Storehouse consciousness (ālaya-vijñāna)

The storehouse consciousness (ālaya-vijñāna) is the Yogācāra school’s account of the deepest layer of the mind. To the six consciousnesses of earlier Buddhist analysis, the five senses and the mind, Yogācāra adds two: a defiled mind that constantly takes the storehouse to be a self, and the storehouse itself, an unbroken subliminal stream that holds the “seeds” (bīja) left by past actions and experiences, from which future experience ripens.

The doctrine answers questions that a strict analysis into momentary events leaves open: how karma carries over between lives, how memory and continuity are possible, and how one can emerge from states without conscious mind. It is not a self: it changes from moment to moment, and the belief that it is a self is the root error that practice must overturn.

At awakening, according to Yogācāra, the storehouse undergoes a “revolution of the basis” and is transformed into wisdom. Chinese and Japanese Buddhism took the doctrine up through Xuanzang’s Faxiang school, and the Awakening of Faith joined it with buddha-nature.