Vasubandhu (4th-5th century)

A single complete biography, late and legendary

Unlike much later figures, Vasubandhu left no autobiography, nor any strictly contemporary testimony. The only complete biography to have come down to us is the work of the monk and translator Paramartha (499-569), one of the great architects of the implantation of Yogacara in China, who wrote the Life of Master Vasubandhu (Posoupandou fashi zhuan) in Chinese more than a century after his subject's death^[1]. This text, preserved in the Chinese Buddhist canon, was translated and studied by the Japanese orientalist Junjiro Takakusu in 1904 in the journal T'oung Pao^[2]. It remains, to this day, the narrative framework of every modern biography of Vasubandhu.

A second source, later and of a different kind, is the travel account of the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang (602-664), who visited India between 629 and 645 and reported information on the places connected with Vasubandhu, notably at Ayodhya^[3]. The two traditions — Paramartha's and Xuanzang's — do not always agree on the chronology of events, which obliges the historian to constant caution^[4].

One or two Vasubandhus? The Frauwallner debate

The most discussed question in modern research on Vasubandhu concerns his very identity. In 1951, the Austrian Indologist Erich Frauwallner published a study that overturned the traditional consensus: according to him, the ancient biographies had merged two distinct persons bearing the same name — a "Vasubandhu the elder", brother of Asanga and author of the Yogacara treatises, active c. 320-380, and a "Vasubandhu the younger", author of the Abhidharmakosha, active slightly later, c. 400-480^[5].

This thesis was first discussed by the Japanologist Hajime Sakurabe as early as 1952-1953, then refuted in detail by the Indian-born American Indologist Padmanabh S. Jaini in a landmark article published in 1958 in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies^[6]. Jaini shows in particular that an anonymous treatise, the Abhidharmadipa — written precisely to criticize the Abhidharmakosha — unambiguously designates one and the same Vasubandhu as the author of both corpora, Abhidharma and Yogacara^[7]. The American philosopher Dan Lusthaus has since reinforced this conclusion by showing that Vasubandhu's thought, taken as a whole, displays a coherent intellectual progression — from a critical realist scholasticism towards an idealism of consciousness — more plausible in a single thinker evolving with age than in two independent homonymous authors^[8]. Contemporary research, summarized by the philosopher Jonathan C. Gold in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, now regards the "two Vasubandhus" thesis as largely abandoned^[9].

A chronology centred on the Gupta age

Freed from the doubling hypothesis, the dating of Vasubandhu nevertheless remains approximate, for lack of absolute reference points. Paramartha reports that, in his old age, he was the instructor of the crown prince and the queen at the court of a king called "Vikramaditya", whom research most often identifies with the Gupta emperor Chandragupta II (reign c. 380-415)^[10]. This reference places Vasubandhu's mature activity at the turn of the 4th and 5th centuries, which matches the title traditionally adopted for this article: Vasubandhu (4th-5th century). The precise dates of birth and death, by contrast, vary considerably from author to author — from about 316-396 to about 350-430 — and none can be held certain^[11].

Three brothers of Purusapura

According to Paramartha's biography, three brothers were born at Purusapura (present-day Peshawar), capital of the kingdom of Gandhara, sons of a Brahmin father named Kaushika^[12]. The eldest, Asanga, one of the greatest spiritual masters of Buddhist India, withdrew very early into monastic life; the youngest, Virincivatsa, also became a monk, but left few traces in the history of thought^[13]. Vasubandhu, the middle brother, directly inherited the family name and was, according to tradition, the one of the three brothers who deployed the most systematic philosophical intelligence^[14].

Training in the Sarvastivada and secret journey to Kashmir

Vasubandhu first entered the order of the Sarvastivada school, one of the great monastic schools of north-western India, in its most rigorous branch, the Vaibhashika, whose intellectual centre lay in Kashmir^[15]. But the detailed teaching of the Mahavibhasha — the great commentary which fixed Vaibhashika orthodoxy — was traditionally reserved for Kashmiri monks, and kept secret from outsiders^[16]. Vasubandhu is said to have travelled there under an assumed name, in order to receive this formation forbidden to monks from elsewhere, from the master Skandhila (transcribed in Chinese as Sai-chien-ti-lo), himself the author of an orthodox treatise, the Abhidharmavatara^[17].

