Āryāsaṅga

Āryāsaṅga or Asaṅga (Sanskrit: असङ्ग) was a major exponent of the Yogācāra tradition in India. He and his half-brother Vasubandhu are regarded as the founders of this school. Current scholarship places him in the fourth century CE. However, Mme. Blavatsky argues that he lived before the Common Era:

Aryâsanga was a pre-Christian Adept and founder of a Buddhist esoteric school, though Csoma di Köros places him, for some reasons of his own, in the seventh century A.D. There was another Aryâsanga, who lived during the first centuries of our era and the Hungarian scholar most probably confuses the two.

She elaborated on this as follows:

Âryasangha (Sk.). The Founder of the first Yogâchârya School. This Arhat, a direct disciple of Gautama, the Buddha, is most unaccountably mixed up and confounded with a personage of the same name, who is said to have lived in Ayôdhya (Oude) about the fifth or sixth century of our era, and taught Tântrika worship in addition to the Yogâchârya system. Those who sought to make it popular, claimed that lie was the same Âryasangha, that had been a follower of Sâkyamuni, and that he was 1,000 years old. Internal evidence alone is sufficient to show that the works written by him and translated about the year 600 of our era, works full of Tantra worship, ritualism, and tenets followed now considerably by the “red-cap” sects in Sikhim, Bhutan, and Little Tibet, cannot be the same as the lofty system of the early Yogâchârya school of pure Buddhism, which is neither northern nor southern, but absolutely esoteric. Though none of the genunine Yogâchârya books (the Narjol chodpa) have ever been made public or marketable, yet one. finds in the Yogâchârya Bhûmi Shâstra of the pseudo-Âryasanaha a great deal from the older system, into the tenets of which he may have been initiated. It is, however, so mixed up with Sivaism and Tantrika magic and superstitions, that the work defeats its own end, notwithstanding its remarkable dialectical subtilty. How unreliable are the conclusions at which our Orientalists arrive, and how contradictory the dates assigned by them, may be seen in the case in hand. While Csoma de Körös (who, by-the-bye, never became acquainted with the Gelukpa (yellow-caps), but got all his information from “red-cap” lamas of the Borderland), places the pseudo-Âryasangha in the seventh century of our era; Wassiljew, who passed most of his life in China, proves him to have lived much earlier; and Wilson (see Roy. As. Soc., Vol. VI., p. 240), speaking of the period when Âryasangha’s works, which are still extant in Sanskrit, were written, believes it now “established, that they have been written at the latest, from a century and a half before, to as much after, the era of Christianity”. At all events since it is beyond dispute that the Mahayana religious works were all written far before Âryasangha's time-whether he lived in the “second century B.C.”, or the “seventh A.D.”--and that these contain all and far more of the fundamental tenets of the Yogâchârya system, so disfigured by the Ayôdhyan imitator--the inference is that there must exist somewhere a genuine rendering free from popular Sivaism and left-hand magic.

Asaṅga spent many years in serious meditation, during which time tradition says that he often visited Tuṣita Heaven to receive teachings from Maitreya Bodhisattva. The Tibetan tradition attributes authorship of the Ratnagotravibhaga to him. According to scholar David Reigle there is a certain connection between this text and the Stanzas of Dzyan.

Online resources

Articles

• Āryāsanga at Theosopedia
• Aryasanga at UniversalTheosophy.com