The Long ConversationA timeline of world philosophy

Philosopher

Xuanzang

602–664 CE

Also known as Hsüan-tsang

Buddhist monk who spent sixteen years travelling to and studying in India, brought hundreds of texts back to China, and with his disciple Kuiji founded the Consciousness-only (Faxiang) school.

Painting of a monk walking with a large pack frame on his back
Xuanzang on his journey to India: a Japanese painting of the fourteenth century, Kamakura period, made some seven centuries after his death. Tokyo National Museum.Unknown Japanese artist · Public domain · See the original

Xuanzang was born at the start of the Tang dynasty into a family of scholars, and had a Confucian education before following his elder brother into the Buddhist order; he became a monk at thirteen. Troubled by contradictions in the Buddhist texts available in China, he set out for India in 629, defying an imperial ban. He spent most of his years abroad at the great monastery of Nālandā, where its abbot, Śīlabhadra, initiated him into Yogācāra teaching, and he won renown in public debates before returning to Chang’an in 645 with hundreds of manuscripts.

He devoted the rest of his life to translating them with a team of more than twenty scholars, and dictated an account of his journey, the Records of the Western Regions, which later inspired the novel Journey to the West. With his disciple Kuiji he founded the Faxiang school, China’s form of Yogācāra. Its central text was his edited translation of commentaries on Vasubandhu’s Thirty Verses, which drew on ten earlier works. The school flourished for a time in the Tang but declined after the deaths of its founders.

Key ideas

Consciousness only
Only consciousness is real. What we take to be an outer world can never exist apart from the consciousness that knows it, and the everyday belief in external objects is a misconception that meditation can remove.
The store consciousness
Beneath the five sense consciousnesses and the mind lies a store consciousness (ālaya-vijñāna), of which we are unaware. It holds the karmic “seeds” left by thoughts and deeds, which later ripen into experience and give it its regularity.
A shared world from seeds
If each mind constructs its own objects, why do different people, with different bodies and senses, meet a common world? What appears alike to everyone comes from universal seeds in the store consciousness, and the differences from particular ones.
Three modes of being
Things exist in three ways, as mere fictions of false imagination, as relatively existing under certain conditions, and in the perfect mode of being. Once the store consciousness is purified of the split between subject and object, what remains is suchness, which is buddhahood.
Tradition
Chinese
Region
Chang'an, Tang China
Schools
Yogācāra

Influences

Influenced by

Xuanzang602–664 CE

Influenced

Influenced by

Xuanzang602–664 CE

Influenced

Where these links come from
  • Xuanzang drew on Vasubandhu. Source: Der Huey Lee, Xuanzang (Hsüan-tsang), Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • Wonhyo argued against Xuanzang. Source: Lucy Hyekyung Jee, Korean Buddhism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Key works

  • Records of the Western Regions of the Great Tang (Da Tang xiyu ji), 646 CE
  • Vijñaptimātratāsiddhi-śāstra, 659 CE

Terms on this page

ālaya-vijñāna
Store consciousness: in Yogācāra, the eighth and weightiest of the consciousnesses, which stores and coordinates everything reflected in the mind.

All terms in the glossary

Sources

  1. Der Huey Lee, Xuanzang (Hsüan-tsang), Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy