A great Mahayana Buddhist is Asanga (lit., unbound) who lived in what is now Kandahara in Afghanistan around the 4th century CE (some argue the 5th century). There is a great deal of myth that makes up his biography so that it is difficult for modern scholars to separate historical fact from myth. According to tradition, after a great spiritual struggle, eventually Asanga, ascending to Tusita heaven, was able to receive and master five teachings directly from Bodhisattva Maitreya, the future Buddha (I suspect this was an invention by Asanga to give this own spiritual attainment credibility). Of course, modern scholars have different theories which I won’t dive into except to say the works attributed to Asanga or Maitreya or Maitreyanatha are worth our time to study.
It is believed that both Asanga and his younger brother, Vasubandhu, were behind the development of Yogacara ‘the practice of yoga’ (also called Vijñânavâda) which could be argued is almost indistinguishable from Advaita Vedanta (non-dualistic Vedanta).
Asanga wants us to understand that our subjective world and the objective world, out there, are at bottom constituted of Mind. In this respect, their seeming duality is illusory. When we remove the subject/object representations (vijñapti) what is left is formless and far from any subject/object representation. In this spiritual vision, ordinary things familiar to us like mountains and rivers; even our ordinary thoughts and emotions, while seeming to be different and unique, are not beyond Mind, being in this respect only name & form (namarupa). Asanga also speaks of gaining one’s atman or Self which is pure (shudda).
“In the pure removing, the Buddhas have always found a way by their non-self, obtaining the purity of the self [shuddhâtmâ] and arriving at the greateness of self [mahâtmâ]” ( Mahâyânasûtralamkara IX, 23).
According to Asanga, this purity of Self is the real meaning of empty or shunya. We are not to conclude that empty means nothing, but that the purity of Self is completely empty of perturbations or disturbances which occlude it. We might think of Self, like pure Mind, to be a pure field. Such a pure, empty reality, according to Asanga, pervades the world like space. This, by the way, is not a metaphyscical theory—it can be realized by means of yoga.
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