- Lived:
- c. 350–430 CE (dates contested; see below) · born in Puruṣapura — modern Peshawar, Pakistan; worked in Kashmir and the Gupta heartland, died reportedly in Ayodhyā
- Tradition:
- Indian Buddhist; master of the old Abhidharma schools, then — after a famous conversion — co-architect of Yogācāra, the "mind-only" school his brother Asaṅga founded
- The Big Idea:
- Consistency, shared experience, and real-world consequences do not prove there is a mind-independent world — everything you will ever encounter arrives as a construction of consciousness, and he argued the point with a rigor his opponents never matched.
- In their words:
- "This world is nothing but representation, since it appears as objects that do not exist — as a man with an eye disease sees hairs and flies that are not there." (a plain rendering of the Twenty Verses' opening)
- If you remember one thing:
- He was the greatest critic of the school he ended up joining — and instead of burning his old tools, he brought them with him. Philosophy remembers him twice: once for each side of the argument.