The Abhidharmakośakārikā or Verses on the Treasury of Abhidharma

The Abhidharmakośakārikā or Verses on the Treasury of Abhidharma is a key text on the Abhidharmawritten in Sanskritverse by Vasubandhuin the 4th or 5th century.[1]It summarizes the Sarvāstivādintenets in eight chapters with a total of around 600 verses. The text was widely respected and used by schools of Buddhismin India, Tibet and East Asia.

Vasubandhu wrote a commentary to this work called the Abhidharmakośabhāsya. In it, he critiques the interpretations of the Sarvāstivādins, Vaibhāṣikasand others of the tenets he presented in his previous work from a Sautrāntikaperspective.[2]This commentary includes an additional chapter in prose refuting the idea of the "person" (pudgala) favoured by some Buddhists of the Pudgalavadaschool. However, later Sarvāstivādin master Samghabhadra considered that he misrepresented their school in the process, and at this point designated Vasubandhu as a Sautrāntika(upholder of the sutras) rather than as an upholder of the Abhidharma.

The Sanskrit original of the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya was lost for centuries, and was known to scholarship only through Chinese and Tibetan translations. The work was of such importance to the history of Indian thought that in the 1930s, the great scholar Rāhula Sāṅkṛtyāyana(1893--1963) even re-translated the verses into Sanskrit, from Tibetan, and wrote his own Sanskrit commentary on them. However, during a subsequent visit to Tibet, Sāṅkṛtyāyana discovered an ancient palm-leaf manuscript of 367 leaves that contained not only Vasubandhu's verses, but his lost commentary.[3]In 1967 and then in a revised edition of 1975, Prof. P. Pradhan of Utkal Universityfinally published the original Sanskrit text of the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya, Vasubandhu's great work summarizing earlier traditions of the Vibhāṣā school of Buddhist philosophy.[4]

An English translation of the chapter titles, including the title of the 9th chapter of Vasubandhu's commentary, is:

Chapter four of the Kośa is devoted to a study of karma, and chapters two and five contain formulation as to the mechanism of fruition and retribution.[5]This became the main source of understanding of the perspective of early Buddhism for later Mahāyāna philosophers.[6]

Vasubandhu elaborates on the causes[note 1]and conditions[note 2]involved in the production of results,[note 3]karma being one source of causes and results, the "ripening cause" and "ripened result."[web 1]Generally speaking, the conditions can be thought of as auxiliary causes. Vasubhandhu draws from the earlier Sarvāstivādin Abhidharma treatises to establish an elaborate Buddhist etiologywith the following primary components:

The Abhidharmakośa-kārikā (the verses) and the Abhidharmakośa-bhāsya (the auto-commentary) were translated into Chinese in the 6th-century by Paramārtha(T1559). They were translated again in the 7th-century by Xuanzang(T1560 & T1558). Other translations and commentaries exist in Tibetan, Chinese, Classical Mongolianand Old Uyghur.

The verses and the commentary were first translated into a European language by Louis de La Vallée-Poussin, published in 1923-1931 in French, which is primarily based on Xuanzang's Chinese translation but also references the Sanskrit text, Paramārtha's Chinese translation, and the Tibetan.

Currently, three complete English translations exist. The first by Leo M. Pruden in 1988 and the second by Gelong Lodrö Sangpo in 2012 are both based on La Vallée-Poussin's French translation. The third by Masahiro Shōgaito in 2014 is a translation of the Uighur translation of Xuanzang's Chinese translation.

There are many commentaries written on this text, including an autocommentary by Master Vasubandhuentitled Abhidharmakoshabhasya. Vasubandhu's student Sthiramatiwrote the Tattvartha-tika (6th c. CE). The Nalandascholar Yasomitra (6th c. CE), also wrote a sub-commentary on the Abhidharmakoshabhasya, the Sputarth-abhidharmakosa-vyakhya.

Other scholars wrote commentaries on the Kosa to defend the Sarvastivadin tenets that Vasubandhu refutes in the text, these include the Nyayanusara (“In Accordance with the Truth”, by Samghabhadra, 5th c) and the Abhidharma-dipa (“Lamp of Abhidharma”, anonymous).

Dignaga's commentary, the Abhidharmakosa Vrtti Marmadipa also includes many sutra quotations.

Śamathadeva’s Abhidharmakośopāyikā-ṭīkā, (The Essential Companion to the ‘Treasury of the Abhidharma, Tib. Chos mngon paʼi mdzod kyi ʼgrel bshad nye bar mkho ba zhes bya ba, Derge no. 4094 / Peking no. 5595), is a handbook of the Abhidarmakosa that quotes passages from the MūlasarvāstivādaTripitaka.[9]

The First Dalai Lama, Gyalwa Gendun Drup (1391-1474) composed a commentary titled Illumination of the Path to Freedom.

Mikyö Dorje, 8th Karmapa Lama(1507-1554) also wrote a two volume commentary on this text.

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