The Yogachara school came to fruition in the fourth century CE with the brilliant half brothers Asanga and Vasubandhu. Asanga was more a creative and original thinker, and Vasubandhu a gifted systematizer. Together they initiated or elaborated most of the tenets of what came to be known as the Yogachara (“Practice of Yoga”), or Chittamatrata (“Nature of Mind Only”), school of Buddhism, and Buddhism had taken another evolutionary leap forward, the Third Great Turning of the Wheel of Dharma.
What all schools of Yogachara have in common is a continuing and intensifying of the drive to see and fully realize the union of Emptiness and Form, to integrate them in the here and now. Given the fact that Emptiness and Form are not-two, Emptiness itself is related to some everyday aspect of Form that the ordinary person is already aware of—in this case, pure unqualifiable Awareness just as it is. All schools of Yogachara either equate directly Emptiness and unconstructed pure Awareness (alaya-jnana), or at least equate them relatively as a useful orientation and metaphoric guide for practitioners.