Legend has it that Skandhila, perceiving through meditation his brilliant pupil's true foreign origin, urged him to leave Kashmir discreetly before his fellow students — including the formidable Samghabhadra — discovered the ruse and sought to harm him^[18]. Back in Gandhara, Vasubandhu began to teach publicly the system he had just learned, going so far as to challenge anyone to contradict him at the end of each lesson^[19].

The Abhidharmakosha and the quarrel with Samghabhadra

From this teaching were born the root verses of the Abhidharmakosha ("Treasury of the Abhidharma"), so faithful a summary of Kashmiri Vaibhashika orthodoxy that the masters of Kashmir, on receiving the text, at first sincerely rejoiced in it^[20]. But Vasubandhu then composed his own prose commentary (bhashya) on these same verses — and, in this commentary, he systematically criticized the very system he had just summarized, defending on many points the rival position of the Sautrantika school^[21]. The disappointment of the Kashmiri Vaibhashikas matched their initial enthusiasm.

The most brilliant defender of Kashmiri orthodoxy, Samghabhadra, replied with an immense treatise, the Nyayanusara ("In Accordance with Correct Reasoning"), devoted entirely to refuting, point by point, Vasubandhu's Sautrantika criticisms^[22]. According to tradition, Samghabhadra himself came to seek out Vasubandhu for a public debate; but the latter, already engaged in deep contemplative practice, is said to have declined the confrontation — an episode which Buddhist biographers read as a sign of spiritual detachment rather than intellectual defeat^[23].

The conversion to the Mahayana

According to Paramartha's account, Asanga — by then a great master of the Mahayana — grew concerned to see his brilliant younger brother devoting all his talent to combating the doctrine of the Great Vehicle, which he then judged incoherent^[24]. Rather than confronting him himself, Asanga sent disciples to recite in secret, within Vasubandhu's hearing, major Mahayanist texts — notably the Dashabhumika-sutra and the Akshayamatinirdesha-sutra^[25]. Overwhelmed by the depth of these teachings he had hitherto despised, Vasubandhu is said to have gone to his brother, seized with remorse at having, through his attacks, delayed the spread of a doctrine he now recognized as true.

"I formerly did harm speaking ill (of the truth) by means of my tongue. I will now cut out my tongue in order to atone for my crime." — Vasubandhu, according to Paramartha's Life of Vasubandhu^[26]

Asanga dissuaded him with a reply that has remained famous in the Yogacara tradition:

"Your tongue was able to speak very skillfully and effectively against the Mahayana, and thus discredit it. If you want to wipe out your offence, you must now propound the Mahayana equally skillfully and effectively." — Asanga, according to Paramartha's Life of Vasubandhu^[27]

This conversion — which cannot be dated precisely, but which tradition places in Vasubandhu's maturity — marks the decisive turning point of his work: from a critical commentator on the Abhidharma, he becomes, with Asanga, one of the two founders of Yogacara philosophy^[28].

The last years and death at Ayodhya

Having become, according to Paramartha, the preceptor of the crown prince and the queen at the court of "Vikramaditya", Vasubandhu spent his last decades composing most of his Mahayanist corpus and commenting on the treatises of his brother and of Maitreyanatha, before dying at an advanced age in the city of Ayodhya, in northern India^[29]. The sources diverge on his exact age at death — some recensions speak of eighty years, others of an even greater age — which once again illustrates the limits of a biography composed more than a century after the facts^[30].

A summa and its own critique

The Abhidharmakoshakarika ("Root Verses of the Treasury of the Abhidharma") and its commentary, the Abhidharmakoshabhashya, form one of the monuments of Indian Buddhist scholasticism: some six hundred stanzas organizing into a coherent system the analysis of the constitutive factors of experience (dharma), Buddhist cosmology, the theory of karma and rebirths, and the path of purification leading to Awakening^[31]. The work has the extremely rare characteristic of first loyally expounding a doctrine (Kashmiri Vaibhashika), then subjecting it to close critical examination in the name of a rival school (the Sautrantika) — a procedure which makes it, in the eyes of modern logicians, a model of philosophical dialectic^[32].

The text was translated in full into French by the Belgian orientalist Louis de La Vallée Poussin, in a monumental undertaking carried out between 1923 and 1931 for the Belgian Society of Oriental Studies^[33]. This translation, reissued in 1971 in an anastatic edition prefaced by the Indologist Étienne Lamotte, remains the reference in the French language^[34]. More than any other work, it made the argumentative finesse of Indian Buddhist scholasticism known to the French-speaking learned world.

