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Yogācārabhūmi - Foundations of Meditation Practice: The Manual of China's First Meditators
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 30 2026
Pages: 376
Weight: 1.11
Height: 0.78 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The Story of this book
Around the turn of the first and second centuries, in Gandhāra - the Buddhist northwest, where Greek art met Indian thought after Alexander's conquest - a Buddhist monk named Saṅgharakṣa, a near-contemporary of the poet Aśvaghoṣa, set down a complete, step-by-step course in how to meditate. Its Sanskrit title was the Yogācārabhūmi, the stages of one who practises yoga - a meditation manual. In 284 CE the great translator Dharmarakṣa carried it into Chinese, and it became one of the very first practical answers China ever received to a simple question: how, exactly, is this done?The tradition later flowering as Zen learned to sit from books like this one. Yet in seventeen centuries it was never put into English - until now.
This is that translation: the first complete English rendering of Saṅgharakṣa's Yogācārabhūmi - made to be read and used by anyone who actually meditates, and annotated for anyone who wants to know exactly where each teaching comes from.
What you will find inside- The counting of the breath - caught here near the moment of its making. The endnotes trace it across both the Pāli and the Chinese canons and show it appears nowhere in the early canon of either: a Gandhāran refinement, set down here among its earliest full statements anywhere.
- Loving-kindness, the guarding of the senses, the contemplation of death, and the sorting of meditators by temperament - the earliest such system known.
- The great chapter on emptiness and non-self, carried by the canon's most famous images: the mirage, the plantain with no core, the lute whose sound cannot be caught, the foam on the river.
- An unflinching tour of the hells, answered at once by a chapter of pure encouragement - for this book knows, as good teachers do, that fear must be handed on to gladness or it sours.
- The whole ascent to the arahant and the peace of a lamp gone out - and, bound in after it, as Mahāyāna became fashionable, a coda built on two of the Lotus Sūtra's greatest parables.
The English translation style is meant to teach a living practitioner, sentence by living sentence. Wherever the rendering goes beyond the letter, or leans on a parallel elsewhere in the canon, an endnote gives the literal wording, names the parallel and its exact location, and shows the translators reasoning. Some ninety canonical cross-references - in Pāli, Sanskrit, and Chinese - stand behind the notes, every one verified in its source. Terms are given in both Sanskrit and Pāli; the verse is translated as verse; and a long introduction sets the book in its Gandhāran and Sarvāstivāda world.
Who it is forFor the meditator - a clear and beautiful handbook by a teacher who assumed nothing and explained everything: how to steady a scattered mind by counting, how to meet fear in a dark forest, how to keep terror from souring into despair, how calm and insight must pull together like two horses in one yoke.
For the student of Buddhism - a fully sourced translation of a text long known by name and never, until now, read whole in English.
For the reader of Zen and mindfulness - a chance to drink at the well the whole tradition drew from, and to find the water, after seventeen centuries, still cold and clear.
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