One List, No Definitions — and Why That Is the Whole Argument
This page carries Ru-Yi's translation of the complete Mahāyāna Treatise on the Hundred Dharmas That Clarify the Gate to the Teaching (大乘百法明門論), traditionally attributed to Vasubandhu and translated into Chinese by Xuánzàng. At five hundred and seventy-eight characters, it is the shortest text on this site: a bare inventory of five categories and one hundred dharmas, arranged and numbered, with not one of the hundred defined. The treatise opens by quoting the Buddha's own claim that all dharmas are without self, and closes by naming the two kinds of selflessness the list was built to prove. Everything in between is scaffolding for that single argument.
1. Why List Anything at All
The treatise's title in the source names it more fully than the short form used on this site: 大乘百法明門論本事分中略錄名數, "a brief record of the names and numbers, excerpted from within the Section on Fundamental Topics" — signaling from the outset that this is a digest, not an original composition. Its raw material is the same encyclopedic project this site's Treatise on the Stages of Yogic Practice undertakes at far greater length; Vasubandhu's contribution here is compression to the vanishing point. Classical text is set in the left-hand column below, our English in the right. See also this site's note on translation method.
如世尊言「一切法無我」。何等一切法？云何為無我？一切法者略有五種：一者心法、二者心所有法、三者色法、四者心不相應行法、五者無為法。一切最勝故，與此相應故，二所現影故，三分位差別故，四所顯示故。如是次第。第一心法，略有八種：一眼識、二耳識、三鼻識、四舌識、五身識、六意識、七末那識、八阿賴耶識。
As the World-Honored One has said, "All dharmas are without self." What are all dharmas? And what is meant by "without self"? All dharmas are, in brief, of five kinds: first, mind; second, the mental factors; third, form; fourth, formations dissociated from mind; and fifth, the unconditioned. Mind is supreme above all else; the mental factors correspond with it; form is the image these two manifest; formations dissociated from mind are the differentiated positions of the three before them; and the unconditioned is what these four disclose. Such is the order.
First, mind is, in brief, of eight kinds: the eye consciousness, the ear consciousness, the nose consciousness, the tongue consciousness, the body consciousness, the mind consciousness, the manas, and the ālayavijñāna.
Kuījī's commentary (大乘百法明門論解, T1836) states the treatise's whole shape in one line: 一切法等者，總標百法及二無我以為宗旨，乃一論之綱領也 — the hundred dharmas and the two selflessnesses together are the treatise's single thesis, its 綱領. Everything between the opening question and the closing nine characters is scaffolding for that one claim, exactly as the shortness of this page already suggests.
Kuījī also explains why 略 ("in brief") is not a throwaway word. He notes that the Treatise on the Stages of Yogic Practice, in just its opening fascicles, runs to more than twenty thousand characters unfolding upward of six hundred and sixty dharmas (瑜伽始五識身，歷至法界六百六十等法); this treatise compresses the same material to under five hundred words. A student holding this page is holding a working index to a system stated, elsewhere on this site, at some forty times the length.
On the order of the five categories, Kuījī's own gloss is worth quoting for its precision on the third category in particular: 所現影故者，即前色法，謂此色法不能自起，要藉前二所變現故 — form is placed third because form cannot arise on its own; it must be manifested by mind and the mental factors that precede it. Mind comes first as 最勝, supreme among conditioned things; the mental factors second because they 與此相應, correspond with mind and never occur apart from it; formations dissociated from mind fourth because they are 分位差別，假立前三是實，此一為假 — a provisional label laid across real positions already taken by the first three, not a further real thing in their own right; and the unconditioned last because it is what these four 所顯示, disclose, once rightly seen — never one item standing beside the rest.
2. The Remaining Ninety-Two, by Category
The eight consciousnesses accounted for, the treatise now runs through the other four categories without pausing to explain a single term — this page's reading notes below carry what explanation the bare list omits.
