The Thirty Verses, or Treatise on the Thirty Verses on No More Nor Less than Representation Only, by Vasubandhu (316–396), is a concise and concentrated presentation of Yogācāra, the Yoga Practice School of the Mahāyāna. This text is a concise and concentrated presentation of Yogācāra, the Yoga Practice School of the Mahāyāna. Alongside Madhyamaka, Yogācāra investigates the conditions under which objects appear to consciousness and the transformations through which suffering, self-grasping, and liberation become possible.
The verses became canonical and, through Xuanzang’s Treatise on the Establishment of Consciousness-Only, formed the basis of the Chinese Faxiang interpretation of Yogācāra. In this later interpretation, Vasubandhu was often read as an ontological idealist, with the subject constituting the object.
The present commentary rejects this interpretation. It reconstructs early Yogācāra as a critical and phenomenological analysis of conscious life. “Consciousness-Only” does not mean that consciousness creates the world, but that sensate and mental objects always appear to a mind.
The commentary examines base-mind, afflictive self-consciousness, sensory and conceptual consciousness, conditioning, suffering, representation-only, and the three natures. It concludes with the stages through which Buddhist yoga transforms consciousness.
The volume also contains a Sanskrit transliteration and English and French translations of the thirty verses.
Thirty Verses
on Conscious Life