Within the Yogācāra lineage, reflections on Vasubandhu’s legacy often take the form of careful internal critique rather than outright rejection. Many later Yogācārins observed that his training in Abhidharma made his works highly analytic and schematic, especially in the treatment of consciousness and the three natures. This style was seen as risking an overly scholastic or psychological reading of Yogācāra, in which transformative realization could be overshadowed by intricate conceptual analysis. The concern here was not that analysis is useless, but that it might become an end in itself rather than a support for direct meditative insight.

A central point of debate was his handling of *vijñapti-mātra* and *ālaya-vijñāna*. Some interpreters felt that his formulations could be read as reifying consciousness, as though the storehouse consciousness were a subtle, enduring substrate. This raised questions about whether karmic seeds and their continuity could be explained without implying some kind of quasi-substantial entity. Others worried that his strong arguments against external objects might be taken as denying even their conventional reality, thus inviting charges of extremism or nihilism rather than a nuanced account of dependent appearance.

Related to this were criticisms of his account of the three natures (*trisvabhāva*). Certain Yogācāra commentators judged his treatment to lean too heavily toward an epistemic model—focusing on error and correction in cognition—without fully unfolding the deeper soteriological power of the scheme. They questioned whether his explanations clearly distinguished the imagined nature from the dependent nature, and whether the transition to the perfected nature was adequately articulated as a lived realization rather than merely a refined description. In this light, some felt that the luminous, already-pure aspect of mind and the language of suchness or Buddha-nature did not receive sufficient emphasis.

Finally, there were concerns about the practical orientation of his system. The detailed mapping of consciousness and its transformations, while philosophically rich, was sometimes seen as making the path overly intellectual. Some Yogācārins argued that such complexity could obscure the immediacy of non-dual realization, and that the subtle dualisms implicit in distinguishing subject and object even within consciousness might linger as obstacles. From this perspective, the task was to preserve the depth of Vasubandhu’s analysis while ensuring that it remained firmly tethered to contemplative practice and the direct realization of emptiness.