The Wei-shih-san-shih-lun-sung (Vijnaptimatrataridasastrakarika, Treatise in Thirty Verses on Mere-Consciousness) is a Chinese version by Hsuan-tsang, the great Chinese scholar and traveller, of the Sanskrit text of the Trimsikakarikas of Vasubandhu. The Trimsika sums up the essentials of the Yogacara-Vijnanavada school of Buddhist thought in thirty verses. Ten Indian Yogacara teachers including Dharmapala elaborated them in their commentaries on the Trimsika. Of those commentaries only Sthiramati's work is available in Sanskrit and the rest are lost now. Hsuan-tsang summarized the interpretations of all the ten commentaries following the line of Dharmapala in his masterpiece, the Ch'eng-wei-shih-lun (Vijnaptimatratasiddhisastra, Treatise on the Establishment of the Doctrine of Mere-consciousness). The present volume consists of a critical translation of the Wei-shih-san-shih-lun, a comprehensive translation of the Ch'eng-wei-shih-lun along with a summary of the text, and a comparison of the Sanskrit and Chinese commentaries of Sthiramati and Dharmapala.

The book explores the developments and the various implications of the doctrine of Mere-consciousness. It aims at the evaluation and reconstruction of the patterns of Buddhist idealism in India and China from the Sanskrit and Chinese sources of the first comprehensive translation and interpretation of the basic Yogacara-Vijnanavada texts preserved in Chinese.

Treatise in Thirty Verses on Mere-Consciousness, Swati Ganguly, Motilal, Hardcover, 271 pages, $20.00

Swati Ganguly is Professor of English at the Department of English, Visva-Bharati. Her interests include Rabindranath Tagore and his times, European Renaissance, feminist studies, women's writing, translation studies and theatre. She received the Charles Wallace Fellowship for translation studies in 1996, and has translated and co-edited The Stream Within (1999) compiling contemporary Bengali women�s short stories. She has also co-edited two anthologies of essays on Rabindranath Tagore. She writes fiction in Bengali and is an occasional painter. She is the co-founder of Ebong Alaap, a non-profit society based in Kolkata focussing on education and gender.