A recurring misunderstanding is the tendency to see Vasubandhu as a one‑dimensional “mind‑only” philosopher from the outset. In fact, his career reflects a movement from Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma, exemplified by the Abhidharmakośa, into a more fully developed Yogācāra perspective under the influence of Asaṅga. Treating all texts attributed to him as expressions of a single, mature Yogācāra system overlooks this evolution and the possibility of transitional phases and later doctrinal developments by others. Related to this is the habit of presenting him as the sole or isolated architect of Yogācāra, which obscures the broader collaborative and historical context in which his thought took shape.

Another persistent misconception is to equate Yogācāra with crude solipsism or a blanket denial of any kind of reality outside one’s individual mind. The language of “mind‑only” or “mere representation” is often read as a claim that nothing exists at all, or that Vasubandhu rejected conventional reality. His analysis, however, is directed toward how experience is constructed and how objects are reified, not toward erasing the pragmatic functioning of phenomena or the shared, conditioned stream of experience. In this light, the comparison with Western “idealism” can be misleading when it suggests a simple thesis that “the world is only mental,” rather than a nuanced examination of perception, cognition, and karmic conditioning.

A further distortion arises when Yogācāra is portrayed as setting up consciousness itself as a kind of ultimate substance and thereby abandoning the insight of emptiness. Vasubandhu’s discussions of consciousness, including the storehouse consciousness and karmic seeds, are not intended to posit an eternal self or a metaphysical ground, but to explain continuity and transformation within an impermanent, conditioned flow. His thought does not stand in simple opposition to the Madhyamaka teaching of emptiness; rather, it presupposes that even consciousness and its factors lack intrinsic, self‑established existence. When read in this way, the three natures and the analysis of perception function as skillful means for loosening the grip of dualistic clinging, rather than as blueprints for a new metaphysical edifice.

Finally, there is a tendency to treat Vasubandhu’s work as if it were merely abstract psychology or speculative philosophy, detached from the path of practice. Yet his careful mapping of consciousness, mental factors, and the transformation of the basis is explicitly soteriological, aimed at revealing how ignorance and conceptual construction generate the duality of grasper and grasped. The point of this analysis is to guide meditative cultivation, ethical conduct, and the purification of karmic seeds, so that non‑dual wisdom can emerge. When these practical and liberative dimensions are kept in view, his writings cease to look like dry theory and instead appear as a subtle manual for reorienting experience at its very roots.