The Yogalehrbuch, a Sanskrit Buddhist ‘yoga manual’ from the Kučā region of the Tarim Basin in the mid first millennium, is a unique and puzzling work. It comprises a series of doctrinally familiar meditations, each of which is presented as an antidote to certain unwanted aspects of phenomenal experience, from how one perceives the objective world to the cognitive, emotional and physical aspects of the personality. Yet it does so in a manner which seemingly falls outside of any neat doctrinal definition or taxonomy. The meditations are highly vivid, symbolically loaded, and of truly cosmic proportions, with the yoga practitioner (yogācāra) traversing the plains of existence, from the heavens above to the hells below, and receiving ritual consecrations for his insights along the way, until the climax of the drama unfolds in his becoming a bodhisattva, purposed towards the liberation of all. This curious admixture of features has posed many problems, being at once reminiscent of Sarvāstivāda, Mahāyāna and Tantric streams of philosophy and practice. However, as this presentation will seek to show, the text was likely far more “orthodox” than is often presumed, exhibiting several parallels with the Vibhāṣā, the preeminent scholastic treatise of the Vaibhāṣika school, whose conception of reality the Yogalehrbuch seeks to put into practice, as the meditations, namely, of a Vaibhāṣika Bodhisattva.