The Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra presents the eight consciousnesses as a layered account of how experience, delusion, and the possibility of awakening unfold. At the surface are the five sense-consciousnesses—visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile—which register forms, sounds, smells, tastes, and tangibles. These do not yet construct a solid sense of “self” and “world”; they simply provide the raw data of perception. On their own, they are not the primary source of bondage, but they serve as the immediate occasions for further mental activity that turns simple contact into complex, karmically charged experience.

Beneath this sensory level stands the mental consciousness (mano-vijñāna), which gathers and coordinates the input of the senses and also takes mental objects such as ideas, memories, and concepts. It discriminates, judges, and constructs the familiar subject–object duality: “I see this,” “I like that,” “this is good,” “that is bad.” In this way it becomes the main arena of conceptual proliferation and present-moment karmic intention. Closely related, yet more subtle, is the defiled mental consciousness (kliṣṭa-manas), a constant background function that clings to an imagined self. This manas turns toward the deepest level of mind and appropriates it as “I” and “mine,” marked by self-delusion, self-view, self-conceit, and self-love.

At the most fundamental level is the storehouse consciousness (ālaya-vijñāna), described as a repository of karmic seeds (bīja) and latent tendencies. It is beginningless and functions as the underlying support for the continuity of samsaric existence, including birth, death, and rebirth. From the maturation of these seeds arise the other seven consciousnesses and the entire experienced world of beings and environments. This storehouse is neither purely defiled nor purely pure; it is a basis that can be transformed. The text emphasizes that what appears as an external world is, in truth, “mind-only” or “consciousness-only,” a flow of projections and transformations of these eight consciousnesses driven by karmic seeds and grasping.

The Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra links this deepest level of consciousness with Buddha-nature (tathāgata-garbha). For beings still caught in ignorance and clinging, this underlying basis is experienced as the ālaya-vijñāna that sustains samsaric continuity. When there is profound insight into the empty, dependently arisen nature of subject, object, and the eight consciousnesses themselves, this basis is “turned over” (āśraya-parāvṛtti) and realized as pure, unobstructed awareness. The same ground that once functioned as a defiled storehouse is then known as luminous Buddha-nature, free from grasping and distortion. In this way, the theory of eight consciousnesses not only analyzes the structure of deluded experience but also points to the very heart of awakening.