第二心所有法，略有五十一種，分為六位：一遍行有五、二別境有五、三善有十一、四煩惱有六、五隨煩惱有二十、六不定有四。一遍行五者，一作意、二觸、三受、四想、五思。二別境五者，一欲、二勝解、三念、四定、五慧。三善十一者，一信、二精進、三慚、四愧、五無貪、六無嗔、七無癡、八輕安、九不放逸、十行捨、十一不害。四煩惱六者，一貪、二嗔、三慢、四無明、五疑、六不正見。五隨煩惱二十者，一忿、二恨、三惱、四覆、五誑、六諂、七憍、八害、九嫉、十慳、十一無慚、十二無愧、十三不信、十四懈怠、十五放逸、十六惛沈、十七掉舉、十八失念、十九不正知、二十散亂。六不定四者，一睡眠、二惡作、三尋、四伺。
Second, the mental factors are, in brief, of fifty-one kinds, divided into six categories: the universal factors, five in number; the particular factors, five in number; the wholesome factors, eleven in number; the root afflictions, six in number; the secondary afflictions, twenty in number; and the indeterminate factors, four in number.
The five universal factors: attention, contact, feeling, perception, and volition. The five particular factors: aspiration, resolve, recollection, concentration, and wisdom. The eleven wholesome factors: faith, diligence, sense of shame, sense of embarrassment, non-greed, non-hatred, non-delusion, pliancy, heedfulness, equanimity, and non-harming. The six root afflictions: craving, hatred, conceit, delusion, doubt, and wrong view. The twenty secondary afflictions: wrath, resentment, vexation, concealment, deceit, flattery, arrogance, harmfulness, envy, stinginess, lack of shame, lack of embarrassment, lack of faith, laziness, heedlessness, torpor, restlessness, forgetfulness, incorrect knowledge, and distraction. The four indeterminate factors: sleep, regret, coarse discursive thought, and subtle discursive thought.
第三色法，略有十一種：一眼、二耳、三鼻、四舌、五身、六色、七聲、八香、九味、十觸、十一法處所攝色。
Third, form is, in brief, of eleven kinds: the eye, the ear, the nose, the tongue, and the body; form, sound, smell, taste, and touch; and form included in the dharma sense field.
第四心不相應行法，略有二十四種：一得、二命根、三眾同分、四異生性、五無想定、六滅盡定、七無想報、八名身、九句身、十文身、十一生、十二老、十三住、十四無常、十五流轉、十六定異、十七相應、十八勢速、十九次第、二十方、二十一時、二十二數、二十三和合性、二十四不和合性。
Fourth, formations dissociated from mind are, in brief, of twenty-four kinds: possession, the life faculty, class-commonality, the state of an ordinary being, the attainment of no-thought, the attainment of cessation, the ripened fruit of no-thought, word-groups, phrase-groups, syllable-groups, birth, aging, abiding, impermanence, continuity, fixed distinction, correspondence, swift efficacy, sequence, direction, time, number, combination, and non-combination.
第五無為法者，略有六種：一虛空無為、二擇滅無為、三非擇滅無為、四不動滅無為、五想受滅無為、六真如無為。
Fifth, the unconditioned is, in brief, of six kinds: space, cessation through discrimination, cessation not through discrimination, the immovable, the cessation of perception and feeling, and suchness.
Kuījī explains why each of the six categories of mental factor carries the name it does, and the reasoning sharpens what the bare list only asserts. The universal five are named for reach: 三性、八識、九地，一切時俱能遍故 — they pervade all three moral natures, all eight consciousnesses, all nine grounds, at every moment, without exception. The particular five are named for the opposite reason: each is tied to its own distinct kind of object and no other — 所緣之境則有四，乃所樂之境、決定境、曾習境、所觀境 — aspiration to what is desired, resolve to what is settled, recollection to what is familiar through practice, and concentration and wisdom together to what is contemplated. A factor earns "universal" by never being absent; a factor earns "particular" by never straying from the one object proper to it.
Kuījī also names the relationship between the root and secondary afflictions directly, rather than leaving twenty names to stand as twenty unrelated diseases. The six root afflictions generate the rest — 能生隨惑，名為根本煩惱 — and the twenty secondary afflictions are their 等流, literally an "outflow of the same kind," inheriting the root's character rather than arising as independent troubles. He further splits the twenty by how directly each traces back to one root: thirteen — wrath through incorrect knowledge, together with heedlessness — occupy their own distinct position relative to a specific root affliction (根本家差別分位), while seven — lack of shame, lack of embarrassment, torpor, restlessness, lack of faith, laziness, and distraction — are the plainer outflow, present wherever any root affliction whatsoever is active (根本家等流性).
