Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche’s commentary on one of Asanga’s most essential and also most psychologically oriented works, providing a framework as well as a general pattern about how a practitioner should follow the path, develop him or herself, and finally attain buddhahood.

The Abhidharmasamuccaya belongs to the mahayana tradition of Buddhism. The mahayana has two philosophical schools: the Madhyamaka (school of the middle way) and Yogacara (practitioners of yoga). The founder of the Yogacara, Asanga, composed many texts and prominent among them is The Abhidharmasamuccaya.

Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche presents the Abhidharma system of Asanga in clear and uncomplicated language so that students of the mahayana can easily employ its insights to understand their own minds. The Yogacara view of mind provides a model for understanding our construction of reality. Its lucid depiction of how the mind works enables us to properly assess our lives and develop psychologically wholesome ways of being, without getting bogged down by past experience. Rinpoche shows that through this kind of reflection, we will gradually learn how to integrate our fragmented consciousness and transform neurosis into wisdom.

As Rinpoche says, “It is not the fact of what we are that is keeping us in bondage; it is our mismanagement of the whole situation. What we are has nothing to do with being bound. Our wrong assessment of the situation has created our bondage. Mahayanists don’t say you have to come to any kind of cessation on that level. The neuroses do not cease as much as they are seen for what they are. Not being able to see our own neuroses for what they are is what creates the neurosis.”

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