Immeasurable Joy: Being One Meditation of a “Bodhisattva Vaibhāṣika”

A seventh-century Sanskrit yoga manual from Qïzïl describes the practice of immeasurable joy (muditā) as part of a bodhisattva's path to awakening. The manual's author relied on a version of the *Vibhāṣā, a major Vaibhāṣika treatise on Buddhist metaphysics. The paper identifies parallels between the two texts and presents a new edition of select passages from the preface to immeasurable joy, which the text calls a theory of practice (prayoganirdeśa). It shows that Vaibhāṣika ontological and phenomenological principles are instantiated at the experiential, structural, and representational levels of the practice that the manual exemplifies.

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Abstract

This paper considers the practice of immeasurable joy (muditā) as presented in the so-called Yogalehrbuch, a seventh century Sanskrit “yoga manual” from Qïzïl, on the northern rim of the Tarim Basin. It demonstrates that the author of the text, whose purpose is to describe the journey of a yogin on the path to the awakening of a Bodhisattva, relied on some version of the *Vibhāṣā, the voluminous treatise on Buddhist metaphysics from which the Vaibhāṣika school derives its name. Identifying several parallels between the two texts, it presents a new edition of select passages of the manuscript from the preface to immeasurable joy which constitute what the text terms a theory of practice (prayoganirdeśa). On this basis, it is shown that the specific principles of Vaibhāṣika ontology and phenomenology conveyed by this theory come to be instantiated at the experiential, structural and representational levels of the practice (prayoga), which the text primarily serves to example.