The lineage

Where the teaching comes from

These Fifty Verses did not appear from nowhere. They stand at the end of a long line of teachers, each of whom received the teaching, lived it, and passed it on renewed. Thầy traces that line himself, at the close of the book, in an afterword he called The Sources of the Fifty Verses.¹ What follows is that story, in brief.

See also The Fifty Verses and, on the Teachings page, Thầy teaching Vasubandhu’s Thirty Verses — the root text the Fifty extend.

Three streams, one river

Indian Buddhism is usually described in three great periods: Original Buddhism, the Many-Schools period, and the Mahāyāna, the Great Vehicle. The Fifty Verses carry something from all three.¹ They reach back to the Abhidharma of the Pāli Canon and forward to Mahāyāna scriptures such as the Avataṃsaka (Flower Ornament) Sūtra.²

The Abhidharma: a first map of the mind

After the Buddha’s lifetime, his students faced the task of gathering and ordering what he had taught. The Abhidharma — the “higher” or “super” Dharma — was the first great attempt, and Buddhist psychology grows directly out of it.¹ In the fifth century the monk Buddhaghosa composed the Visuddhimagga (The Path of Purification); around the same time a brilliant scholar named Vasubandhu compiled the Abhidharma-kośa, the Treasury of the Abhidharma — still one of the most respected summaries of this early analysis of mind.¹

Two brothers: Asaṅga and Vasubandhu

In the fourth to fifth century CE, in Gandhāra (near present-day Peshawar), lived two half-brothers who would shape everything that followed.¹⁴ Asaṅga, the elder, was a Mahāyāna monk and scholar; his Summary of the Great Vehicle (Mahāyāna-saṃgraha) laid the groundwork of the new psychology, and tradition tells that he received his deepest teachings from the bodhisattva Maitreya.⁴ Vasubandhu, the younger, was at first a master of the older Abhidharma who doubted that the Mahāyāna was authentic Buddhism. The story goes that one full-moon night, walking in meditation, he came upon Asaṅga beside a clear pond chanting the Mahāyāna teachings — and in that moment his understanding broke open. From then on, the book tells us, “the two brothers practiced and taught Mahayana Buddhism together.”¹

“Manifestation Only”

Vasubandhu became the patriarch of the school that grew out of this meeting — the Vijñānavāda, or Yogācāra.¹⁶ Yogācāra means “the practice of yoga,” that is, of meditation: the school studied the mind not merely to analyse it but to transform it.¹ Vasubandhu gave it its root texts, the Twenty Verses and the Thirty Verses on the Manifestation of Consciousness — the direct ancestor of the Fifty we study.¹⁵ Thầy prefers to call the school “Manifestation Only” (vijñapti-mātra) rather than the usual “Mind Only” or “Consciousness Only,” because those names are so easily mistaken for a kind of idealism — as if only the mind were real. The teaching is subtler than that: mind and its object always arise together.¹

The masters of Nālandā

After Vasubandhu the teaching passed through a line of great commentators — Sthiramati; then Dignāga, who wove in logic and the study of perception; and Dharmapāla.¹ Their work was gathered and taught at Nālandā, the vast monastic university in what is now Bihar, where the pilgrim Xuanzang would later count ten thousand monks in study.¹⁷ Its rector, Śīlabhadra, was by then said to be a hundred years old — the last of the ten illustrious “doctors” of the school, of whom Vasubandhu had been the first.¹

Xuanzang, the Pilgrim

In the seventh century a Chinese monk, Xuanzang (600–664), made the long overland journey to India expressly to study these teachings at their source.¹⁶ At Nālandā he studied Manifestation Only under Śīlabhadra, then carried the texts home to China. There he founded the Wei Shi (“Consciousness Only”) school and wrote its foundational commentary, the Cheng Wei Shi Lun.¹⁶ He also composed a short poem on the “three realms of perception” — which Thầy places, with gratitude, inside Verse 24 of the Fifty.¹

Fazang and the flower ornament

A generation later the monk Fazang (643–712), a master of the Avataṃsaka Sūtra, brought its great vision into the system — “one is all, and all is one,” the image of Indra’s net, in which every jewel reflects every other.¹³ This is the interbeing and interpenetration that surfaces in Verses 13 and 14 of the Fifty.³ After Fazang, Thầy notes, few carried the work forward, and the Thirty Verses came to be read as dry analysis, without their living Mahāyāna heart.¹

Into Vietnam, and to Thầy

The stream reached Vietnam early. Master Tăng Hội, the first Zen teacher in the country, likened the mind to an ocean into which all our experience flows like a thousand rivers.² Centuries later the Zen master Thường Chiếu said simply, “When we understand how our mind works, the practice becomes easy.”² As a young novice, Thầy studied Vasubandhu’s Twenty and Thirty Verses in Chinese; in the mid-1960s he taught this psychology at Vạn Hạnh Buddhist University; and in 1990 he composed the Fifty Verses — first published as Transformation at the Base — to carry the teaching into plain, practicable language.² He kept Vasubandhu’s structure, deepened the ground of store consciousness, added a whole path of practice, and returned the realms of existence to where they belong: states of our own mind, here and now.¹

The Fifty Verses here are my attempt to continue to polish the precious gems offered by the Buddha, Vasubandhu, Sthiramati, Xuanzang, Fazang, and others.

— Thich Nhat Hanh, Understanding Our Mind¹

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