Modern scholars tend to approach the Lankāvatāra Sūtra as a synthetic Yogācāra–Tathāgatagarbha work that offers a subtle account of consciousness while affirming Buddha-nature. Its well-known “mind-only” (cittamātra) teaching and eight-consciousness model, especially the ālaya-vijñāna or storehouse consciousness, are read as a sophisticated analysis of how karmic seeds and habitual patterns give rise to the world of experience. Rather than a simple subjective idealism, this is often interpreted as a critique of naïve realism: what appears as an external, independent world is understood as a construction of conditioned consciousness. The repeated call to abandon discriminating consciousness is thus taken as both a philosophical and a meditative directive, pointing toward a transformation of cognition rather than a merely theoretical stance.

At the same time, the text’s strong affirmation of tathāgatagarbha, or Buddha-nature, has attracted sustained attention. Scholars generally see the sutra as attempting to harmonize Yogācāra’s analysis of mind with the more “positive” language of innate purity and potentiality found in Buddha-nature doctrine. Even where the language seems almost substantialist, modern interpretation tends to treat this as a way of speaking about emptiness and the universal possibility of awakening, rather than as a reintroduction of a metaphysical self. This integrative tendency has led many to view the sutra as a bridge-text, where non-self and emptiness are expressed in a more affirmative register without abandoning the core Mahāyāna critique of any fixed essence.

Philological and historical studies further suggest that the work is composite and layered, preserving traces of different stages in Mahāyāna development. This helps explain the doctrinal tensions that scholars often note: passages that strongly emphasize non-self and radical mind-only stand alongside statements about Buddha-nature that can sound essentialist or devotional. Rather than treating these as simple inconsistencies, modern interpreters frequently see them as evidence of an evolving attempt to reconcile Yogācāra consciousness theory, tathāgatagarbha thought, and the broader Mahāyāna concern with emptiness. The sutra is thus valued less as a perfectly consistent system and more as a rich record of philosophical synthesis in motion.

A further strand of interpretation highlights the sutra’s insistence on direct, non-conceptual realization—what it calls the “self-realization of noble wisdom.” Its critique of reliance on conceptual constructions and scriptural authority is read as a shift toward an experiential, practice-centered soteriology, in which genuine insight transcends the dualities of existence and non-existence, subject and object. This emphasis on meditative realization, together with its analysis of mind, helps explain why the text later became so influential for Chan/Zen circles, even if its own standpoint remains firmly within the Yogācāra–Tathāgatagarbha framework. From this perspective, the Lankāvatāra Sūtra is approached as a work that does not merely describe consciousness and Buddha-nature, but seeks to guide practitioners toward a transformation in how reality is lived and known.