One Taxonomy, Three Depths.
Yogācāra's foundational classroom exercise is the five-position, hundred-dharma system (五位百法): every conditioned and unconditioned thing there is, sorted into mind, mental factors, form, formations dissociated from mind, and the unconditioned. This site's Yogācāra corpus already covers the system at treatise length — the hundred-fascicle Stages of Yogic Practice, the twenty-fascicle Illuminating the Sacred Teaching, the Abhidharmasamuccaya — but never at the entry level, where students traditionally begin. This collection supplies that beginning: the same taxonomy read three times, each time at a different depth, in the sequence students have studied it in for over a thousand years.
Why three texts, not one
These are three separate treatises, not three parts of a single work — which is why this collection reads differently from this site's other multi-part pages. The Hundred Dharmas Treatise (百法明門論, 578 characters) gives the bare skeleton: five categories, a hundred names, and not one definition, in the sole service of proving that a self is nowhere on the list. Vasubandhu's own Five Aggregates Treatise (五蘊論, 3,126 characters) supplies every definition the skeleton withheld, reorganized under the older frame of the five aggregates. And Sthiramati's Extended Five Aggregates Treatise (廣五蘊論, 5,726 characters) takes up that same text clause by clause and expands nearly every definition with an etymology, a worked example, or the reasoning behind it — CBETA cross-references the two five-aggregates texts against each other directly. Read start to finish, one doctrine is examined at three successively finer grains.
The traditional teaching sequence places the hundred-dharmas list first and the five-aggregates material second, which this collection follows. A reader in a hurry can stop after Part One and already have the complete taxonomy; a reader who wants the reasoning behind every term should continue through Parts Two and Three.
What each part page includes
- The Chinese source text beside our English translation, entire on one page for each treatise.
- Reading notes flagging where the three texts genuinely disagree — on term order, on naming, on how many kinds of a thing there are — rather than smoothing the disagreement away.
- A running glossary matched to this site's other Yogācāra pages, above all Illuminating the Sacred Teaching.
Read by Part
The traditional teaching sequence: the bare list first, its definitions second, and the definitions' own reasoning last.
The Hundred Dharmas Treatise
Vasubandhu's complete 578-character text: five categories, a hundred dharmas, numbered and named without a single definition — because the treatise's only real argument is the two selflessnesses its exhaustive list is built to prove.
The Five Aggregates Treatise
The same author's ninety-five "what is it?" questions, each answered in one clause — every one of the fifty-one mental factors defined, the ālayavijñāna proven, and the same material re-sorted twice more as sense fields and elements.
The Extended Five Aggregates Treatise
Sthiramati's expansion of Part Two, adding a function clause to nearly every definition, plus etymologies for "faculty" and "element," a philosophical aside on why an effect can borrow its cause's name, and a citation of the Buddha's own words.
Translation Notes
Recurring terms and cross-text divergences, kept consistent across all three parts and matched to the site's other Yogācāra pages where the same term appears. See also this site's note on translation method.