 19), that each article is accompanied by a separate bibliography, though it would have been a relatively easy task to have have merged them all into one comprehensive file at the end of the work. However, the utility of the essays of Delhey, Lau and Kim as distinct topical bibliographies perhaps argues in favor of the editor’s decision to retain separate lists of references.
Such relatively minor points aside, the editor and his collaborators have our heartfelt felicitations for their exceptional efforts, truly gambhīrodāra, which, taken together, clearly define and further advance the state of the Yogācāra Studies field. Matthew T. Kapstein École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris and, The University of Chicago m-kapstein@uchicago.edu
