What “mind-only” means in Yogācāra
Vasubandhu’s Yogācāra philosophy asks readers to question the ordinary picture of perception: first there is a fully known world outside us, then the mind copies it. When we see a mountain, we encounter an appearance within experience; we do not step outside experience to compare that appearance with the mountain as it exists independently of perception.
This is the force of Yogācāra’s “mind-only” language. It points to how what we call objects are known through consciousness, not to a simple claim that a person can wish mountains out of existence. The view makes the boundary between perceiver and perceived less secure than common sense suggests.
How karmic “seeds” shape experience
Yogācāra explains continuity through storehouse consciousness: a deep, ongoing layer of consciousness that carries “seeds,” or latent dispositions formed by past actions and experiences. A seed is not a tiny object inside the mind. It is a tendency that can later ripen into a way of perceiving, feeling, or responding.
The idea links action to experience without requiring a permanent, unchanging self. What a person does leaves traces; under suitable conditions, those traces help shape what appears and how it is interpreted. In this account, perception is not a neutral window—it is conditioned by accumulated habits.
A philosophical account, not a brain scan
Vasubandhu’s framework belongs to Buddhist philosophy, where examining perception also bears on suffering and liberation. If experience is shaped by ingrained tendencies, those tendencies can be examined and transformed. The striking implication is that the world we take for granted is never encountered apart from the mind’s work of making it intelligible.
