Ebook: On Knowing Reality: Tattvārtha Chapter of Asaṅga's Bodhisattvabhūmi

On Knowing Reality is the first English translation with commentary of a crucial chapter of the Bodhisattvabhūmi, composed in Sanskrit in the late fourth century by the philosopher-sage Asaṅga, founder of the Yogācāra school of Mahāyāna Buddhism. The chapter is the core of Asaṅga’s theoretical teachings: it deals with the central epistemological question of how to judge and validate knowledge and how confusions about “reality" arise. The Yogācāra school has long been considered by scholars, East and West, as advocating a fully idealistic view of reality. But Janice D. Willis argues that Asaṅga himself had no such intention, and that in fact he rejected idealism as forcefully as he rejected the notion that ordinary beings know things as they really are. Instead, the chapter “On Knowing Reality” shows that Asaṅga expounded voidness (śunyatā), rather than mind (citta), as the only absolute mode of being. He attempted to redefine śunyatā in a more positive way than had Nāgārjuna and other philosophers of the so-called “critical" school, setting up a philosophical scheme to mediate between inexpressible reality and the distortions of ideation and language. In addition to her translation and extensive commentary, Willis has written an introduction which describes the history of the text and of its author, discusses the place of the Yogacara school in Buddhist philosophical history, and interprets key terms in Asaṅga’s system. The result is a work of fundamental importance to the study of the Mahāyāna Buddhist tradition.