Within the Yogācāra tradition, emptiness is not a claim that nothing exists, but a way of describing how things exist. What appears as a world of external objects and an internal subject is understood as “mind-only”: a stream of dependently arisen cognitive events. Emptiness, in this context, means that these appearances lack any fixed, independent essence and are empty of being truly separate from consciousness. The ordinary sense of a solid subject confronting solid objects is treated as a conceptual construction, not as the way reality ultimately is. Thus, emptiness points directly to the non-duality of consciousness and its contents.

This vision is articulated through the framework of the three natures. The imagined nature is the falsely projected duality of subject and object, a purely conceptual fabrication that is regarded as totally empty. The other-dependent nature is the causal flow of consciousness and mental formations, arising through interdependent conditions; it functions conventionally, yet is empty of the imagined duality imposed upon it. The perfected nature is the direct realization that this dependently arisen flow is empty of the imagined nature, a seeing of suchness in which the subject–object split no longer holds sway. Emptiness here is always “emptiness of” something: specifically, the other-dependent nature empty of the imagined nature.

From this standpoint, emptiness is both the absence of inherent existence and, more specifically, the absence of subject–object duality in experience. All dharmas, including the storehouse consciousness and its karmic seeds, are dependently arisen and therefore lack any self-sufficient core. When this is realized, what remains is not a blank void but a clear, non-dual awareness in which appearances are recognized as mere manifestations of consciousness, devoid of any rigid separation between perceiver and perceived. Such realization transforms the stream of consciousness into wisdom, revealing emptiness as the very mode in which reality, as mind-only, is disclosed.