Asanga and Vasubandhu: The Founders of Yogacara

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 27 October 2026

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Asaṅga and Vasubandhu, Indian monks who probably lived in the fourth or fifth century CE, are the founders of Yogācāra, the Mahayana school of “consciousness-only” (vijñaptimātra). The four traditional accounts described below all make them brothers. Asaṅga taught the system, which tradition says came to him from the bodhisattva Maitreya. Vasubandhu, the younger brother, wrote its classic short treatises. Nearly everything told of their lives comes from later sacred biographies, which disagree with one another.

Who were Asaṅga and Vasubandhu?

Four old accounts tell their story, none of them contemporary with the brothers:

• Paramārtha’s Biography of Dharma Master Vasubandhu (Taishō 2049), credited to the Indian translator Paramārtha (499–569), who worked in China. K. T. S. Sarao (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy) calls it “the only complete account”; its BDK translator, Albert Dalia, notes its “sense of the extraordinary”.
• Xuanzang’s Record of the Western Regions, completed in 646, which sets down what Xuanzang was told near Ayodhyā.
• Bu-ston’s History of Buddhism, by the Tibetan scholar Bu-ston (1290–1364), from the fourteenth century.
• Tāranātha’s History of Buddhism in India, by Tāranātha (born 1575), from the early seventeenth century.

They agree on a core. Asaṅga was the elder, and Vasubandhu trained in the Sarvāstivāda, mastered its Abhidharma, and only later turned to the Mahayana. Xuanzang makes Asaṅga a native of Gandhāra, and Paramārtha names Vasubandhu’s city as Puruṣapura, which Sarao identifies with modern Peshawar; the two Tibetan histories give no birthplace.

They differ on much else. In Paramārtha, a brahmin of the Kauśika clan has three sons, all named Vasubandhu. The eldest becomes Asaṅga, the youngest is known as Viriñcivatsa, and the middle son is simply Vasubandhu. Bu-ston and Tāranātha instead make Asaṅga and Vasubandhu half-brothers by one mother (Prasannaśīlā in Obermiller’s Bu-ston, Prakāśaśīlā in Tāranātha’s translators), with a kṣatriya father for Asaṅga and a brahmin father for Vasubandhu. Paramārtha has Asaṅga first ordained as a Sarvāstivādin; Xuanzang makes him a monk of the Mahīśāsaka school.

Jonathan Gold (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) notes that the “mythologized, hagiographic character of the traditional biographies, together with the (disputed) belief that they contradict one another” has led a number of modern scholars to doubt their veracity.

When did they live? The “two Vasubandhus”

No date is settled. The proposals Sarao lists for Vasubandhu run from 270–350 CE to 420–500 CE. Some scholars put him in the fourth century: Anacker (316–396), Ui Hakuju (320–400), the BDK translators John Keenan and Inagaki Hisao (both about 320–400), and Christian Coseru (320–380). Others put him in the fifth: Takakusu and Kimura (420–500) and Hikata (400–480). Dalia reports that recent study favours the fifth. Gold writes “4th to 5th century” and calls the dating “contested”. For Asaṅga, Keenan gives ca. 310–390 and Coseru ca. 315–390.

Behind the dates lies a larger question. In 1951 Erich Frauwallner proposed two Vasubandhus, an elder of about 320–380 and a younger of about 400–480 (Sarao’s figures), whom the biographies merged into one man. The two encyclopedias disagree about where that debate stands:

• Gold (SEP, 2021): versions of the theory “hold sway in some areas of the academy”. Others see gradual development rather than a sudden conversion; Robert Kritzer and colleagues argue he was “secretly an advocate of Yogācāra all along”. “No narrative of Vasubandhu’s intellectual development has achieved scholarly consensus.”
• Sarao (IEP): the hypothesis is “no longer tenable in current scholarship”, because many of the early Chinese documents Frauwallner used are spurious.

Asaṅga and Maitreya: three versions of the story

Each source tells Asaṅga’s meeting with the future Buddha its own way; here they are as the biographies tell them.

