Argument
Vasubandhu
Overview
Vasubandhu (traditional Chinese: 世親; ; pinyin: Shìqīn; Tibetan: དབྱིག་གཉེན་ Wylie: dbyig gnyen; fl. 4th to 5th century CE) was an influential Indian Buddhist monk and scholar. He was a philosopher who wrote commentary on the Abhidharma, from the perspectives of the Sarvastivada and Sautrāntika schools. After his conversion to Mahayana Buddhism, along with his half-brother, Asanga, he was also one of the main founders of the Yogacara school.
Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakośakārikā ("Commentary on the Treasury of the Abhidharma") is widely used in Tibetan and East Asian Buddhism, as the major source for non-Mahayana Abhidharma philosophy. His philosophical verse works set forth the standard for the Indian Yogacara metaphysics of "appearance only" (vijñapti-mātra), which has been described as a form of "epistemological idealism", phenomenology and close to Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism. Apart from this, he wrote several commentaries, works on logic, argumentation and devotional poetry.
Vasubandhu is one of the most influential thinkers in the Indian Buddhist philosophical tradition. Because of their association with Nalanda university, Vasubandhu and Asanga are amongst the so-called Seventeen Nalanda Masters. In Jōdo Shinshū, he is considered the Second Patriarch; in Chan Buddhism, he is the 21st Patriarch.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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There are two kinds of beauty; free beauty (_pulchritudo vaga_) or merely dependent beauty (_pulchritudo adhaerens_). The first presupposes no concept of what the object ought to be; the second does presuppose such a concept and the perfection of the object in accordance therewith. The first is called the (self-subsistent) beauty of this or that thing; the second, as dependent upon a concept (conditioned beauty), is…
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
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144. But, nothing seems more to have contributed towards engaging men in controversies and mistakes with regard to the nature and operations of the mind, than the being used to speak of those things in terms borrowed from sensible ideas. For example, the will is termed the motion of the soul; this infuses a belief that the mind of man is as a ball in motion, impelled and determined by the objects of sense, as…
George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
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For this reason, too, it is a legend universally believed, that Pythagoras, for instance, received his Philosophy from India and Egypt; the fame of the wisdom of these people, which wisdom is understood also to contain Philosophy, is an old one. The Oriental ideas and religious worship which prevailed throughout the West up to the time of the Roman Empire, likewise bear the name of Oriental Philosophy. The Christian…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy
States what Vasubandhu is.
Philosophers who discussed Vasubandhu
Related ideas
- Ātman (Hinduism)
- Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra
- George Berkeley
- Ishvara
- Mahayana-sutra-alamkara-karika
- Abhidharmakośa-bhāsya
- Buddhist logico-epistemology
- Dignāga
- Two truths doctrine
- Immanuel Kant
- Vaibhāṣika
- Idealism
- Japan
- Karma
- Soteriology
- Sarvastivada
- Skandha
- Dharmakirti
- Monism
- Pure Land Buddhism
- Nalanda mahavihara
- Indian logic
- Xuanzang
- Nirvana
Place in the tradition
Part of Atheism.