The Twenty Stanzas: refuting the existence of the external world

The first great treatise of Vasubandhu's Mahayanist period, the Vimshatika ("Twenty Stanzas"), opens with an affirmation which alone sums up the whole Yogacara programme:

"All this is consciousness-only, because of the appearance of non-existent objects — just as a man afflicted with a disorder of vision perceives hairs, flies, and other such things, which do not exist." — Vasubandhu, Vimshatika, stanza 1^[35]

In the twenty stanzas that follow and in his own prose commentary, Vasubandhu refutes one by one the arguments which, in his view, might establish the existence of material objects really external to the consciousness perceiving them — notably the argument that several persons perceive the same object in the same place, or that dreams produce no real effects whereas "waking" objects do^[36]. Vasubandhu replies that the intersubjective coherence of perceptions and their real causal effects are sufficiently explained by the common structure and the "seeds" (bija) stored in each being's stream of consciousness, without any need to postulate a material world separate from consciousness^[37]. The original Sanskrit text of the Twenty Stanzas, lost for centuries, was rediscovered in Nepal by the French Indologist Sylvain Lévi in 1922, then edited for the first time in 1925 with the commentary of Master Sthiramati^[38].

The Thirty Stanzas and the alayavijnana

Vasubandhu's last great work, the Trimshika ("Thirty Stanzas"), carries the analysis further by describing the complete structure of consciousness according to Yogacara: not a single consciousness, but eight distinct consciousnesses — the five sensory consciousnesses, the mental consciousness, the self-consciousness (manas) which deludes itself by clinging to the eighth as to a "self", and finally the alayavijnana, the "store-consciousness", the continuous substrate where the "seeds" (bija) from all past acts accumulate and from which future experiences sprout^[39]. This store-consciousness is not a permanent "self": it is itself an impermanent flux, changing at every instant, which makes it possible to explain the continuity of karma and personality without recourse to a substantial soul, in accordance with the fundamental Buddhist doctrine of anatman (non-self)^[40].

Vasubandhu died, according to tradition, before he could write the prose commentary on this ultimate text, leaving posterity to gloss it^[41]. Ten Indian commentators applied themselves to the task in the following centuries; two commentarial traditions became dominant, that of Sthiramati, preserved notably in Tibetan, and that of Dharmapala, which the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang brought back to China and which became, synthesized with the help of his disciple Kuiji, the foundation of the great Chinese treatise Cheng Weishi Lun ("Treatise Establishing the Doctrine of Consciousness-Only"), completed in 659^[42].

The three natures

A third brief but dense treatise, the Trisvabhavanirdesha ("Exposition of the Three Natures"), distinguishes three modes in which reality may be envisaged: the imagined nature (parikalpita) — the world as it falsely appears, external and substantial; the dependent nature (paratantra) — the real but conditioned flux of mental representations, produced by a chain of causes; and the absolutely perfected nature (parinishpanna) — the emptiness of all subject-object duality, directly grasped by the wisdom of Awakening^[43]. The exact attribution of this text to Vasubandhu, rather than to another author of his school, was discussed in detail by the sinologist and Tibetologist Matthew Kapstein in a 2018 study, which concludes on the contrary, for philosophical, philological and historical reasons, that the attribution of this text to Vasubandhu can no longer be maintained^[44].

A Buddhist idealism? A scholarly debate still open

Should Vasubandhu's philosophy be called "idealism", in the sense the term has carried in Western philosophy since Berkeley or Kant? The question divides contemporary specialists. Some, like the philosopher Thomas Kochumuttom, stress the nuances separating vijnaptimatra from an absolute idealism of the Hegelian type^[45]. Others point out that, whatever the terminological precautions, Vasubandhu's practical conclusion remains unambiguous: no material object exists independently of the mind perceiving it^[46]. It is precisely this point, and not the technical vocabulary surrounding it, that interests the Catholic reader concerned to compare this doctrine with the Christian realism of knowledge — a question addressed further on in this article.

The commentaries on Asanga and Maitreyanatha

After his conversion, Vasubandhu devoted a large part of his activity to commenting on the great treatises attributed to his brother Asanga and to the mysterious master Maitreyanatha (whom Tibetan tradition identifies with the future Buddha Maitreya himself): the Madhyantavibhaga ("Distinction of the Middle and the Extremes"), the Mahayanasutralamkara and Asanga's Mahayanasamgraha ("Compendium of the Great Vehicle")^[47]. He also wrote a commentary on the Dashabhumika-sutra, the sutra of the ten bodhisattva stages, as well as on several major sutras of the Mahayanist canon, including the Diamond Sutra^[48]. This work as a commentator, less original than his personal treatises, was decisive for the later diffusion and systematization of the Yogacara corpus in East Asia.