Paramārtha (sixth century). Unable to penetrate emptiness (śūnyatā), Asaṅga was taught the Hinayana meditation on it by the arhat Piṇḍola, but his mind was still not at peace. By supernormal power he went up to Tuṣita heaven, where Maitreya taught him the Mahayana meditation; he then took the name Asaṅga, “without attachment”. Later, at his prayer, Maitreya came down at night and recited the Yogācārabhūmi, the “Sutra of the Seventeen Bhūmis”. It took “the nights of four months”, and only Asaṅga could come close to him.

Xuanzang (646). At a monastery in a mango grove near Ayodhyā, the pilgrim was told of Asaṅga: “At night he ascended to the place of Maitreya Bodhisattva in [Tuṣita] Heaven” to learn the Yogācārabhūmi, the Mahāyānasūtrālaṃkāra and the Madhyāntavibhāga, and lectured on them by day (trans. Li Rongxi).

Bu-ston (fourteenth century). Asaṅga meditated in a cave on Kukkuṭapāda mountain. Twice he gave up and was sent back by what he saw: after three years, an old man making needles by rubbing an iron bar with cotton; after six more, a rock worn away by water drops and birds’ wings. After twelve years he left in grief and found a dog whose lower body was eaten by worms. To save both, he cut flesh from his own body to draw the worms onto it, then shut his eyes and was about to lift them off with his tongue when the dog vanished and Maitreya stood before him: “I was here from the very beginning, but thou couldst not see me, owing to thy own obscurations. Now, as great Commiseration has become originated in thee, thou hast got purified and canst now behold me” (trans. E. Obermiller). At Maitreya’s bidding Asaṅga carried him on his shoulder to show him to people, and no one else could see him. Holding Maitreya’s robe, Asaṅga then rose to Tuṣita heaven. Tāranātha differs in detail: four periods of three years, and a bitch met in a city. He adds that when Asaṅga carried Maitreya through the city, others saw nothing; a woman wine-seller saw him carrying a puppy, and a poor porter saw only the toes.

The twelve years and the dog come from the Tibetan histories; neither Chinese source tells them.

Vasubandhu’s conversion and the tongue

In Paramārtha’s account Vasubandhu first won fame with the Abhidharmakośa (“Treasury of Abhidharma”); Bu-ston instead has him compose it after his conversion. Its verses, Gold notes, summarise the Kashmiri Vaibhāṣika school, while in his own commentary the Sautrāntika view tends to win the day, though even there, Gold adds, Vaibhāṣika views are often left unchallenged. (The work itself is covered on our Abhidharma page.) In the biographies Vasubandhu also scorned the Mahayana, and three of the accounts each tell differently how Asaṅga won him over:

• Paramārtha: Asaṅga sends a messenger to Ayodhyā: “I am now seriously ill.” The illness, he tells his brother, is in his heart, and Vasubandhu’s slander of the Mahayana caused it. Vasubandhu repents and offers to cut out his tongue. Asaṅga answers that he should “skillfully [use it] to expound the Mahayana” instead (trans. Dalia).
• Xuanzang: Asaṅga sends a disciple, who stays outside Vasubandhu’s lodging and at night recites the Daśabhūmika, the sutra of the ten bhūmis. Vasubandhu takes up a knife to cut off his tongue and sees Asaṅga appear before him, asking, “What would be the benefit of becoming mute?” The apparition vanishes, and Vasubandhu goes to study the Mahayana with his brother (trans. Li Rongxi).
• Bu-ston: Vasubandhu mocks his brother: twelve years of meditation had won him nothing but a system so burdensome “That it can be carried only by an elephant” (trans. Obermiller). Asaṅga sends two pupils with the Daśabhūmika and the Akṣayamatinirdeśa for Vasubandhu to recite morning and evening. By daybreak he is convinced, and he looks for a razor to cut out his tongue.

The endings differ too. Paramārtha has Asaṅga die first and Vasubandhu die at eighty in Ayodhyā; Xuanzang has Vasubandhu die first and return from Tuṣita to tell his brother; Bu-ston has him die in Nepal.

Their works

Asaṅga

• Mahāyānasaṃgraha (“Summary of the Great Vehicle”), which Keenan calls “perhaps the most representative text of the Yogācāra school”. Keenan notes that Paramārtha’s Chinese translation of 563 added passages on buddha-nature found in no other version.
• Abhidharmasamuccaya, a summary of Abhidharma that Bu-ston calls common to all three vehicles.
• Yogācārabhūmi, the vast “Stages of Yoga Practice”. Coseru calls it “most likely a compilation by various authors”.

