The next epoch in the history of Buddhism is marked by the names of Asanga and Vasubandhu.  The interval between them and Deva produced no teacher of importance, but Kumaralabdha, the founder of the Sautrantika school and perhaps identical with Kumarata the eighteenth Patriarch of the Chinese lists, may be mentioned.  Hsuean Chuang says[218] that he was carried off in captivity by a king who reigned somewhere in the east of the Pamirs and that he, Asvaghosha, Nagarjuna and Deva were styled the four shining suns.

Asanga and Vasubandhu were brothers, sons of a Brahman who lived at Peshawar.  They were both converted from the Sarvastivadin school to Mahayanism, but the third brother Virincivatsa never changed his convictions.  Tradition connects their career with Ayodhya as well as with Peshawar and Vasubandhu enjoyed the confidence of the reigning monarch, who was probably Candragupta I. This identification depends on the hypothesis that Vasubandhu lived from about 280 to 360 A.D. which, as already mentioned, seems to me to have been proved by M. Peri.[219] The earlier Gupta kings though not Buddhists were tolerant, as is shown by the fact that the king of Ceylon[220] was allowed to erect a magnificent monastery at Nalanda in the reign of Samudragupta (c. 330-375 A.D.).

Asanga founded the school known as Yogacara and many authorities ascribe to him the introduction of magical practices and Tantrism.  But though he is a considerable figure in the history of Buddhism, I doubt if his importance or culpability is so great as this.  For if tradition can be trusted, earlier teachers especially Nagarjuna dealt in spells and invocations and the works of Asanga[221] known to us are characterized by a somewhat scholastic piety and are chiefly occupied in defining and describing the various stages in the spiritual development of a Bodhisattva.  It is true that he admits the use of magical formulae[222] as an aid in this evolution but they form only a slight part of his system and it does not appear that the Chen-yen or Shingon sect of the Far East (the Sanskrit Mantrayana) traced its lineage back to him.

Our estimate of his position in the history of Buddhism must depend on our opinion as to the authorship of The Awakening of Faith.  If this treatise was composed by Asvaghosha then doctrines respecting the three bodies of Buddha, the Tathagatagarbha and the Alaya-vijnana were not only known but scientifically formulated considerably before Asanga.  The conclusion cannot be rejected as absurd—­for Asvaghosha might speak differently in poems and in philosophical treatises—­but it is surprising, and it is probable that the treatise is not his.  If so, Asanga may have been the first to elaborate systematically (though not to originate) the idea that thought is the one and only reality.  Nagarjuna’s nihilism was probably the older theory.  It sounds late and elaborate but still it follows easily if the dialectic of Gotama is applied uncompromisingly not only to our mental processes but to the external world.  Yet even in India the result was felt to be fantastic and sophistical and it is not surprising if after the lapse of a few generations a new system of idealism became fashionable which, although none too intelligible, was abstruse rather than paradoxical.