In Yogācāra, “mind-only” (citta-mātra or vijñapti-mātra) points to the insight that all experienced phenomena are inseparable from consciousness and appear as mental representations. What is ordinarily taken to be a solid, external world of independently existing objects is understood instead as a field of cognitive constructions, appearances that arise within and through consciousness. There is no direct access to “raw” things existing apart from this flow of awareness; what is encountered are always mind-mediated phenomena. This does not entail a crude solipsism in which an isolated individual mind invents reality, but rather emphasizes that the fundamental character of experienced reality is consciousness itself, without truly independent external referents.

Within this vision, the familiar split between subject and object is treated as a construction generated by consciousness. Through conceptualization and mental fabrication, consciousness presents itself as a perceiving subject over against perceived objects, even though both poles of this duality are dependently arisen aspects of the same cognitive process. Yogācāra describes this process in terms of multiple modes of consciousness, including the five sense consciousnesses, mental consciousness, an afflicted or defiled mental consciousness, and a foundational “storehouse consciousness” (ālaya-vijñāna). This storehouse functions as a repository of karmic “seeds” (bīja), whose maturation gives rise to the patterned experiences that appear as a shared world of selves and things.

“Mind-only” thus serves as a profound corrective to naïve realism, undermining the tendency to cling to perceived objects as self-existing entities. By recognizing that what appears as the external world is nothing but mental representation, attachment to the apparent solidity of things is gradually loosened. At the same time, Yogācāra insists that all these mental constructions, including the very notion of “mind,” are empty of inherent, independent existence, arising only in dependence upon conditions. When this is realized, the imagined boundary between perceiver and perceived falls away, and the nature of consciousness is seen as free from the dualities that ordinarily structure experience.