The texts that tradition attributes to Maitreya show how far the traditions differ. Bu-ston lists five: the Sūtrālaṃkāra, Madhyāntavibhāga, Dharmadharmatāvibhāga, Uttaratantra and Abhisamayālaṃkāra, and counts the Yogācārabhūmi as Asaṅga’s own. The Chinese canon has it the other way round: the Yogācārabhūmi (T1579) is headed “spoken by the Bodhisattva Maitreya”, and the Mahāyānasūtrālaṃkāra (T1604) “composed by the Bodhisattva Asaṅga”.

Vasubandhu

• Abhidharmakośa with its own commentary (bhāṣya), described above and on our Abhidharma page; among much else it argues at length against a lasting self, the teaching of non-self.
• The Yogācāra syntheses: the Twenty Verses with his own commentary, the Thirty Verses, and the Three Natures Exposition. Gold notes that the Three Natures Exposition is quite different in style from his other works, though it follows logically from them philosophically, and that it or the Thirty Verses could be misattributed.
• Shorter treatises, among them the Karmasiddhiprakaraṇa, which adds a defence of the storehouse consciousness to his account of karma, and the Vyākhyāyukti, which defends the Mahayana sutras.
• Commentaries on three of the Maitreya texts, on the Mahāyānasaṃgraha and on the Daśabhūmika, and the Discourse on the Pure Land (see below).

Gold adds that “many scholars are skeptical as to the unity of the authorship even of the works listed”.

The core ideas of Yogācāra

Consciousness-only

In Gold’s translation from the Sanskrit, the Twenty Verses opens: “Everything in the three realms is only appearance (vijñaptimātra).” For Vasubandhu, Gold stresses, “mind” (citta) and “appearance” (vijñapti) are synonyms, so “mind only” does not mean made of mental rather than physical stuff: “It is to be a false construction by a deluded mind.” Against objections he offers examples: dream objects seem fixed in place and time, beings in hell share one hallucination of their tormentors, and a dream can have physical effects. He then argues that partless atoms cannot make up the objects we seem to perceive.

The storehouse consciousness and its seeds

Yogācāra places beneath the active mind the ālayavijñāna, the “storehouse” consciousness. In Francis Cook’s translation of the Thirty Verses (from Xuanzang’s Chinese), it is the “holder of all seeds” (bīja), and it “always evolves like a flowing stream, And is abandoned in the state of arhat.” Each morally significant act, Gold explains, plants new seeds that later ripen as experience. Sarao adds that the idea let Vasubandhu account for continuity, after deep sleep and between lives, and for the working of karma, with no need for a permanent self (ātman) as doer and receiver. (How other schools answer the same question is set out on karma in Buddhism.)

The eight consciousnesses

The Thirty Verses counts eight kinds of consciousness:

• One to five: the five sense consciousnesses.
• Six: the mental consciousness (mano-vijñāna), Sarao’s “empirical consciousness”.
• Seven: manas, a “self-aggrandizing mentality” (Sarao), “always associated with four passions: Delusion about self, view of self, Self-conceit, and love of self” (trans. Cook).
• Eight: the storehouse consciousness.

From these the verses draw their conclusion:

The three natures

Yogācāra describes everything under three “natures” (trisvabhāva). The fabricated (parikalpita) is how things appear to us, as selves and objects. The dependent (paratantra) is the process of construction, arising from causes. The perfected (pariniṣpanna) is the absence of the fabricated within the dependent. In Vasubandhu’s telling, Gold writes, they are “one reality viewed from three distinct angles”. The Three Natures Exposition gives the famous image of a conjurer who makes a piece of wood look like an elephant:

Transformation of the basis

The path ends in what the Thirty Verses call āśraya-parāvṛtti, the “transmutation of the support”. Cook describes it as a deep change in ordinary consciousness that ends delusion and yields “the awakened perception of a Buddha”.

Is Yogācāra idealism?

