In Yogācāra thought, consciousness (vijñāna, citta) is understood as a dynamic, layered flow rather than a single, simple mind. This flow is articulated through an eightfold model of consciousness. The first five are the sense-consciousnesses—visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile—which provide mere sensory cognitions. The sixth, mental consciousness (manovijñāna), processes, conceptualizes, and combines this sensory data, giving rise to thoughts, judgments, and imaginings. The seventh, manas, is self-referential and afflicted, functioning as the “I-maker” that clings to a deeper level of mind as a real self and is colored by attachment, aversion, and ignorance. The eighth, ālayavijñāna or storehouse consciousness, serves as the underlying basis of this entire flow.

The storehouse consciousness is described as a deep, ongoing current that contains karmic “seeds” (bīja) formed by past actions and impressions. These seeds mature into concrete experiences: perceptions of an apparently external world, emotional tendencies, and even the sense of a personal identity. In this way, consciousness is both the projector and the repository of experience, continually shaped by what it has previously generated. Yet ālayavijñāna is not regarded as a permanent soul; it is dependently arisen, conditioned, and therefore transformable. The continuity of experience across moments and lifetimes is explained through this subtle, ever-changing basis.

From this perspective, “mind-only” (cittamātra or vijñaptimātra) does not assert that nothing exists at all, but that what appears as a solid, external world is a construction of consciousness conditioned by karmic seeds. Subject and object—seer and seen—are understood as two aspects of a single cognitive process arising from the same stream of consciousness. External objects are said to lack independent existence apart from this transformative activity of mind. The duality of knower and known is thus revealed as a conceptual fabrication, a way of carving up a process that is, at root, non-dual.

Spiritual practice in Yogācāra is framed as a transformation of this very basis (āśrayaparāvṛtti). Through insight and cultivation, defiled seeds in the storehouse consciousness are exhausted, and the eight consciousnesses are transformed into wisdoms (jñāna) that directly know emptiness and non-duality. Consciousness, in its ultimate nature, is empty and dependently arisen, devoid of any fixed essence even as it gives rise to the full display of experience. Liberation consists in recognizing the purely mental, constructed nature of phenomena and allowing the flow of consciousness to manifest as unobstructed, non-dual awareness rather than as a field of grasped objects and a grasping self.