Vasubandhu’s Yogācāra vision places consciousness itself at the very heart of contemplative life, and this gives his account of meditation a distinctive flavor when set beside other Buddhist currents. Rather than beginning from external phenomena and tracing their impermanence, his analysis turns steadily toward the inner landscape of experience, treating all appearances as manifestations of consciousness. The eightfold structure of consciousness, and especially the ālaya-vijñāna or storehouse consciousness, becomes a primary field of meditative inquiry. This storehouse, understood as the locus of karmic “seeds,” is not merely observed but deliberately transformed, so that the very basis from which deluded experience arises is reconfigured. Liberation is thus framed as a radical transformation of the cognitive ground, rather than only as the cessation of defilements.

From this standpoint, meditation is not limited to watching thoughts and sensations arise and pass; it is a disciplined inquiry into how the apparent split between subject and object is constructed. Yogācāra practice, as articulated by Vasubandhu, aims to reveal that both “observer” and “observed” are mental constructions, a play of consciousness-only (vijñapti-mātra). This goes beyond simply recognizing impermanence or emptiness in things, by directly dismantling the dualistic framework through which experience is ordinarily organized. The realization that what seem to be external objects are in fact cognitive representations marks a distinctive emphasis when compared with approaches that do not so explicitly reinterpret the external world in these terms.

Vasubandhu also provides a refined psychological and phenomenological map to guide this work. Drawing on detailed classifications of mental factors, his approach invites careful discernment of wholesome and unwholesome states, as well as the latent tendencies that support them. Mindfulness, in this setting, is not a bare, non-analytical awareness, but a tool for examining the functioning of the eight consciousnesses and the seeds they carry. Through sustained contemplation, negative karmic seeds in the storehouse consciousness are gradually purified, and the eight consciousnesses are said to be transformed into forms of wisdom. This intertwining of scholastic analysis and meditative practice gives Yogācāra a particularly systematic and psychologically nuanced character.

Finally, Vasubandhu’s teaching on the three natures offers a structured contemplative framework for tracing illusion to its root. Meditative inquiry moves from recognizing the imagined nature, in which inherent existence and subject–object duality are projected, to seeing the dependent nature, the flow of causes and conditions that constitutes experience. From there, practice opens onto the perfected nature, the non-dual and empty character of phenomena as they are realized in awakened cognition. In this way, meditation becomes a progressive unveiling: the practitioner learns to see how illusion is constructed, how it functions, and how it can be relinquished through a transformation at the very base of consciousness.