The Summary of the Great Vehicle is perhaps the most representative text of the Yogacara school of Mahayana Buddhism. Yogacara, together with Madhyamika, laid the foundation for subsequent Mahayana thinking.
[...] The Summary presents the classic argument for the basic Yogacara themes on conscious interiority, attempting to reinterpret within this context the general Mahayana teachings of emptiness and dependent co-arising. The entire Yogacara endeavor, it would appear, is aimed at evolving a critical understanding of consciousness that would ground the Prajnaparamita (and Madhyamika) insistence on emptiness within a critically understood notion of the structure and functioning of conscious interiority. It then proceeds to explain the etiology of imaginative illusion, sketch its reversal by offering an explanation of the nature of conversion, champion the recovered insight into dependent co-arising in terms of the converted other-dependent pattern of consciousness, and thus allow for a valid, if limited, role for language-formed, conventional discourse, both commonsense and theoretical.
The Summary of The Great Vehicle, Asanga, Translated from Chinese by John P. Keenan, Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, Hardcover, 160 pages, $25.00
John P. Keenan is Professor Emeritus of Religion at Middlebury College and vicar of St. Nicholas Episcopal Church in Scarborough, Maine.
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