Paving the Great Way: Vasubandhu's Unifying Buddhist Philosophy

The Indian monk Vasubandhu (fourth–fifth century C.E.) is one of Buddhism's most celebrated philosophers. Paving the Great Way draws together the key ideas from across his diverse writings. Vasubandhu unified seemingly incompatible intellectual and scriptural traditions and provided a crucial foundation for the development of Buddhist epistemology and the theorization of tantra. In Vasubandhu, the book reveals a surprisingly relevant philosophical position: a distinctive, Buddhist approach to knowledge, moral agency, and subjectivity, under a causal worldview in which the "self" is understood to be an illusion.

Featuring close studies of Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakosabhasya, Vyakhyayukti, Vimsatika, and Trisvabhavanirdesa, among other works, this book identifies recurrent treatments of causality and scriptural interpretation that unify distinct strands of thought under a single, coherent Buddhist philosophy