Abhidharmakośa-bhāsya
The Abhidharmakośabhāsya (, lit. Commentary on the Sheath of Abhidharma), Abhidharmakośa () for short (or just Kośa or AKB), is a key text on the Abhidharma written in Sanskrit by the Indian Buddhist scholar Vasubandhu in the 4th or 5th century CE. The "Kośa" summarizes the Sarvāstivādin Abhidharma in eight chapters with a total of around 600 verses and then comments on (and often criticizes) it. This text was widely respected and used by schools of Buddhism in India, Tibet and East Asia. Over time, the "Abhidharmakośa" became the main source of Abhidharma and Sravakayana Buddhism for later Mahāyāna Buddhists . In the "Kośa", Vasubandhu presents various views on the Abhidharma, mainly those of the Sarvāstivāda-Vaibhāṣika, which he often criticizes from a Sautrāntika perspective. The "Kośa" includes an additional chapter in prose refuting the idea of the "person" ("pudgala") favoured by some Buddhists of the Pudgalavada school. The Vaibhāṣika master Samghabhadra considered that Vasubandhu had misrepresented numerous key points of Vaibhāṣika Abhidharma in the "Kośa", and saw Vasubandhu as a Sautrāntika (upholder of the sutras). However, Vasubandhu often presents and defends the Vaibhāṣika Abhidharma position on certain topics (contra Sautrāntika). Because of this, Chinese commentators like Pu Guang do not  see Vasubandhu as either a Vaibhāṣika nor as a Sautrāntika. Background. The "Abhidharmakośabhāsya" (AKB) is a work of Abhidharma, a field of Buddhist philosophy which mainly draws on the Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma tradition. This tradition includes various groupings or "schools", the two main ones being Vaibhāṣika and Sautrāntika. The main source for the Vaibhāṣika tradition (which was based in Kaśmīra) is the "Abhidharma Mahāvibhāṣa Śāstra." The other main tradition of Sarvāstivāda philosophy were those masters who were called "westerners" (Pāścāttya) or "outsiders" (Bāhyaka) and they were mainly based in Gandhara. These masters (later known as Sautrāntikas) did not fully accept the  Vaibhāṣika philosophy and compiled their own Abhidharma texts, such as the "Abhidharma-hṛdaya" by Dharmaśrī"," which was the first Abhidharma text to provide a series of verses with prose commentary (this is the style that the "Kośa" follows). This work was very influential on subsequent Abhidharma texts (which imitated its style) and various commentaries were written on it. The "Abhidharmakośabhāsya"'s style and structure is based on these Sautrāntika Abhidharma works. According to K.L. Dhammajoti, in the AKB"," Vasubandhu often favors the opinion of the Sautrāntika school against the Sarvāstivāda Vaibhāṣikas (when there is a dispute). For example, he criticizes  the doctrine of the existence of the three times (past, present, future), a central Sarvāstivāda doctrine. However, this is not always the case and he seems to have sometimes also favored certain Vaibhāṣika doctrines (contra Sautrāntika), including the reality of certain mental factors (caittas), the notion of the conjunction (saṃprayoga) of mind (citta) and mental factors and also the Sarvāstivāda doctrine of simultaneous causation ("sahabhu-hetu") which was rejected by Sautrantika masters like Śrīlāta. Content Overview. The text is divided into the following chapters. 4: The Exposition on Karma ("karma-nirdeśa"). Chapter four of the Kośa is devoted to a  study of karma, and chapters two and five contain formulation as to the mechanism of fruition and retribution. The Text and its Translations. The Sanskrit original of the "Abhidharmakośabhāṣya" was lost for centuries, and was known to scholarship only through Chinese and Tibetan translations. The work was of such importance to the history of Indian thought that in the 1930s, the great scholar Rāhula Sāṅkṛtyāyana (1893--1963) even re-translated the verses into Sanskrit, from Tibetan, and wrote his own Sanskrit commentary on them.  However, during a subsequent visit to Tibet, Sāṅkṛtyāyana discovered an ancient palm-leaf manuscript of 367  leaves that contained not only Vasubandhu's verses, but his lost commentary. In 1967 and then in a revised edition of 1975, Prof. P. Pradhan of Utkal University finally published the original Sanskrit text of the "Abhidharmakośabhāṣya", Vasubandhu's great work summarizing earlier traditions of the Vibhāṣā school of Buddhist philosophy. The "Abhidharmakośa-kārikā" (the verses) and the "Abhidharmakośa-bhāsya" (the auto-commentary) were translated into Chinese in the 6th-century by Paramārtha (T1559). They were translated again in the 7th-century by Xuanzang (T1560 & T1558). Other translations and commentaries exist in Tibetan, Chinese, Classical Mongolian and Old Uyghur. The  verses and the commentary were first translated into a European language by Louis de La Vallée-Poussin, published in 1923-1931 in French, which is primarily based on Xuanzang's Chinese translation but also references the Sanskrit text, Paramārtha's Chinese translation, and the Tibetan. Currently, three complete English translations exist. The first by Leo M. Pruden in 1988 and the second by Gelong Lodrö Sangpo in 2012 are both based on La Vallée-Poussin's French translation. The third by Masahiro Shōgaito in 2014 is a translation of the Uighur translation of Xuanzang's Chinese translation. Commentaries. There are  many commentaries written on this text. Indian Commentaries. Other Indian Buddhist commentaries include: Chinese Commentaries. According to Paul Demiéville, some of the major extant Chinese commentaries to the "Abhidharmakośa include": Two other disciples of Xuanzang, Huai-su and K'uei-chi, wrote commentaries on the "Kośa" which are lost.