- Lived:
- Asaṅga c. 300–370 CE, Vasubandhu c. 4th–5th century CE (scholars' estimates range from about 270 to 450) — half-brothers born at Puruṣapura (Peshawar) in Gandhāra; their careers ran from Kashmir to Ayodhyā and the Gupta court
- Field:
- philosophy — founders of Yogācāra, the "mind-only" school of Mahāyāna Buddhism, and authors of the most widely studied textbook in the history of Buddhist thought
- The Big Idea:
- The world you experience is not delivered to you; it is constructed — projected from a deep stream of consciousness where every past action left a seed. One brother brought this teaching down from a mountain retreat; the other, the age's greatest critic, was converted by him and gave it its sharpest arguments.
- In their words:
- "All this is representation only, because it appears as objects that are not there — as a man with an eye disease sees hairs and flies that do not exist." (Vasubandhu, Viṃśatikā, opening verse; our rendering)
- If you remember one thing:
- Two brothers from Peshawar — one who would not kill the maggots in a dying dog's wound, one who summarized everything Buddhism had concluded and then demolished half of it — built between them the philosophy of mind that runs from Nālandā to Kyoto.