Yogācāra, often rendered as “consciousness-only” or “mind-only,” teaches that what is ordinarily taken to be an external, independently existing world is in fact a manifestation of consciousness. This does not mean that appearances are simply denied, but that their supposed status as self-existing objects is exposed as a cognitive construction. All phenomena are understood as transformations or representations within consciousness, and the duality of subject and object is seen as a mistaken projection rather than an ultimate feature of reality. In this way, Yogācāra offers a radical re-reading of experience, inviting a shift from clinging to external things toward examining the processes of knowing themselves.

To clarify these processes, Yogācāra speaks of eight kinds of consciousness. There are the five sense-consciousnesses associated with sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch, together with a mental consciousness that engages in conceptual thought and reflection. Beneath these operates an afflicted or defiled mental consciousness, which subtly grasps at a sense of “I” and appropriates the deeper basis of mind as a self. At the most fundamental level lies the storehouse consciousness (ālaya-vijñāna), a continuous stream that underlies experience and serves as the repository of karmic seeds. From this layered model, the familiar world of perception emerges as the maturation of latent tendencies within consciousness itself.

The storehouse consciousness is said to contain seeds (bīja) planted by past actions, impressions, and habits. These seeds ripen into present perceptions, dispositions, and even the environments in which beings find themselves, so that the experienced world is shaped by the accumulated imprints of consciousness. Habit energies and afflictive emotions further “perfume” this stream, reinforcing patterns of dualistic grasping and reification. Thus, what appears as a solid, external reality is understood as the unfolding of these karmic and cognitive imprints, continuously conditioning how things show up to awareness.

Yogācāra also articulates the structure of experience through the three natures (trisvabhāva). The imagined nature is the falsely constructed realm of subject versus object, where conceptual fabrications are taken as ultimately real. The other-dependent nature is the dependently arisen flow of causes and conditions, including consciousness and its seeds, which underlies those fabrications. The perfected nature is the realization of the absence of this imagined duality within that dependent flow, the recognition of a reality free from the split between knower and known. Emptiness, in this light, is understood as the emptiness of the subject–object division that is projected onto the dependently arisen stream.

Liberation, for Yogācāra, is described as a profound transformation of consciousness. The basis of experience—the storehouse consciousness and the afflicted mental processes associated with it—is purified and “turned around,” so that what once functioned as the ground of delusion becomes the ground of wisdom. The eight consciousnesses are transformed into forms of awakened knowing, often expressed as mirror-like and non-conceptual wisdom that no longer fabricates duality. Through meditative discipline, ethical conduct, and insight, the practitioner gradually uproots the seeds of ignorance and affliction, directly realizing the consciousness-only nature of phenomena and the perfected nature that was obscured by habitual projections.