The Three Natures: Imagined, Dependent, and Perfected

Alongside the eight consciousnesses, Yogacara's other central analytic structure is the doctrine of the three natures (trisvabhava), given its fullest independent treatment in Vasubandhu's short verse treatise the Trisvabhavanirdesa and integrated into the wider system in Asanga's Mahayanasamgraha. The first nature, the imagined (parikalpita), names the falsely constructed appearance of a substantial, independently existing subject standing over against a substantial, independently existing object — the very subject-object duality that ordinary, unreflective experience takes entirely for granted, and that vijnaptimatra's critique of external objects is meant to dismantle. The imagined nature, in Yogacara's technical vocabulary, simply does not exist in the way it is naively taken to exist; it is a superimposition (samaropa), not a further layer of reality alongside the other two natures.