Vasubandhu stands out in the Buddhist tradition by radicalizing the analysis of both self and world through the lens of “consciousness-only” (vijñapti-mātra). Like other Buddhist schools, his thought firmly rejects any permanent, independent self, yet it does so by tracing the illusion of “I” to specific structures within consciousness. The person is not a hidden essence but a conceptual imputation upon a stream of mental events and karmic seeds. What distinguishes his account is the detailed mapping of this stream into eight consciousnesses, including the manas, which persistently grasps at an “I,” and the ālaya-vijñāna, the storehouse where karmic potentials are held. The sense of self is thus not merely a mistaken idea but a deeply rooted, habitual misapprehension arising from how consciousness is configured.

This interior turn is matched by an equally striking view of the nature of reality. Earlier schools generally accepted an external world of physical and mental dharmas as conventionally real, even while denying a permanent self. Vasubandhu, by contrast, argues that what appear as external objects are nothing more than manifestations or appearances of consciousness, without independent existence apart from that consciousness. The familiar split between subject and object is treated as a constructed, imagined duality rather than a faithful picture of how things ultimately are. In this way, Yogācāra does not simply deny a self; it questions the very status of the “external” world that the self is supposed to inhabit.

Within this framework, Vasubandhu employs the doctrine of the three natures to articulate different levels of understanding. The imagined nature refers to the conceptual fabrications that posit discrete selves and objects; the dependent nature is the flow of consciousness and its karmic conditioning; the perfected nature is the realization of reality free from subject–object duality. Liberation is described as a profound transformation at the base (āśrayaparāvṛtti), in which the storehouse consciousness itself is purified and reconfigured into wisdom. Compared with schools that emphasize either the analysis of aggregates or a purely deconstructive account of emptiness, this vision offers a more explicitly psychological and phenomenological path: by understanding how consciousness constructs both self and world, the practitioner can allow that construction to unravel, revealing a non-dual mode of awareness.