Asanga

Asanga (c.4th century CE) was the North Indian master who, with his brother Vasubandhu, founded and systematized the Yogacara (“Yoga Practice”) school, also called Cittamatra, “mind-only.” Building on Nagarjuna’s emptiness, Asanga shifted the emphasis from what phenomena lack (inherent existence) to what experience is: a stream of consciousness.

His tradition holds that the world we encounter is not an independent external reality but a manifestation of mind—appearances arise within and as consciousness, structured by mental imprints. He elaborated the doctrine of the alaya-vijnana (“storehouse consciousness”), a deep substratum of mind that carries karmic seeds (bija) which ripen into the experienced world.

For the mind-power lineage, Asanga is perhaps the single most direct ancient ancestor of “consciousness creates reality.” The Yogacara claim that the perceived world is a projection of mind, and that latent mental seeds determine experienced reality, is the structural template behind modern teaching that thought and belief shape one’s lived world.

The “storehouse consciousness” full of seeds that bloom into circumstance is a strikingly close precursor to manifestation models in which subconscious mental contents externalize as events. Through the Lankavatara Sutra, this mind-only stream fed directly into Chan/Zen, and through Tibetan Buddhism into a view of reality as fundamentally mental and transformable.