The Thirty Verses
All Thirty Verses
Vasubandhu's Triṃśikā in a fresh English rendering from Xuanzang's 7th-century Chinese (唯識三十頌, T1586), each verse read by the five lenses. Click any card to dive in.
Self and dharmas are designations, not entities
“Self and dharmas are provisional designations; what appears depends on what consciousness transforms.”
Three layers, one transformation
“Three transformations: the maturing, the cogitating, and the consciousness that discriminates objects.”
Alaya: the store with no known contents
“Its appropriations, its location, and its discerning are imperceptible.”
The torrent that turns at its root
“Unobstructed, karmically neutral, flowing on unceasingly like a torrent.”
Manas: the reader that mistakes the substrate for self
“Arising in dependence on the store consciousness, taking it as its object — its character is self-reflective cogitation.”
The four afflictions that come for free
“Always accompanied by four afflictions: self-delusion, self-view, self-pride, and self-love.”
When manas stops
“At arhatship, in the meditation of cessation, and on the supramundane path — there it does not exist.”
The six sense streams
“The third transformation, six kinds — wholesome, unwholesome, or neither.”
What the sense layer carries
“Universals, object-specific, wholesome, afflictions, secondary afflictions, indeterminate — all with the three feelings.”
Universal and specific factors
“The universals: contact and the rest. The object-specific: desire, conviction, retention, concentration, discernment.”
The eleven beneficial factors
“Faith, shame, embarrassment, the three roots, diligence, serenity, non-negligence, equanimity, non-harming.”
The six root afflictions
“Greed, hatred, delusion, pride, doubt, and wrong views — and the secondaries begin.”
The secondary afflictions
“Deceit, guile, harmfulness, arrogance, shamelessness, restlessness, torpor, non-faith, indolence…”
Four factors that go either way
“The indeterminate: regret, drowsiness, applied thought and sustained thought — each of two kinds.”
Waves on water
“Like waves arising upon water.”
When the thinking-mind goes offline
“The mental consciousness is always manifest — except in the no-thought heaven, two mindless absorptions, dreamless sleep, and fainting.”
Both the discriminator and the discriminated
“Both the discriminator and the discriminated — therefore all is consciousness-only.”
Seeds transforming through mutual influence
“Through the force of mutual influence, this and that discrimination arises.”
How karma keeps going
“When a former maturation is exhausted, a further maturation is again produced.”
The imagined: what isn't there
“The imagined nature has no own-being whatsoever.”
The other-dependent and the realized
“The dependent is discrimination arising from conditions; the perfected is its constant separation from the imagined.”
Not the same, not different
“Neither different nor non-different — as impermanence relates to conditioned things.”
Threefold no-self
“With hidden intent, the Buddha declared all dharmas without own-nature.”
How each nature lacks self
“Non-nature as to character, as to arising, and as to the grasped self-and-dharmas.”
Thusness, always already
“Suchness — the true reality of consciousness-only.”
The path begins: not yet resting
“As long as the cognition has not yet arisen, the latent tendencies cannot be subdued and extinguished.”
Even the right idea is grasping
“To set up even some slight object and call it ‘consciousness-only’ is not yet to abide in it.”
When there is nothing to grasp
“When cognition attains nothing at all, then one abides in consciousness-only.”
The overturning at the root
“Non-attainment, inconceivability — supramundane wisdom. The transformation of the basis.”
The inconceivable realm
“The untainted realm — inconceivable, wholesome, eternal — the Dharma-body of the Great Sage.”