Vasubandhu wrote the standard textbook of one Buddhist school, then critiqued it in his own notes
Vasubandhu condensed the orthodox Sarvastivada system into a set of verses, then added a commentary that often picks those verses apart. Later, persuaded by his half-brother Asanga, he helped found the Yogacara school, whose idea that experience is appearance only has drawn comparisons with Kant.
He flourished in the 4th to 5th centuries CE, though sources disagree about his birthplace: Xuanzang says Gandhara, the Tibetan historian Buton says central India. His name means kinsman of abundance. He trained in the Sarvastivada school, dominant in Gandhara, went on to study in Kashmir, and also learned from a Sautrantika teacher named Manoratha, a rival school that would shape his doubts.
The result was the Treasury of the Abhidharma, which catalogues 75 basic factors of experience and lays out a whole system of meditation, cosmology, perception and rebirth. The Sarvastivadins held that phenomena exist in past, present and future alike; his commentary sides instead with the Sautrantika claim that each moment flashes into being, does its causal work and vanishes. The Treasury also argues against a creator god and mounts a long attack on the idea of a lasting self, treating the person as a convenient label for a stream of changing sensations and thoughts. It remains the main Abhidharma text in Tibetan and East Asian Buddhism.
After turning to Mahayana he wrote the Twenty Verses and Thirty Verses on consciousness only, the second becoming the basis for Xuanzang's central East Asian Yogacara treatise. To explain how karma carries across lifetimes, he described a storehouse consciousness holding karmic seeds. His Discourse on the Pure Land shaped East Asian Pure Land devotion; Jodo Shinshu counts him its second patriarch and Chan its 21st.
Tradition says he beat Samkhya philosophers in a debate before a Gupta king at Ayodhya, earning 300,000 gold pieces that he spent on monasteries and hospitals, and that he died there aged 100. The Buddhologist Erich Frauwallner proposed two separate men named Vasubandhu, but scholars such as Dan Lusthaus point to consistent style and vocabulary, and that theory has largely been dropped.
Source: Vasubandhu
