How does Yogācāra Buddhism explain an oak tree?

By that I mean, an oak tree that doesn't have a sudden death from fire or being cut down or whatever, will for all intents and purposes live many years. Everyone who comes and visits the tree will see generally the same tree. Of course, the tree is never the "same" moment to moment, every atom is being swapped out and moving around, radiation is coming and going, branches and leaves fall off and regrow, etc.. But still, if I visit the tree today, and you visit it 1 year from now (in the middle of the tree's life), the tree is still "there" (even though it might be slightly different). Everyone who walks by will point "there is a tree over there". It's persistent across time and space, for some period. I understand that everything is technically an "illusion". We are all one unified flow of stuff, and the idea of a self or independence is an illusion in the grand scheme of things. But still, within the illusion, there are basically "natural physical laws of the universe" you could say. It's not like all of a sudden, "zap", the tree is an elephant when you visit. Then boom (magic wand), it is a car, then later it is a piece of cotton, or a sun, etc.. Or it magically jumps around in space. That is, there is some sort of structure somewhat independent of me that obeys some sort of rules to stay somewhat consistent in time and space. Even if my "mind" is projecting this experience or interpretation of such a tree illusion.... Everyone's mind is basically projecting a roughly similar illusion. I saw an example of a "river" from somewhere: > - A deva sees a river as a stream of gems. > - A human sees it as water. > - A hungry ghost sees it as a river of pus and blood. Sure, fine. But it's still at least perceived as a general "flow" by all. A continuous stream. It's not like it's a rock to some and an animal to others, and a river to everyone else. Or an explosion of rippling radiation or some other dispersed and hard to imagine network/system of many things.... It's still a flow, in time and space. Maybe to a fast-moving light-being, it is like a slow moving game of tetris, etc.. But it is still moving! If you account for the change in perspective, you have the same overall "flow" in the place. So my question is, at least in Yogācāra Buddhism (or other schools deeply analyzing consciousness to that degree), how do they account for this? My understanding so far is that, in Yogācāra, everything is mind. Everything is consciousness, from the base consciousness (ālaya-vijñāna). So then my question becomes "how do you account for physical form then"? To which they respond (it seems) with, "it's a mental projection". Okay, sure, MY experience of a form is a mental projection in my own mind, but that doesn't change the fact that the form is persistent in time and space (like the tree!). How does Yogācāra account for that? But then my reading/understanding of Yogācāra perspective is basically that: > All appearances, including persistent physical forms like trees, are manifestations of consciousness (vijñapti-mātra) arising from causal seeds (bīja) stored in the storehouse consciousness (ālaya-vijñāna). Basically, the tree is a co-constructed, stable illusion due to ongoing karmic resonance, not an independent material substance. Its form is projected within consciousness, but projected in accordance with karmic law, which behaves much like physical law. Something like that is very hard for me to comprehend, and feels circular in reasoning somehow. Is there a way to explain how physical forms seem to persist in time and space, from this sort of mind-only perspective here? _Looking further, it seems they would say "all sentient beings who perceive the tree are doing so because they have karmic seeds that generate similar experiences." But that doesn't make any sense to me, that the tree's reality is based on everyone else's reality. Or something like that. That everything is based on everything else, and if one thing changes all of a sudden, the entire universe could change it's fundamental laws. Doesn't seem to jive with me yet. Maybe I'm also reading it wrong._