Yogācāra portrays perception and cognition as a sophisticated unfolding of consciousness in which what appears as an external world is, at root, a display of mind. Experience is described as *vijñapti-mātra*—“nothing but representations”—meaning that what is encountered are mental presentations rather than independently accessed objects. These representations arise in dependence on causes and conditions, especially karmic impressions, so that both the perceiving subject and the perceived object are shaped by consciousness itself. This view does not simply deny existence, but reframes it as a dependently arisen stream of cognitive appearances.

To clarify this, Yogācāra analyzes mind into eight interrelated consciousnesses. The five sense consciousnesses arise in dependence on their respective faculties and “objects,” yet what appears as an object is ultimately a representation. The sixth, mental consciousness (manovijñāna), gathers and interprets these sensory streams, forming concepts, memories, and judgments. Beneath these, the seventh consciousness (kliṣṭa-manas) appropriates the flow of experience as “I” and “mine,” generating ego-centered distortion. At the deepest level, the storehouse consciousness (ālayavijñāna) holds karmic seeds (*bīja*), a subliminal current from which all these modes of awareness emerge.

Perception, on this account, unfolds as karmic seeds in the ālayavijñāna ripen into a coordinated display: a sense consciousness, a corresponding object as representation, and a mental consciousness that takes this configuration as an external world. The afflicted mind then grasps this stream as a solid subject confronting solid objects, giving rise to the familiar dualistic stance. Thus, what seems to be a person perceiving a world “out there” is, from the Yogācāra perspective, a complex projection and interpretation of consciousness conditioned by past actions and impressions. Both individual and shared worlds are understood as emerging from such latent tendencies.

Yogācāra further illuminates this process through the teaching of the three natures (*trisvabhāva*). The imagined nature (*parikalpita*) is the falsely constructed duality of subject and object, taken as inherently separate and real. The other-dependent nature (*paratantra*) is the actual dependently arisen flow of causes and conditions—seeds, consciousnesses, and representations in mutual interplay. The perfected nature (*pariniṣpanna*) is the realized absence of any intrinsic separation between knower and known, the way experience is when cognitive error has been relinquished. Spiritual practice, in this light, is a disciplined inquiry into how perceptions are constructed, allowing the mind to see through its own projections and recognize the non-dual character of its ongoing display.