The Storehouse of Expectations: Ālaya-vijñāna as a Reflexive Seed in Yogācāra Soteriology

Most scholarship on ālaya-vijñāna asks what the doctrine explains: karmic continuity, latent affliction, meditative cessation, rebirth without self, āśraya-parāvṛtti. I want to ask something different: what happens when the teaching enters contemplative training. Yogācāra holds that cognition is shaped by seeds and conceptual construction. If that is right, the doctrine of ālaya-vijñāna is not exempt from its own analysis. Taught as a model of hidden karmic depth, it can itself become a seed: shaping what practitioners expect, what they notice, how they interpret what arises, and what they later report as evidence for the doctrine. The case is built from inside Yogācāra. Vasubandhu warns in the Triṃśikā that even cognition-only fails when grasped as an object; that warning extends naturally to ālaya-vijñāna. Asaṅga's Mahāyānasaṃgraha, read alongside Yamabe's work on meditative transformation, shows why the doctrine is soteriological rather than merely scholastic. Research on meditation maps, religious experience, expectation, and social reinforcement gives the picture psychological plausibility, though not historical proof. The worry is not that map-shaped experiences are worthless. It is that they cannot serve as independent confirmation of the map that shaped them. Yogācāra teaching should therefore treat ālaya-vijñāna as a provisional heuristic, keep description separate from doctrinal interpretation, leave room for other explanations, and put non-apprehension before confirmation. Keywords: Yogācāra; ālaya-vijñāna; soteriology; meditation; constructivism; expectation; vijñapti-mātra; āśraya-parāvṛtti