Literary History of Sanskrit Buddhism

Nāgārjuna – 115
(Haraprasad Shastri, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal
Vol. 67, 1898, p. 175 ff.) Otherwise all that we know of Āryadeva is
from quotations in Sanskrit and from Tibetan and Chinese Buddhist
literature. Candrakīrti cites Śataka-Catuśataka and Śataka-śāstra of
Vallée-Poussin, pp. 16, 173, 552 and 393; also La Vallée-Poussin, Le
Museon, p. 236 ff., on the confusion of the name of Āryadeva with
Candrakīrti and the epithet of Nīlanetra and Kanadeva as attached
to Āryadeva, see N. Peri, Apropos de la date de Vasubandhu, p. 27 ff.
Extract from Bullétin de l'Ecole française d'Extrême Orient, xi,
1911).
Asaṅga
Asaṅga or Āryasaṅga was to the Yogācāra school of Mahāyāna
Buddhism what Nāgārjuna was to the Madhyamika sect. The
Yogācāra branch teaches Vijñānavāda, which is a doctrine that
nothing exists outside our consciousness which [95] consequently
repudiates Śūṇyavāda or the doctrine of the void equally with the
reality of the phenomenal world. But at the same time it admits in a
certain sense the Being contained in thought and consciousness. The
subtle Bodhi can be attained only by the Yogācāra, that is, he who
practices Yoga; and that, too, only gradually after the aspirant has
completed his career as a Bodhisattva in all the ten stages
(daśabhūmi). The practice of Yoga or mysticism which was already
not quite foreign to Hīnayāna Buddhism was reduced by Asaṅga to a
systematic connection with the Mahāyāna Buddhism. The principal
text of this doctrine is the Yogācārabhūmiśāstra, of which only one
part of the Bodhisattvabhūmi, is conserved in Sanskrit. The whole