Scholars disagree, largely over what “idealism” should mean:

• Gold: the Twenty Verses “defends at least some form of idealism”, but Vasubandhu is “an idealist, but only in the realm of conventions”; ultimately he affirms that reality is beyond words. Gold suggests “conventionalist idealism” and compares Kant.
• Kochumuttom and Lusthaus, as Gold reports them: Thomas Kochumuttom (1982) argued that Vasubandhu should not be called an idealist; Dan Lusthaus calls him an “epistemological idealist” and Yogācāra a phenomenology.
• Cook: “the teaching of consciousness only is not a species of philosophical idealism”. Keenan says the Mahāyānasaṃgraha presents it “not as a subjective idealism”.
• Sarao (IEP): “Vasubandhu does not deny that cognitive objects exist”; what he denies is that they have external reference points.
• Madhyamaka critics, as Richard Hayes reports them, presented it as “a kind of subjective idealism”.

Yogācāra and Madhyamaka

Yogācāra grew up beside the Madhyamaka of Nāgārjuna. Early Mādhyamikas, Hayes writes, tended to refute it, and Gold notes that Bhāviveka, Candrakīrti and Śāntideva all charged it with making mind a new “ultimate”. Gold replies that Vasubandhu’s position “is clearly intended to elude such a critique”, and that read this way he is “much closer to Madhyamaka philosophy than is ordinarily assumed”. Later Mādhyamikas, Hayes adds, found room for Yogācāra. Śāntarakṣita, who went to Tibet in about 763, treated mind-only as a stage on the way to Madhyamaka; in Hayes’s summary of his Madhyamakālaṃkāra (verses 92–93), one who has taken up both “rides the chariot of both systems as a single great vehicle”. Among the scriptures behind Yogācāra, Hayes names the Saṃdhinirmocana Sūtra as “one of the principal sources of the Yogācāra philosophy”. For mind-only in the sutras, see the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra.

What became of their thought

India. Coseru calls Yogācāra “the dominant philosophical school in India from the 5th through the 12th century”.

China and Japan. Sarao names three schools in China that grew from these works: the Dilun, from Vasubandhu’s commentary on the Daśabhūmika; the Shelun, from Paramārtha’s translation of the Mahāyānasaṃgraha; and the Faxiang of Xuanzang and his disciple Kuiji in the seventh century. Faxiang rests on Xuanzang’s Cheng weishi lun, which reads the Thirty Verses through ten Indian commentaries and in effect adopts Dharmapāla’s interpretation; Cook notes that scholars question whether that is what Vasubandhu meant. In Japan it became the Hossō school. Dalia adds that Chan was “heavily influenced by Vijñānavāda thought”.

Tibet. In Tibetan tenet-system study, Yogācāra appears as Cittamātra, “Mind Only”. Tsongkhapa, whose philosophy the Gelug tradition follows, ranks it below Madhyamaka. In his mature work, write Gareth Sparham and Chandra Chiara Ehm (SEP), he stated that Asaṅga’s Yogācāra is “distinct from, and less definitive than,” Nāgārjuna’s school, and gave the storehouse consciousness “only a heuristic value”. That is not the only Tibetan reading: Dolpopa of Jonang held that Nāgārjuna and Asaṅga share one philosophy, the “Great Middle Way”. Gold notes that Vasubandhu’s commentaries on the Maitreya texts are “still regularly studied in Tibetan educational settings”. (See the schools of Tibetan Buddhism.)

Zen. The Song-dynasty Jingde chuandeng lu lists a Vasubandhu (婆修盤頭) as the twenty-first Indian patriarch of Chan and Zen. But its life of him, born in Rājagṛha and dying under the Later Han, does not match the Vasubandhu of Paramārtha and Xuanzang.

Pure Land. Vasubandhu’s Discourse on the Pure Land, translated into Chinese by Bodhiruci, received a classic commentary from Tanluan (476–542), and Hōnen made it one of the four basic texts of his Jōdo-shū. Shinran listed Vasubandhu second, after Nāgārjuna, of the seven masters he honoured as his Pure Land lineage, whom Jōdo Shinshū counts as its Seven Patriarchs. In his Hymn of True Faith and Nembutsu Shinran writes that Vasubandhu “took refuge in the Tathāgata of Unhindered Light”, meaning Amitābha (trans. Inagaki Hisao).

The BDK English Tripiṭaka offers free translations of most of the texts quoted on this page. (For the brothers’ place among the great figures of the tradition, see the most influential Buddhist teachers.)