Immeasurable Joy: Being One Meditation of a “Bodhisattva Vaibhāṣika”

This paper considers the practice of immeasurable joy (muditā) as presented in the so-called Yogalehrbuch, a seventh century Sanskrit “yoga manual” from Qïzïl, on the northern rim of the Tarim Basin. It demonstrates that the author of the text, whose purpose is to describe the journey of a yogin on the path to the awakening of a Bodhisattva, relied on some version of the *Vibhāṣā, the voluminous treatise on Buddhist metaphysics from which the Vaibhāṣika school derives its name. Identifying several parallels between the two texts, it presents a new edition of select passages of the manuscript from the preface to immeasurable joy which constitute what the text terms a theory of practice (prayoganirdeśa). On this basis, it is shown that the specific principles of Vaibhāṣika ontology and phenomenology conveyed by this theory come to be instantiated at the experiential, structural and representational levels of the practice (prayoga), which the text primarily serves to example.