Yogācāra stands out within the Buddhist tradition by placing an uncompromising emphasis on consciousness as the basis of all experience. While other schools acknowledge the centrality of mind, they generally accept external objects as at least conventionally real; Yogācāra, by contrast, treats what appears as an external world as nothing more than representations within consciousness. This “mind-only” perspective does not simply collapse into crude solipsism, but functions as a radical phenomenological analysis: the subject–object duality itself is seen as a constructed illusion. In this way, Yogācāra’s idealism is more pronounced than that of many other Mahāyāna and early Buddhist schools, which tend to be more comfortable speaking of external phenomena as existing in some conventional sense.

A distinctive hallmark of Yogācāra is its detailed map of consciousness. Instead of limiting analysis to the six sense consciousnesses, it introduces a defiled mental consciousness (manas) and the storehouse consciousness (ālayavijñāna), yielding eight consciousnesses in total. The ālayavijñāna functions as a kind of karmic continuum, a repository of seeds (bīja) that condition how reality is experienced. Other schools discuss continuity and karmic conditioning, yet do not articulate this underlying storehouse in such a systematic way. This model allows Yogācāra to explain both the persistence of karmic tendencies and the apparent stability of a world that is, at root, nothing but consciousness and its transformations.

Yogācāra also develops a subtle analysis of how experience is structured through the doctrine of the three natures. The imagined nature refers to the falsely imputed duality of subject and object; the dependent nature is the causal flow of conditions and representations; and the perfected nature is the realization of the emptiness of that duality within the ongoing flow of experience. This framework sets Yogācāra apart from schools such as Madhyamaka, which likewise affirm emptiness but typically proceed by a more purely negative deconstruction of inherent existence, without the same triadic schema. Yogācāra thus speaks more affirmatively about consciousness, even while agreeing that all phenomena lack inherent existence.

In terms of spiritual practice, Yogācāra describes the path as a profound transformation of consciousness itself. Liberation is portrayed as a “turning around at the basis” (āśraya-parāvṛtti), in which the storehouse consciousness, laden with karmic seeds, is transformed into non-dual wisdom. Rather than merely eliminating defilements, the practitioner works to reshape the very structures of cognition that project a dualistic world. This emphasis on the transformation of consciousness, grounded in the eight-consciousnesses model and the analysis of three natures, marks Yogācāra’s distinctive contribution to Buddhist thought and contemplative life.