vasana Buddhist philosophical term meaning ‘tendency’. It is an explanatory category, designed to show how it is possible to talk of tendencies or capacities in persons on the basis of a metaphysic that denies that there are any enduring existents in the continua of events conventionally called ‘persons.’ According to this metaphysic, when we speak of the tendency of persons understood in this way to do this or that – to be jealous, lustful, angry – we are speaking of the presence of karmic seeds in continua of events, seeds that may mature at different times and so produce tendencies to engage in this or that action. See also ALAYA-VIJÑA ANA. P.J.G. Vasubandhu (fourth–fifth century A.D.), Indian philosopher, a Mahayana Buddhist of the Yogacara or Sarvastivada school. He wrote the Abhidharmakosá (‘Treasure Chamber of the Abhidharma,’ the Abhidharma being a compilation of Buddhist philosophy and psychology) and the Vimcatika (‘Proof in Twenty Verses That Everything Is Only Conception’). He held that the mind is only a stream of ideas and that there is nothing non-mental. In contrast to Buddhist direct and representational realists, he argued that dream experience seems to be of objects located in space and existing independent of the dreamer without their actually doing so. See also BUDDHIS. K.E.Y.