Mahāyānasaṃgraha


The Mahāyānasaṃgraha , or the Mahāyāna Compendium/Summary, is a key work of the Yogācāra school of Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy, attributed to Asanga. The MSg is a comprehensive work on the central doctrines and practices of the Yogacara school. It was translated into Chinese by Paramartha and became the central text of the Shelun school. Although no Sanskrit original has been found, the work survives in Tibetan and Chinese translations, together with commentaries. There are two commentaries to the work; Vasubandhu's Mahāyānasaṃgraha-bhāṣya and the Mahāyānasaṃgraha-panibandhana by Asvabhava.

Content

Asanga's Mahāyānasaṃgraha expounds the major doctrines of the Mahayana Yogacara school such as the ālayavijñāna, the 'three forms of existence', the five paths and the Dharmakaya.
In its first chapter, the compendium offers the most extensive analysis of the Yogacara concept of "storehouse consciousness" of any early Yogacara text. According to Asanga, this is a subliminal consciousness in which impressions from past experiences are stored as the seeds of future experiences. The active consciousness of present experience grows from these seeds. According to Asanga, humans are just this stream of consciousness formed from the ālayavijñāna and the "active consciousness" arising from it and planting new seeds in the storehouse consciousness.
The second chapter of the MSg is devoted to the doctrine of the 'three forms of existence' or 'three patterns'. This doctrine holds that all beings possess three patterns - the dependent, the imagined and the consummate. John Keenan explains the three patterns thus:
The most basic is the other dependent pattern, which, in a word, is the above structure of consciousness as co-arising in an interplay between the container and the active consciousnesses and in the interplay between image and insight in thinking. The imagined pattern is the failure to understand this basic structure and the consequent clinging to things as if they had enduring essences. Frozen at the presentation of images as essences, one mistakenly affirms the reality of things that are in their very being empty and nonexistent. All things are empty inasmuch as all the ideas that are projected in the imagined pattern are without essence. The perfected pattern, which Paramårtha renders as reality pattern, is the absence of imagining in the other dependent pattern and the consequent recovery of its basic nature as other-dependent.

Chapter three expounds the doctrine of representation only as a rejection of the subject-object dichotomy. Chapters four to nine are an overview of the Bodhisattva's advance through the practice of the paramitas and the stages of realization. Chapter ten discusses the nature of wisdom as related to the Trikaya doctrine.

Translations