The second patriarch of the Pure Land

A text attributed to Vasubandhu, the Discourse on the Pure Land (reconstructed Sanskrit Sukhavativyuhopadesha, Chinese Jingtǔ lun), comments on the great Sutra of Infinite Life and expounds a method of contemplation in five gates for obtaining rebirth in the Pure Land of the Buddha Amitabha^[49]. Translated into Chinese in the 6th century by the Indian monk Bodhiruci, this short treatise became one of the founding texts of Pure Land Buddhism in China, then in Japan^[50].

In Japan, the great reformer Shinran (1173-1263), founder of Jodo Shinshu — today one of the country's most important Buddhist schools — places Vasubandhu, under the name of Tenjin, second among the seven patriarchs of his spiritual lineage in his doctrinal hymn, the Shoshinge, immediately after Nagarjuna and before the Chinese masters Tanluan, Daochuo and Shandao^[51]. Shinran's very name combines, according to tradition, the character "shin" borrowed from Vasubandhu's Japanese name (Seshin) and the character "ran" borrowed from Tanluan's — a sign of the importance the reformer attached to this heritage^[52]. One and the same historical figure is thus venerated, under two distinct Japanese names (Seshin for the Hosso school, Tenjin for the Pure Land), in two Buddhist traditions which, in the Far East, are nonetheless quite distinct.

Xuanzang, Nalanda and the Faxiang school

Tibet: one of the Six Ornaments

Tibet received Vasubandhu's entire corpus through the great Indo-Tibetan translations of the 8th-13th centuries, integrated into the canon of commentaries (bsTan-'gyur)^[53]. Tibetan tradition ranks Vasubandhu, alongside Nagarjuna, Aryadeva, Asanga, Dignaga and Dharmakirti, among the "Six Ornaments who illumine the world" (Jambudvipa, the southern continent of Buddhist cosmology), six commentators whose doctrinal authority is judged almost equal to that of the sutras themselves^[54]. In this scheme, Nagarjuna and Asanga are the two founders — of the Middle Way (Madhyamaka) and the Vast Way (Yogacara) respectively — while Aryadeva and Vasubandhu are, according to tradition, their two principal disciples and systematizers^[55].

What the Church can recognize: intelligence placed at truth's service

The Second Vatican Council teaches:

"The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions [...]. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from what she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men." — Second Vatican Council, Nostra Aetate, § 2^[56]

This teaching applies fully to Vasubandhu: his logical rigour, his capacity for self-criticism — he does not hesitate to dismantle, in his own commentary, the very system he has just expounded — and his constant concern for intellectual coherence testify to a demanding use of reason, which the Church can salute as an authentic seed of the Word (semina Verbi) sown by Providence at the heart of human cultures^[57]. Nor does such an article need to duplicate what has already been established, concerning Buddhism in general, in the article devoted to the Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha: readers seeking the complete magisterial framework (Nostra Aetate, Dominus Iesus, the Magisterium's cautions) will usefully refer to it.

An idealism at odds with Christian realism

Where the article on the Buddha deals first with the question of the creator God and salvation, this one must confront a more strictly philosophical difficulty, peculiar to Vasubandhu: his doctrine of vijnaptimatra denies that material objects really exist independently of the consciousness perceiving them. Yet Christian philosophy, heir to Aristotle through Saint Thomas Aquinas, holds on the contrary that the human intellect truly knows an external world existing independently of it, through the data of the senses from which it abstracts the intelligible^[58]. This moderate realism is no mere technical detail of medieval scholasticism: it conditions the whole of Christian anthropology, for it grounds the very possibility of a creation truly distinct from God, which man can know, love and cultivate without its dissolving into a mere projection of his mind.

Vasubandhu's objection against realism — the coherence of perceptions among several subjects could be explained without any real external world, by the mere common structure of the "seeds" of each stream of consciousness^[59] — is of genuine logical skill, which it would be dishonest to minimize. But it rests on a presupposition which is itself never demonstrated: that the most economical explanation must necessarily be preferred to the most natural one. Common sense, the causal coherence of the perceived world, and the very possibility of rational dialogue between several distinct subjects are more simply explained by the existence of a truly common world than by an invisible coordination of streams of consciousness closed in on themselves — which is precisely the classic difficulty, in West as in East, of every radical idealism.

