Abhisamayalankara

The Abhisamayālaṅkāra "Ornament of/for Realization[s]", abbreviated AA, is one of five Sanskrit-language Mahayana sutras which Maitreya—a bodhisattva or human teacher (the point is somewhat controversial) is said to have revealed to Asanga in Northwest India in the 4th century. Some scholars (Erich Frauwallner, Giuseppe Tucci, Hakiju Ui) refer to the text's author as Maitreya-nātha ("Lord Maitreya") in order to avoid either affirming the claim of supernatural revelation, or identifying the author as Asanga himself.

The AA is never mentioned by Xuanzang, who spent several years at Nalanda in India during the early 7th century, and became a savant in the Maitreya-Asanga tradition. One possible explanation is that the text is late and attributed to Maitreya-Asanga for purposes of legitimacy. The question then hinges on the dating of the earliest extant AA commentaries, those of Arya Vimuktisena (usually given as 6th century, following possibly unreliable information from Taranatha) and Haribhadra (late 8th century).

The AA contains eight chapters and 273 verses. Its pithy contents summarize—in the form of eight categories and seventy topics—the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras which the Madhyamaka philosophical school regards as presenting the ultimate truth. Gareth Sparham and John Makransky believe the text to be commenting on the version in 25,000 lines, although it does not explicitly say so. Haribhadra, whose commentary is based on the 8,000-line PP Sūtra, held that the AA is commenting on all PP versions at once (i.e. the 100,000-line, 25,000-line, and 8,000-line versions), and this interpretation has generally prevailed within the commentarial tradition.

...
Wikipedia