Rethinking Idealism and Ineffability in Vasubandhu's Twenty Verses, Thirty Verses and Treatise on the Three Natures

Use of the term “idealism” in relation to Vasubhandu’s Twenty Verses (Vimśikā), Thirty Verses (Triṃśikā) and Treatise on the Three Natures (Trisvabhāvanirdeśa) has provoked abundant controversy. In this paper I endorse the view that the term “idealist” applies to Vasubandhu insofar as his citta-mātratā theory constitutes a variant of epistemic idealism—the view that all knowables are mental—along with the related view that Vasubandhu is only an epistemic idealist “in the realm of conventions” (Gold 2011, 125). By this I mean that the mental construction of all appearances as of mind-independent objects is not, for Vasubandhu, equivalent to the nature of ultimate reality. I mean also that Vasubandhu does not positively argue for the non-existence of anything not-mind-only at either the conventional or at the ultimate level of analysis. I will attempt to avoid the pitfalls of presupposing that “early Yogācāra was a homogenous and distinctly defined doxographical entity” (Tzohar 2018, 14) to which the concept deployed in the term “idealism” does or does not correspond, by narrowing the scope of my paper to analysis of Vasubandhu’s language in the Vimśikā, the Triṃśikā, and the Trisvabhāvanirdeśa and to evaluation of Jonathan Gold (2011; 2015) and Amber Carpenter’s (2014) commentaries.