Abhisamayalankara

Abhisamayalankara

The Abhisamaya-alaṅkāra ("Ornament of/for Realization"), abbreviated AA, is one of five Sanskrit-language Mahāyāna Buddhist scriptures which Maitreya--a Buddha or bodhisattva (the point is somewhat controversial)--is said to have revealed to Asaṅga (northwest India, 4th century). Some scholars (Erich Frauwallner, Giuseppe Tucci, Hakiju Ui) refer to the text's author as Maitreyanātha ("Lord Maitreya") in order to avoid either affirming the claim of supernatural revelation, or identifying the author as Asaṅga himself. (Perhaps "Maitreya" was the name of Asaṅga's human teacher.)

The AA is never mentioned by the translator Xuanzang, who spent several years at Nalanda in India during the early 7th century, and became a savant in the Maitreya-Asaṅga tradition. One possible explanation is that the text is in fact later, and was attributed to Maitreya-Asaṅga for purposes of legitimacy. The question then hinges on the dating of the earliest extant AA commentary, that of Arya Vimuktisena.

The AA contains nine chapters and 273 verses. Its pithy contents summarize—in the form of eight categories and seventy topics—the Prajñāpāramitā ("Perfection of Wisdom," abbreviated PP) Sūtras which the Mādhyamika school of Buddhism regards as presenting the ultimate truth. Gareth Sparham and John Makransky believe the text to be commenting on the version in 25,000 lines, although it does not explicitly say so. Haribhadra, whose commentary is based on the 8,000-line PP Sūtra, held that the AA is commenting on all PP versions at once, and this interpretation has generally prevailed within the commentarial tradition. Thrangu Rinpoche clarifies that usually the PP Sūtras in 100,000, 25,000, and 8000 lines are meant (the "three Mothers"), but that the category might be expanded to a total of 17 texts (the "six Mothers and eleven Sons").

Several scholars liken the AA to a "table of contents" for the PP. Edward Conze admits that the correspondence between these numbered topics, and the contents of the PP is "not always easy to see..."; and that the fit is accomplished "not without some violence" to the text. The AA is widely held to reflect the hidden meaning (sbed don) of the PP, with the implication being that its details are not found there explicitly. (Sparham traces this tradition to Haribhadra's student Dharmamitra.) One noteworthy effect is to recast PP texts as path literature. Philosophical differences may also be identified. Conze and Makransky see the AA as an attempt to reinterpret the PP, associated with Mādhyamika tenets, in the direction of Yogācāra.

The AA is studied by all lineages of Tibetan Buddhism, and is one of five principal works studied in the geshe curriculum of the major Gelugpa monasteries. Its commentaries are probably the most extensive and influential source of certain doctrines, such as the Ten Grounds (bhumi), the Five Paths (marga), and the Three (or Four) Buddha-Bodies (kaya). Alexander Berzin has suggested that the text's prominence in the Tibetan tradition, but not elsewhere, may be due to the existence of the aforementioned commentary by Haribhadra, who was the disciple of Shantarakshita (an influential early Indian Buddhist missionary to Tibet).

Tsongkhapa's writings name the AA as the root text of the lamrim tradition founded by Atisha. Geshe Georges Dreyfus reports that

"Ge-luk monastic universities... take the Ornament as the central text for the study of the path; they treat it as a kind of Buddhist encyclopedia, read in the light of commentaries by Dzong-ka-ba, Gyel-tsap, and the authors of manuals . Sometimes these commentaries spin out elaborate digressions from a single word of the Ornament."

Dreyfus adds that non-Gelug schools give less emphasis to the AA, but study a somewhat larger number of works (including the other texts of the Maitreya-Asaṅga corpus) in correspondingly less detail.

Note on spelling variations: The compound title Abhisamayālaṅkāra may be separated as Abhisamaya-alaṅkāra. Stripped of diacriticals, the second element may either be spelled -alankara or -alamkara, with the "n" or "m" representing the transliterated letter ṅ (an n with a superscribed dot) and sound ng.