Madhyānta-Vibhaṅga: Discourse on Discrimination between Middle and Extremes

The main content of Madhyānta-Vibhaṅga is organized around the discrimination between the middle way and the extremes that distort the understanding of reality. The work begins with the salutation to Maitreya and Asaṅga, then introduces seven principal topics: the essence of reality, its illusive appearance, absolute reality, purification through meditation, degrees of purification, the result of practice, and the preeminence of Mahāyāna. It proceeds to analyze the universal constructor of phenomenal reality, understood as the productive imagination or consciousness that gives rise to the apparent division between subject and object. The text then explains the threefold structure of this constructor, the unreality of the external world, and the Yogācāra critique of opposing Buddhist schools such as the Sautrāntikas and Sarvāstivādins. A further section examines the dynamics of world-illusion through the subconscious mind-store, the twelve links of dependent origination, and the root causes of phenomenal existence. The chapter on the Absolute discusses its definition, names, varieties, modes of relativity-reality, and relation to Mahāyāna understandings of Buddha and Bodhisattva. Across these discussions, the treatise aims to establish a middle position that avoids nihilistic denial and naïve realism, presenting liberation as the direct realization of pure reality beyond conceptual construction and subject-object duality.