Yogācāra, often rendered as “mind-only” or “consciousness-only,” is a major school of Mahāyāna Buddhism that arose in India around the fourth to fifth centuries of the common era. Its very name, meaning “practice of yoga,” signals a deep concern with meditative cultivation rather than abstract speculation alone. Associated especially with Asaṅga and Vasubandhu, building on earlier teachings attributed to Maitreyanātha, this tradition offers a rigorous analysis of experience in terms of consciousness rather than independently existing external substances. It emphasizes that what appears as an external world is inseparable from mental representations and karmic patterns, and thus cannot be known apart from the workings of consciousness itself.

Central to this vision is the teaching that all phenomena are manifestations of consciousness (vijñāna). The world of subject and object, so solid and self-evident to ordinary perception, is understood as constructed by mental processes and karmic “seeds” (bīja) that mature into specific experiences. Yogācāra does not necessarily insist that nothing external exists at all; rather, it stresses that access to any supposed external reality is always mediated by consciousness. The familiar sense of a stable world and a continuous self is thus traced back to the dynamic flow of consciousness and its latent impressions stored at a subtle level.

This subtle level is articulated through the doctrine of eight consciousnesses (aṣṭa vijñāna). Beyond the five sense consciousnesses and the ordinary mental consciousness (manovijñāna), Yogācāra speaks of an afflicted mind (kliṣṭa-manas) that clings to a false sense of self, and a foundational storehouse consciousness (ālaya-vijñāna). The ālaya-vijñāna functions as a repository of karmic seeds, which ripen as perceptions, tendencies, and even the very sense of a world and a body. In this way, continuity across moments and lives is explained without positing a permanent self, while still accounting for the patterned regularity of experience.

To clarify how this constructed reality operates, Yogācāra presents the framework of the three natures (trisvabhāva). The imagined nature (parikalpita) is the falsely conceived realm of duality, where subject and object appear as inherently separate. The dependent nature (paratantra) is the conditioned flow of causes, effects, and mental processes that underlies this illusion. The perfected nature (pariniṣpanna) is the realized suchness of phenomena when dualistic projections are seen through and no longer taken as ultimately real. Within this perspective, traditional Buddhist teachings on no-self and emptiness are reinterpreted as insights into the way mind constructs and then reifies its own projections.

The path in Yogācāra is described as a transformation of consciousness (āśraya-parāvṛtti), achieved through meditation, ethical discipline, and penetrating insight. By purifying the storehouse consciousness and uprooting the afflicted tendencies that sustain dualistic clinging, the practitioner gradually converts ordinary, deluded cognition into non-dual wisdom. This transformation culminates in Buddhahood, understood as the full realization of the perfected nature, free from the imagined overlays of subject and object. In this way, Yogācāra stands as both a subtle philosophy of mind and a practical roadmap for awakening, inviting a radical re-examination of what is taken to be real.