The Abhisamayalankara is one of the five works upon which the Yogacara school of later Buddhism is founded, and whose authorship is according to the Tibetan tradition, ascribed to Bodhisattava Maitreya, the future Buddha. This book is divided into 8 chapters. The first three deal with three kinds of Omniscience, the omniscience of the Mahayanistic Buddha (sarva-akara-jnata), the Omniscience of the Bodhisattva concerning the path (marga-jnata) and that kind of Omniscience which is attainable by the Hinayanistic Saint (sarva-jnata). This term of Omniscience, as applied to the Buddha carries a totally different connotation than in western religions. It simply means intelligible, non-sensuous, intuition, the direct presentation of the world sub specie aeternitatis. The next four chapters contains the four so called prayogas or ways of realisation of that omniscience. Finally the eighth chapter contains the doctrine of Buddha's cosmical body (dharmakaya), or of the disappearing that omniscience, or of the disappearing of the individuals in the monistic absolute.
The Sanskrit text of the Abhisamayalankara has been prepared from to Mss. of the Cambridge University Library. They are respectively referred to as Mss. A and B. The whole text of the Abhisamayalankara is moreover contained in Haribhadra's Aloka. It is referred to as Mss. C.
The Tibetan translation is the work of the great translator Ng Lodan-Seirab, with the collaboration of the Indian Pandit Amaragomin. |
