ABSTRACT
Rhe fourth- or fifth-century Indian scholar Vasubandhu is among the best-known and most influential of Buddhist philosophers, but he is also extremely controversial and difficult to pin down. His scholarship is hounded on the one side by issues of dating and attribution, and on the other side by controversies over how to characterize his mature, Yogācāra philosophy (Frauwallner 1951, Jaini 1958, Schmithausen 1967, Skilling 2000, Kritzer 2003, Gold 2011). This set of mainly philological problems has tended to slow the development of interpretive, philosophical studies of Vasubandhu’s works. If we compare the number of books and articles on the philosophy of Nāgārjuna (ca. 150–250) to those on Vasubandhu, for instance, one would think that the importance of the latter paled in comparison to that of the former. But that is by no means the case.
