A working bilingual edition of Asaṅga's Śrāvakabhūmi, in Sanskrit (Shukla 1973) and English.
Introduction
Śrāvakabhūmi means "The Stage of the Disciple" — from śrāvaka, literally "hearer," the term for those who heard the Buddha's teaching directly and trained for liberation as arhats, and bhūmi, "ground" or "stage." It is a section of the Yogācārabhūmi-Śāstra, the encyclopedic treatise on yogic practice traditionally ascribed to Asaṅga (4th century CE). Organized into four yogasthānas ("yogic foundations"), it lays out a detailed program of contemplative training: the nine stages of mental abiding (śamatha), the method of insight (vipaśyanā), the five temperament-matched practices (unattractiveness, lovingkindness, dependent origination, elements, breath), and the seven attentions of the mundane path.
The Sanskrit original was long thought lost in India until 1938, when the explorer-scholar Rāhula Sāṅkṛtyāyana located and photographed a palm-leaf manuscript at Shalu Monastery in Tibet; those photographs are the basis for every modern Sanskrit edition, including the source text used here.
Contents
Yogasthāna I — Gotrabhūmi, Avatārabhūmi, Naiṣkramyabhūmi
This is an AI-assisted working translation.
Prepared from the Sanskrit with reference to standard Buddhist Sanskrit dictionaries and established technical terminology in the secondary literature. It is not a scholarly critical edition. Reports of errors or improvements welcome (see Contributing below).
Edition details
Sanskrit source
Karunesha Shukla edition (1973), as hosted on SuttaCentral.
Translator
Ryan Forsyth, AI-assisted, from the Shukla Sanskrit edition.
Format
Bilara-compatible segmented JSON (sources) rendered as side-by-side HTML.
The Sanskrit layer is based on Shukla 1973 (via SuttaCentral) but is not a fully diplomatic transcription. Obvious PDF/OCR extraction artifacts — chiefly intra-word whitespace breaks — have been normalized; a small number of documented restorations and supplements are recorded in the emendation policy. The English marks damaged or conjecturally reconstructed passages inline. For close philological argument, cite the segment ID and check the Sanskrit against Shukla and, where available, against the Tibetan and Chinese witnesses.
Contributing
Errors, alternative readings, and improvements are welcome via GitHub issues or pull requests on the source repository.