The absence of a substantial soul: the question of the subject

The second difficulty, graver still for a Catholic reader, concerns the alayavijnana. Vasubandhu builds a system of remarkable elegance to explain the continuity of the person and of karma without ever positing a substantial "self": in his system, it is only an impermanent flux of consciousness, like a current with no fixed banks^[60]. Yet the Church teaches on the contrary, in line with the whole biblical and patristic tradition, that every human being possesses an immortal spiritual soul, created directly by God and destined to subsist after death:

"The Church teaches that every spiritual soul is immediately created by God — it is not 'produced' by the parents — and also that it is immortal." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 366^[61]

Where Yogacara explains the persistence of the person by a mere causal chaining of moments of consciousness with no permanent subject, the Catholic faith affirms a real subject, unique and personally loved by God, called not to dissolve into an impersonal flux but to rise again body and soul. This difference is no mere doctrinal detail among others: it touches the most intimate question of all spiritual life — who seeks God, who prays, and who, in the end, will be saved.

An irreducible difference over salvation

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith recalls that non-Christian religious traditions, however true and good some of their intuitions may be, also contain "gaps, insufficiencies and errors"^[62]:

"Jesus Christ is the universal mediator and redeemer [...]. There is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved (Acts 4:12)." — Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Iesus, § 11 and § 13^[63]

In Vasubandhu's case, this insufficiency can be identified with rare clarity: a system which begins by denying the independent reality of the external world and ends by negating every substantial subject cannot, by its very structure, lead to the loving encounter between two real persons — the Creator and the creature — which constitutes, for Christianity, the very essence of salvation. The methodical contemplation proposed by Yogacara, of undeniable interior demandingness, thus remains an asceticism with no counterpart, where Christian prayer has always been a dialogue.

Vasubandhu remains a fascinating figure through the power of his intelligence: capable of summarizing with unmatched precision the very system he was about to demolish, capable then of rebuilding, from nothing, a psychology of consciousness of extraordinary finesse. His trajectory — from a critical scholasticism towards an ever more radical interior contemplation — invites Christians to a salutary question: do they, too, take seriously the examination of their own consciousness, the tracking down of the illusions and attachments that distort their view of the world?

But where Vasubandhu, at the end of his journey, dissolves the external world into consciousness and the subject itself into an impersonal flux, Christians receive from Revelation a twofold certainty which no introspection, however fine, could have discovered by its own powers: the world is really created, distinct from God and worthy of being known and loved for itself; and the human soul is a unique person, called by name, loved from all eternity, and destined not to fade out in an impersonal current but to contemplate, in the resurrection, the very face of Him who created it (cf. 1 Cor 13:12).

• Junjiro Takakusu (trans.), "The Life of Vasubandhu by Paramartha", T'oung Pao, vol. 5, 1904, pp. 269-296 — translation of the only complete biography preserved.
• Erich Frauwallner, On the Date of the Buddhist Master of the Law Vasubandhu, Rome, Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente (Serie Orientale Roma III), 1951 — the study that launched the "two Vasubandhus" debate.
• Padmanabh S. Jaini, "On the Theory of Two Vasubandhus", Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, vol. 21, no. 1, 1958, pp. 48-53 — the reference refutation.
• Louis de La Vallée Poussin (trans.), L'Abhidharmakosha de Vasubandhu, Paris, Paul Geuthner, 6 vols., 1923-1931; new anastatic ed. presented by Étienne Lamotte, Brussels, Belgian Institute of Advanced Chinese Studies, 1971 — the French reference translation.
• Sylvain Lévi (ed.), Vijnaptimatratasiddhi: deux traités de Vasubandhu, Paris, Honoré Champion, 1925 — princeps edition of the Sanskrit text of the Twenty and Thirty Stanzas.
• Stefan Anacker, Seven Works of Vasubandhu: The Buddhist Psychological Doctor, Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass, 1984 (repr. 2005) — annotated English translation of the principal treatises.
• Jonathan C. Gold, "Vasubandhu", in Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Autumn 2025 edition — the reference academic synthesis.
• Second Vatican Council, Nostra Aetate (1965) and Ad Gentes (1965); Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Iesus (2000) — the magisterial framework of the Catholic view.
• See also the Ignispedia articles on Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha and Asanga.