Within the Yogācāra vision of “mind-only,” karma is understood as an intrinsic process of consciousness rather than an external cosmic law acting on a separate world. Every action, thought, and intention leaves subtle impressions or seeds (bīja) within the flow of mind. These seeds are gathered and sustained in the ālaya-vijñāna, the storehouse consciousness, which serves as the underlying continuum that carries karmic imprints across time and even across lifetimes. In this way, karma provides both the continuity of individual existence and the latent potential for future experiences.

When these karmic seeds ripen, they manifest as perceptions, mental states, bodily experiences, and the very appearance of an external environment. What is ordinarily taken to be a solid, independent world is, from this perspective, the unfolding of these seeds within consciousness itself. The diversity of karmic accumulations explains why beings inhabit different experiential worlds, even while sharing overlapping patterns of appearance. Karma thus functions as the architect of a consciousness-based reality, determining not only what is experienced but also how it is experienced.

At the same time, karma is the engine that sustains saṃsāra. Under the influence of ignorance, the ripening of seeds gives rise to dualistic perception: a subject facing an object, a self confronting a world. Responding to these appearances with grasping, aversion, and confusion plants further seeds, reinforcing the cycle and ensuring its continuation. In this sense, karma is both the product and the producer of deluded experience, continually shaping the projections that are then mistaken for independent reality.

Yet the same mechanism that binds also offers a path of transformation. Through disciplined practice—ethical conduct, meditation, and the cultivation of wisdom—new wholesome seeds are planted, and unwholesome tendencies are gradually weakened and purified. As the karmic patterns that support dualistic clinging are transformed, the storehouse consciousness itself is refined, and perception shifts toward non-dual wisdom. Liberation, in this framework, is not an escape from a fixed external world but the profound reconfiguration of consciousness and its karmic tendencies, so that reality is seen without the distortions imposed by accumulated seeds.