Abhidharmakośa (Treasury of Abhidharma)

A systematic summary of Buddhist scholastic thought, written as some six hundred verses with Vasubandhu's own prose commentary (bhāṣya). The verses largely report the views of the Vaibhāṣika branch of the Sarvāstivāda school, while the commentary often criticises them from a Sautrāntika standpoint. Its eight chapters cover the elements of existence (dharmas), classified into seventy-five kinds; the faculties; the cosmos and its realms of rebirth, together with dependent origination; action (karma) and its results; the latent tendencies (anuśaya) that drive suffering; the path and the types of practitioner; knowledge; and meditative absorption. A ninth chapter, on refuting the person, argues against those who posit a real self (pudgala) over and above the changing aggregates, and claims that memory and karma can be explained without one. Among its best-known debates is whether past and future dharmas exist, which the Sarvāstivādins affirmed and Vasubandhu's commentary questions.

It is the standard reference for Abhidharma thought across Asian Buddhism, and its argument against a real self remains one of the clearest Buddhist treatments of personal identity.