Readers of this site's Illuminating the Sacred Teaching will recognize almost every name on this list, and will also notice that this treatise does not always agree with itself about how to say them. Three divergences are worth flagging rather than smoothing over, because each one is a genuine difference between how two Yogācāra digests sort the same material, not a copying error. First, where Asaṅga's treatise names the sixth root affliction plain 見, "wrong view," this text writes 不正見, "incorrect view" — the fuller, more explicit form of the same term, translated the same way here. Second, the twenty secondary afflictions and the four indeterminate factors are given in a different running order than in the parallel lists elsewhere on this site — 忿恨惱覆誑諂憍害嫉慳… here, rather than 忿恨覆惱嫉慳誑諂憍害… in the Five Aggregates Treatise that follows this one in the collection — and 睡眠惡作尋伺 here rather than 惡作睡眠尋伺 there. We have kept each text's own order rather than harmonizing them, since the ordering itself is part of what a source text actually says. Third, and most consequential: this treatise counts six kinds of the unconditioned, where Illuminating the Sacred Teaching counts eight (fascicle 1) — yet the first five items agree exactly, space, cessation through discrimination, cessation not through discrimination, the immovable, and the cessation of perception and feeling. The difference is that this treatise closes the list with a single, unified suchness, while Asaṅga's splits suchness three ways — the suchness of wholesome things, of unwholesome things, and of morally neutral things — on the ground that the unconditioned is not reached by leaving the wholesome-unwholesome-neutral world behind, but is present within each of the three alike. Six and eight are the same list at two different resolutions, not two different lists. A reader moving between this site's Yogācāra pages should expect this kind of variation as the ordinary texture of the tradition, not an error to be resolved.
Notice also what this section never does: define anything. Every term above is also defined, one by one, in the Five Aggregates Treatise (五蘊論) and, at greater length, in the Extended Five Aggregates Treatise (廣五蘊論) — the next two texts in this collection. Read as a sequence, this page is the skeleton and those two are, in turn, the flesh and then the fully dressed body. Vasubandhu's own commentators have long read the hundred-dharmas scheme as a repackaging of the older five aggregates: mind maps onto the aggregate of consciousness, the mental factors mostly onto feeling, perception, and formations, form onto the aggregate of form, formations dissociated from mind onto a remainder within formations, and the unconditioned onto nothing in the aggregates at all — which is exactly why it needed its own, fifth category.
3. The Two Selflessnesses
言無我者，略有二種：一補特伽羅無我、二法無我。
As for what is meant by "without self," it is, in brief, of two kinds: the selflessness of persons, and the selflessness of things.
Kuījī's gloss of 補特伽羅 (pudgala) reframes the whole cycle this treatise has just finished cataloguing. His Chinese equivalent is 數取趣, "the one who repeatedly grasps at a destiny": sentient beings 數數起惑造業, again and again generate affliction and karma — this is the grasping, the cause — and thereby undergo 當來五趣, the five destinies to come — this is what is grasped, the effect. Around and around this cycle turns, and nowhere in it, not in the cause and not in the effect, is there 主宰實自在用, a sovereign, truly self-determining agent running the show. That absence, stated precisely, is the entire content of the selflessness of persons.
For the selflessness of things, Kuījī reaches past his own commentary to cite the Treatise on the Stages of Yogic Practice directly (fascicle 93): 補特伽羅無我者，離一切緣生行外別有實我不可得故。法無我者，謂一切緣生諸行性非實我，是無常故 — the selflessness of persons means that, apart from all conditioned formations, no separate real self can be found anywhere; the selflessness of things means that the conditioned formations themselves are, by their very nature, not a real self, precisely because they are impermanent. That source treats the two as a single insight seen from two angles, and names it there 大空, the great emptiness.
One further distinction Kuījī draws is worth carrying forward into this collection's next two texts: self-grasping is narrower than dharma-grasping, 我狹法寬. Anyone confused about dharmas is thereby confused about a self, but the reverse does not hold — an arhat, on the Mahāyāna's own account, has cut off self-grasping and may still retain dharma-grasping. This page's bare list ends exactly at the point where that second, harder grasping would need to be shown, not merely named; the two texts that follow take up precisely that work.
Part One Complete
This closes Part One: the whole of Vasubandhu's Treatise on the Hundred Dharmas, from the Buddha's claim that all dharmas are without self, through the five categories and their order, the full roster of the hundred, to the two selflessnesses the list was built to establish. Part Two turns to the same author's Five Aggregates Treatise (五蘊論), which takes up the same material — most of the same fifty-one mental factors, reorganized under the older frame of the five aggregates — and, this time, defines every one of them.
Continue to Part 2 — The Five Aggregates Treatise →