Madhyamaka answers what things ultimately are by arguing that nothing has an intrinsic nature to be found. Yogachara, the other great school of Indian Mahayana philosophy, takes a different route to a related conclusion: rather than dismantling the question through dialectic, it offers a positive account of how experience of an external world gets constructed, and where the construction can be undone.
Associated chiefly with the brothers Asanga and Vasubandhu, active around the fourth or fifth century, the school is also called Vijnanavada, the doctrine of consciousness, or Cittamatra, mind only, names pointing at its central claim, that ordinary experience of an external world is consciousness appearing to itself as subject and object. Vasubandhu's Thirty Verses lays out a model of eight consciousnesses, from the five senses and a coordinating mental consciousness, through a deluded consciousness mistaking part of the deeper mind for a permanent self, down to the alayavijnana, the storehouse consciousness, where every action leaves a seed, bija, that ripens into a later experience, Yogachara's account of karma without a fixed self to carry it.
Yogachara and Madhyamaka argued for centuries. Madhyamaka commentators read the storehouse consciousness as smuggling back a fixed entity emptiness was built to rule out. Yogachara answered that emptiness with no account of how experience arises, and is reversed through practice, is description without a mechanism. Neither side persuaded the other, and both carried the disagreement into Tibet and East Asia. Undisputed is its other legacy: a logical wing, built by Dignaga and then Dharmakirti, that became standard equipment for Buddhist philosophy across Asia.