The Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra presents saṃsāra and nirvāṇa as “not-two,” not as two separate realms but as two ways of apprehending a single underlying reality. What is ordinarily called saṃsāra arises when consciousness is obscured by ignorance, dualistic discrimination, and clinging to subject and object. When these fabrications fall away and reality is seen without such projections, that very same field of experience is known as nirvāṇa. In this sense, the difference lies not in the world itself, but in how consciousness relates to it.

From the standpoint of Yogācāra, the sutra locates both saṃsāra and nirvāṇa within consciousness, especially in relation to the storehouse consciousness (ālaya-vijñāna). All phenomena, including the cycle of birth and death, are described as mind-only, mere projections of consciousness. When these projections are taken as inherently real, the result is bondage and suffering; when their empty, constructed nature is realized, the very ground that supported delusion is recognized as the purity of Buddha-nature. Thus, the same underlying consciousness, burdened by karmic tendencies, appears as saṃsāra, while freed from those adventitious obscurations, it is experienced as nirvāṇa.

The sutra therefore rejects the idea of nirvāṇa as a remote place or a separately produced state to be escaped into. Nirvāṇa is instead the non-dual knowing that sees saṃsāra as unborn, empty of inherent existence, and never truly apart from enlightenment. This is sometimes expressed as a “turning about” at the deepest level of consciousness, where the basis of deluded experience is transformed into liberating wisdom. When that transformation occurs, birth and death, bondage and liberation, are understood as conceptual overlays on suchness rather than as ultimately distinct realities.

Practically speaking, this vision undermines any attempt to cling to nirvāṇa as something over and against saṃsāra. To seek a nirvāṇa outside of ordinary experience would still be to move within dualistic grasping. The Laṅkāvatāra points instead to a realization that does not abide in either attachment to the world or in a reified peace apart from it, but recognizes that the very stuff of saṃsāra, when seen correctly, has always been of the nature of nirvāṇa.