The Inner Science of Buddhist Practice: Vasubhandu’s Summary of the Five Heaps with Commentary by Sthiramati

The Inner Science of Buddhist Practice contains translations of texts by two historically important Indian Buddhist scholars- Vasubhandhu’s Summary of the Five Heaps and Sthiramati’s commentary on Vasubandhu’s root text. These works present the traditional Buddhist analysis of ordinary experience and provide rich resources for studying Buddhist and Western interpretations of the psychology of spiritual development. According to Buddhist doctrine, the mind of an ordinary person even at birth holds deeply ingrained predispositions that lead us to perceive the elements of everyday experience mistakenly and to believe, for instance, that entities persist through time that the pleasures we pursue are genuinely satisfying, that our own personal being is governed by a real self, and that all physical and mental phenomena have a distinct, independent, and real essence. Our everyday language only serves to reinforce and deepen these erring notions. Buddhist teaching reveals how to reject these flawed beliefs and replace them with a model that both more accurately represents our experience and is indispensable to the realizations that will free us from cyclic