Vasubandhu

Half brother to Asanga, the founder of the Yogacara movement in Mahayana Buddhism, Vasubandhu started his life as a proponent of the Sarvastivadan Buddhist realists. However, he was later converted by his brother to the Mahayana tradition. Throughout his life, a prolific author he contributed both to Buddhist scholasticism and Yogacara thought which left an indelible imprint on all later East Asian Buddhism.

[@shabreenbakthur7906]

hey there, ima great fan of your vids, how r u doing these days? any new plans to upload?

[@laurentlorenzo4843]

Awesome!

[@nephewheshh]

Greatly appreciate this video!

[@FoolishMusings]

No worries, glad you enjoyed the video!

[@enterthevoidIi]

Great video! Thank you.

[@FoolishMusings]

No worries, thank you!

[@vanesacorrea4698]

Thanx for the video. Didn't realized before that some Buddhist use to believe that there was a god who created the universe

[@2tehnik]

Wouldn't there still need to be "a self" that unifies all the mental elements? Sort of like the Kantian 'I think.'
I don't see how throwing a bunch of things onto a pile could lead to something that believes itself to be a self unless there were a synthesizing element that put those things together.
And if substances are immutable, how can they self-destruct? Isn't that simply changing into "non-being"?

[@FoolishMusings]

Hey 2tehnik,
Regarding anatman I think what Vasubandhu and earlier Buddhist thinkers are arguing is in experiencing these mental elements (the experiencing aspect in the Buddhist system of psychology simply being another sense) we misperceive them as a contiguous whole rather than discrete phenomena, similar to how the mind misperceives the splicing of still drawings as movement in animation. Once this misperception has occurred we further misconstrue this conceptual whole as immutable - giving rise to the idea of an unchanging self above and beyond these phenomena.
Regarding universal momentariness, I think Vasubandhu is trying to solve a problem brought about by his division of unreal and real objects - being causality. Because a non-object is non-existent it follows in Vasubandhu’s thinking that destruction cannot be caused by other phenomena, because that would terminate in an unreal non-being. Thus the innate tendency to self destruction is his way of trying to solve this problem. Thus the substance is immutable in that it is unchanged for its singular moment of existence - and after having caused the creation of the next phenomena in the chain simply ceases to be.