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HINAYANA AND MAHAYANA (5th century A.D.), the philosophical impasse was dexterously avoided. 79
Alaya thcy represent as the repository of the bad (kleśita), “the distressed and impaired" as well as of the good (kušala), "the happy and auspicious”-thus bringing Buddhist metaphysics directly into line with one of the main conceptions of Hindu mythology and theology. For in Hinduism the Supreme Being (whether under the mask of Siva, Vişnu, or the Goddess) is always represented as the creator of demons as well as of gods. He is the source of everything in the cosinos, whether malevolent or benign, visible or invisible, and himself enacts through them the roles and attitudes that they represent. As the primordial substance from which creatures come, the Universal Being is ambivalent-or rather, polyvalent. As crcator and destroyer, comforier and oppressor, teacher and trickster-and yet, at the same time, transcendent, peaceful, and cternally uninvolved-he unites in his one presence all the pairs of opposites; unites and insinitely surpasses them. The same principle appears now again in the interpretation of the ālaya by the classic mas
19 Asanga and Vasubandhu were the first and second of three brothers, of the youngest of whom, Viriñcivatsa, nothing is known. (According to another version, Vasubandhu was the youngest and Viriñcivatsa the second.) They came of a Brahman family in Gandhara and took orders in the Sarvästivāda school of the Hinayāna (cf. supra, p. 515). Asanga was the first to transfer his allegiance to the Mahāyāna. He converted his brother, and thereafter the two were distinguished representatives of their communion. They were closely associated with the Gupta court of Ayodhya (the modern Oudh), where they were contemporaries of King Bälāditya and his father Vikramaditya = Candragupta II?). Vasubandhu is credited with some twenty-odd works, the two most celebrated and influential of which are the Abhidharmakośa ("Compendium of the Supreme Truth"), dating from his Hinayāna period, and the Vijñaptimatratá-trimsika ("Treatise in Thirty Stanzas on the World as Mere Representation"), from his later years. The most important of Asanga's works are the Yogācāryabhūmi ("Stages of the Yogācāra") and Mahāyāna-samparigraha ("Mahāyāna Manual").
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