Abhisamayalankara - Ancillary Topics

Ancillary Topics

Tibetan tradition identifies (in Obermiller's words) "173 forms of the Bodhisattva's yoga as realizing respectively the 173 aspects (of the 3 forms of Omniscience)." These 173 aspects are described extensively in the fourth chapter of the AA.

Obermiller, describing the curriculum of Drepung's (’Bras spungs) Go mang college, reports that the monks studied the AA in a four-year sequence (after certain preliminary subjects); and that each class also studied a prescribed "secondary subject" (zur-bkol) for that year:

First class: Introduction to the AA as well as the special topic, the "Twenty Sangha."

Second class: Finished through the seventh topic of the first AA chapter; the supplementary topic was dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda)

Third class: Finished the first AA chapter and continued; also studied the Yogacara theory of the storehouse consciousness (ālāyavijñāna), and the difference between definitive and interpretable scripture as taught by Mādhyamaka and Yogācāra.

Fourth class: Focused on the fourth chapter of the AA ("which is regarded as the most difficult"), supplemented with "the teaching about the four degrees of trance in the sphere of Etherial Bodies...and the four degrees of mystic absorption in the Immaterial Sphere." The fourth-year students would conclude with a celebratory feast.

Obermiller adds that "All these studies are conducted in the form of lectures which are accompanied by controversies between the different groups of students according to the method of 'sequence and reason' (thal-phyir)."