Meditation in Yogācāra is the disciplined means by which the “mind-only” teaching becomes a direct realization rather than a mere doctrine. It is through sustained contemplative practice that the ālaya-vijñāna, the storehouse consciousness that carries karmic seeds (bīja), is gradually purified. As these seeds lose their force, the habitual projections and afflictions that sustain saṃsāric experience are weakened. This purification is not merely moral or psychological; it is understood as a fundamental reconfiguration of how experience appears at all.

Through calm abiding and insight (śamatha and vipaśyanā), meditation stabilizes attention and then turns that stability toward examining the nature of consciousness itself. In this process, practitioners come to discern the three natures (trisvabhāva): the imagined nature (parikalpita), in which subject and object are falsely grasped as separate; the dependent nature (paratantra), the causal flow of mental events; and the perfected nature (pariniṣpanna), the nondual suchness of that flow. Meditative insight reveals that what seemed to be external objects and an internal observer are both constructions within consciousness, thereby undermining the assumption of independently existing entities.

As this insight deepens, meditation becomes the arena for the transformation (āśrayaparāvṛtti) of the eight consciousnesses. The six sense-consciousnesses, the mental consciousness, the afflicted manas, and the storehouse consciousness are progressively reshaped into forms of wisdom (jñāna). This transformation includes the dissolution of the subject–object split, so that the perceiver and the perceived are no longer experienced as two opposed poles but as a single, nondual field of awareness. Meditation thus functions as the catalyst that converts ordinary, fragmented cognition into awakened knowing.

A further role of meditation in Yogācāra is the cultivation of nonconceptual awareness (nirvikalpa-jñāna). Conceptual thought habitually reifies distinctions and sustains the imagined nature; meditative absorption allows phenomena to arise and cease without being seized upon by discursive elaboration. In such nonconceptual cognition, appearances are known as “just mind,” free from the overlay of grasping and aversion. Through this progressive purification and clarification, supported by ethical conduct and wisdom, meditation becomes the path by which consciousness is fully liberated and the mind-only nature of reality is directly realized.