There is a long history of debate around Asaṅga and the Yogācāra vision associated with his name. Scholars question the authorship of several key texts traditionally attributed to him, suggesting that works such as the *Yogācārabhūmi* and related treatises may reflect multiple hands or a gradual development within a Yogācāra community rather than the voice of a single founder. Traditional accounts that link certain profound teachings to visionary encounters with the bodhisattva Maitreya are also scrutinized, with uncertainty about how these transmissions are to be understood historically. This complex textual and historical situation has made Asaṅga both a towering figure and a somewhat elusive one.

At the heart of the philosophical controversy lies the Yogācāra teaching of “consciousness-only” (*vijñapti-mātra*). Critics, especially from the Madhyamaka tradition, have accused this view of sliding into idealism or even solipsism, as if it denied any reality to external phenomena and reified consciousness itself. Defenders, however, interpret the doctrine as a sophisticated analysis of how experience is structured, aimed at undermining naïve realism rather than positing an ultimately existent mind. This tension is closely tied to debates over the three natures (*trisvabhāva*), where the “perfected nature” can appear, to some readers, to function as a subtle metaphysical absolute, even though Yogācāra commentators present it as nothing more than the realization of emptiness and the cessation of dualistic grasping.

Equally contentious is Asaṅga’s elaboration of the eight consciousnesses, especially the *ālaya-vijñāna* or “storehouse consciousness.” This notion of a foundational stream that carries karmic seeds has been challenged as potentially contradicting the doctrine of non-self, since it can look like a hidden substrate or enduring entity. Yogācāra exponents respond that the storehouse consciousness is conditioned, impermanent, and ultimately empty, serving as a provisional model to explain continuity, karma, and rebirth without positing a self. The same dynamic appears in discussions of the transformation of the cognitive basis (*āśrayaparāvṛtti*), where some see a risk of substantializing a “ground,” while others read it as a descriptive way of speaking about the cessation of ignorance.

Finally, the relationship between Asaṅga’s Yogācāra and Madhyamaka has been a persistent source of debate within Mahāyāna thought. Some have regarded Yogācāra as a rival system that falls short of the radical emptiness articulated by Nāgārjuna and his successors, while others have treated it as a complementary, more detailed phenomenological analysis that can be harmonized with a Madhyamaka understanding of emptiness. These controversies, far from being merely academic, reflect deep questions about how to articulate the path to awakening: how to speak of consciousness, continuity, and transformation without losing sight of emptiness and the absence of any enduring essence.