The Tongue He Wanted to Cut Out

Vasubandhu wrote the definitive attack on the Mahayana, and then decided he had been wrong, and wanted to cut out his own tongue.

The first career

Vasubandhu worked in the fourth and fifth centuries. He trained in the Sarvastivada school in Gandhara, moved later to Kashmir, and became the outstanding technical philosopher of the older Buddhist tradition.

His achievement there is the Abhidharmakosha, the treasury of higher doctrine. It is a systematic account of what exists, and how mind works. Moment by moment.

The classification of mental factors. The analysis of perception. The mechanics of karma. The structure of the path.

Fifteen hundred years later it is still studied in Tibetan monastic colleges and in East Asian Buddhist scholarship. Whatever else he did, he wrote the standard textbook of a system.

And then he wrote his own commentary on it, the Bhashya, in which he attacks his own school's positions from a Sautrantika standpoint.

That tells you everything about the kind of mind he had. He produced the definitive summary of a system and then could not stop himself picking at it, in public, in the same book.