6 ideas
Vasubandhu's shift from Abhidharma realism to Yogācāra mind-only is not a conversion but the continuation of one method. Anything real must be explained as a momentary, causally conditioned event, and any posited entity that adds no causal work gets eliminated. Applied consistently, this rule strips away first the self and then the external object.
Critics say that without external objects, experience could not be tied to particular places, shared between people, or causally effective. Vasubandhu answers with cases where it clearly is. Dreams occur at specific times and have real effects such as nocturnal emission, all hungry ghosts collectively see a river as pus, and hell-beings are tormented by guardians who cannot exist as independent beings. Shared, orderly, consequential experience can therefore arise from ripening karmic impressions alone.
An external object would have to be a single whole, a set of separate atoms, or an aggregate of atoms, and none of these works. A whole is never perceived apart from its parts, and single atoms are imperceptible. An aggregate fails too: if atoms have sides so they can join, they are divisible and not atoms, and if they are partless, joined atoms collapse into a point with no extension. The mereology of external matter is therefore incoherent, which undercuts the strongest reason to posit it.
Every experience can be analysed in three ways. The imagined nature is the false split into a grasping subject and grasped objects. The dependent nature is the actual causal stream of consciousness that produces that appearance. The perfected nature is the dependent nature seen emptied of the imagined subject–object duality. Liberation does not destroy the world but removes the imagined overlay from the causal process.
The storehouse consciousness is a subliminal stream that holds seeds planted by past actions and perceptions. When these seeds ripen, they produce the appearance of a world, bodies, and objects. This explains the regularity and continuity of experience, including across sleep, meditation, and rebirth, without a persisting self or mind-independent matter doing the work.
This lens stops treating perception as contact with a world out there. It treats perception as consciousness appearing to itself in the form of object and perceiver. The question shifts from whether an object is real to what conditions produced this appearance and what false duality is being layered onto it. Craving and aversion lose their footing because their targets are recognized as constructed rather than found.