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Thirty Verses on Consciousness-Only

Trimsika

Vasubandhu·c. 360 CE·Sanskrit

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Thirty terse verses laying out the Yogacara teaching that the world is consciousness only: that mind, ripening from its own stored seeds, projects the objects it then mistakes for an external, solid reality. The companion to his vast Abhidharmakosha, it relocates the world from out there to in here.

All this — whatever is spoken of as a self or as things — is a transformation of consciousness. The transformation is threefold: the store-consciousness, ripening with all its seeds; the brooding mind that takes it for an I; and the awareness of the six kinds of objects.

Consciousness itself arises bearing the appearance of a grasped object and of a grasping self, as in a dream: there is no thing out there, and no one in here, apart from the appearing.

So long as consciousness does not stand firm in consciousness-only, so long the tendency to grasp at two will not cease. But when consciousness no longer apprehends any object, it stands in consciousness-only; and this is the supramundane knowledge, the revolution at the basis, the realm without defilement — blissful, liberated, the body of the great sage.

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