Asanga- Buddhist FigureMortal"Master of Yogācāra"

Twelve Years of Fruitless Meditation

Asaṅga entered the caves of Kukkutāpāda mountain to meditate on Maitreya, the future Buddha residing in Tuṣita Heaven. According to the hagiographic tradition preserved by Paramārtha and later by Tāranātha, he meditated for three years without result and left in despair. Along the road he saw water dripping steadily on stone and wearing a groove in the rock. Realizing that persistence could penetrate anything, he returned. After three more years he left again, and saw a man making needles from iron bars by rubbing them patiently with cloth. He returned once more. After three more fruitless years he saw a bird's wings wearing a channel into a cliff face as it brushed against the stone. He returned for a final period.

After twelve years total without a vision of Maitreya, Asaṅga abandoned the cave for the last time, convinced his practice had failed entirely.

The Dog and the Bodhisattva

On the road, Asaṅga encountered a sick dog, its lower body rotting with maggots. Overcome with compassion, he wished to save both the dog and the maggots without killing either. He cut flesh from his own thigh to provide the maggots a new home, then bent to transfer them from the dog's wound using his tongue rather than his fingers, so as not to crush them. As he closed his eyes and leaned forward, the dog vanished. In its place stood Maitreya.

Asaṅga cried out: why had Maitreya waited so long? The bodhisattva replied that he had been present from the first day of meditation. Asaṅga's own karmic obscurations had prevented him from perceiving what had always been there. Only the supreme act of compassion toward the dying dog had cleared his vision at last. Maitreya then took Asaṅga to Tuṣita Heaven, where over the course of what seemed a single night but was years on earth, he transmitted the five great treatises that became the foundation of the Yogācāra school: the Yogācārabhūmi-śāstra, the Madhyānta-vibhāga, the Dharmadharmatā-vibhāga, the Mahāyānasūtrālaṃkāra, and the Abhisamayālaṃkāra.

Whether these works originated from a visionary experience or from Asaṅga's own scholarship, attributed to Maitreya for authority, remains debated by modern scholars. Within Buddhist tradition, the celestial transmission is the accepted account, and together with his brother Vasubandhu's later systematization, Asaṅga's reception of these teachings established consciousness-only (vijñaptimātra) philosophy as one of the two great pillars of Mahāyāna thought.