The Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra presents consciousness (vijñāna) as an intricate, eightfold process rather than a single, static faculty. It distinguishes the five sense-consciousnesses—seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching—from the more subtle mental dimensions that interpret and appropriate these sensory data. Mental consciousness (mano-vijñāna) is described as the arena where thoughts, concepts, and judgments arise, shaping the stream of experience into coherent narratives. This layered model already suggests that what is ordinarily taken as a simple “mind” is, in fact, a complex interplay of functions.

Within this structure, the text gives particular weight to manas, the seventh consciousness, which is characterized as self-referential and appropriative. Manas clings to the flow of experience as “I” and “mine,” generating the sense of a solid, enduring self and reinforcing subject–object duality. It is here that attachment and ego-clinging crystallize, as this consciousness persistently misreads the dynamic processes of mind as a fixed identity. In this way, consciousness is not merely a neutral witness but an active participant in the construction of samsaric bondage.

At the deepest level stands ālaya-vijñāna, the storehouse consciousness, portrayed as a kind of underlying continuum or “repository” of karmic seeds (bīja). All past actions, impressions, and tendencies are said to be deposited here, forming the latent basis from which the other seven consciousnesses arise, function, and cease. This storehouse is not a permanent self but a constantly changing stream of potential, conditioning how the world appears and how one responds to it. Ordinary personality and the experienced world are thus understood as projections or manifestations emerging from this karmically charged depth.

The Laṅkāvatāra further characterizes all this as a process of “mind-only” or “consciousness-only,” emphasizing that what appear as external objects are, in truth, constructions or transformations of consciousness itself. Perceiver, act of perceiving, and perceived object are three aspects of a single, ongoing modification of consciousness, rather than three independent realities. Awakening is described as a radical transformation at this very basis (āśraya-parāvṛtti), in which the dualistic functioning of consciousness is overturned. When the ālaya-vijñāna is purified of defilements, its deepest level is revealed as tathāgatagarbha, Buddha-nature, so that the same ground which once stored karmic seeds is realized as non-dual Buddha-wisdom.