The Foundation for Yoga Practitioners: The Buddhist Yogācārabhūmi Treatise and Its Adaptation in India, East Asia, and Tibet

The Yogacarabhumi, a fourth-century Sanskrit treatise, is the largest Indian text on Buddhist meditation. Its enormous scope exhaustively encompasses all yoga instructions on the disciplines and contemplative exercises of sravaka, pratyekabuddha, and bodhisattva practitioners. The thoroughness of the text meant that the Yogacarabhumi became the fundamental source for later Buddhist writings on meditation across Asia. The present edited volume, conceived by Geumgang University in South Korea, brings together the scholarship of thirty-four leading Buddhist specialists on the Yogacarabhumi from across the globe. The essays elaborate the background and environment in which the Yogacarabhumi was composed and redacted, provide a detailed summary of the work, raise fundamental and critical issues about the text, and reveal its reception history in India, China, and Tibet. The volume also provides a thorough survey of contemporary Western and Asian scholarship on the Yogacarabhumi in particular and the Yogacara tradition more broadly. The Foundation for Yoga Practitioners aims not only to tie together the massive research on this text that has been carried out in Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Europe, and the United States up to now, but also to make this scholarship accessible to all students and scholars of Buddhism.