ABSTRACT
The Yogācārins, 163 the second large school of Mahāyāna thought, developed slowly from the second century AD onwards, reached the height of their productivity in the fourth century with a large number of works attributed to Vasubandhu and Asanga, and then for some centuries continued to produce a great variety of ideas. During the fourth century the Yogācārins were great systematizers, and in viewing their literary productions we must not lose sight of their encyclopedic intentions. A great deal of what they wrote consisted in just ‘working up’ traditional fields of knowledge, such as the Abhidharma 834 or the Prajñāpāramitā, 835 or in giving a definitive form to traditional concepts like the ten ‘stages’, or the three ‘bodies’ of the Buddha (cf. pp. 232 sq.). Much that is usually attributed to them is Sautrāntika or Mahiśāsaka doctrine with a slight Mahāyāna slant. In this chapter we are not concerned with the Yogācārin works which just absorb traditional views, adding a slight sectarian tinge to them here and there, 836 but only with the distinctive basic ideas of this school.
