Yogâcāra Buddhism transmitted or transformed?

This dissertation argues that the Yogâcara Buddhism transmitted by the Indian translator Paramârtha (Ch. Zhendi) underwent a significant transformation due to the influence of his later Chinese interpreters, a phenomenon to which previous scholars failed to paid enough attention. I begin with showing two contrary interpretations of Paramârtha's notion of jiexing . The traditional interpretation glosses jiexing in terms of "original awakening" ( benjue ) in the Awakening of Faith and hence betrays its strong tie to that text. In contrast, a contrary interpretation of jiexing is preserved in a Dunhuang fragment Taisho No. 2805 (henceforth abbreviated as T2805). The crucial part of this dissertation consists in demonstrating that T2805 and the Awakening of Faith represent two competing lineages of the interpreters of Paramârtha. The first clue is that modern scholars have voiced objection to the traditional attribution of the Awakening of Faith to Paramârtha. In addition, I discovered that striking similarities exist between T2805 and Paramârtha's corpus with respect to terminology, style of phrasing, and doctrine. I further draw attention to the historical testimonies about two diffe