Vasubandhu, Trisvabhavanirdesa (Indicaţiile referitoare la cele trei naturi)

According to some authors, Trisvabhāvanirdeśa is the last work authored by Vasubandhu (IV-th century AD), one of the founders of Vijñānavāda, the idealist school of Mahāyāna Buddhism. The text briefly depicts the tripartite ontology of the school. The doctrine of Vijñānavāda is based on the theory of the three own-beings (trisvabhāva), which ranks everything on three levels of reality: the absolute reality (parinișpanna svabhāva – the fulfilled own-being), the non-delimited conditional flow (paratantra svabhāva – the interdependent own-being) and the level of categorically structured experience, specific to human beings (parikalpita svabhāva – the constructed own-being). Among these, the first two own-beings are real, while the third is unreal, being the object of religious and philosophical criticism.