Within the Yogācāra vision, what is called suffering is not grounded in independently existing external things, but in the way consciousness, conditioned by ignorance, constructs and reacts to its own projections. Experience unfolds entirely within consciousness, yet this is not recognized; instead, there is a firm belief in a truly existing “I” facing a world of truly existing external objects. This duality of grasper and grasped is an illusion, a mental construction that gives rise to the felt sense of being a vulnerable subject in a threatening or enticing world. Suffering, then, is the painful texture of this misapprehended experience, not an intrinsic property of any object “out there.”

The root of this situation is ignorance, specifically the failure to recognize the mind-only nature of experience and the emptiness of the subject–object split. Under the sway of this ignorance, consciousness engages in conceptual construction, proliferating distinctions and stories that solidify the illusion of a separate self and external things. These constructions give rise to the familiar afflictive patterns: attachment to what seems pleasing, aversion to what seems harmful, and the confusion that underlies both. Greed, hatred, and delusion, along with other mental afflictions, operate entirely within consciousness, yet they are projected outward and then reacted to as if they were properties of an external world.

Yogācāra further describes a deep layer of mind, the storehouse consciousness (ālaya-vijñāna), which holds karmic seeds (bīja) planted by past actions of body, speech, and mind. These seeds mature as particular perceptions, situations, and emotional tendencies, shaping how the world appears and how it is habitually interpreted. Because this entire process is governed by ignorance, the maturation of these seeds repeatedly gives rise to deluded perceptions and the afflictive responses that follow. Suffering is thus the fruition of one’s own karmic imprints within consciousness, rather than the impact of an independently existing reality.

From this perspective, liberation is not achieved by rearranging external conditions, but by transforming the very mode of knowing. When the mind directly realizes that all phenomena are mere transformations of consciousness, the imagined nature of things is seen through and the duality of subject and object collapses. With this realization, ignorance no longer fuels conceptual construction, karmic seeds cease to produce afflictive experience in the same way, and the cycle of attachment and aversion is brought to an end. The transformation of consciousness into wisdom is precisely the cessation of suffering understood in Yogācāra terms.