The Prajñā Wisdom of Tathāgatagarbha

As long as the Buddha has not defined and delineated the framework for the mental factors (caittas) of the manas and the tathāgatagarbha, then the mental factors of these two consciousness-minds, as well as the mental factors of all consciousnesses, remain to be observed and realized, and then revealed.

The tathāgatagarbha is also called prajñā, and prajñā means great wisdom. What kind of prajñā wisdom does the tathāgatagarbha possess? Can this wisdom be measured? The tathāgatagarbha manifests its own five-aggregate body — this is great wisdom; manifesting the material universe (the vessel-world) is great wisdom. What dharmas can the seven consciousnesses manifest? Directly speaking, the seven consciousnesses cannot manifest any dharma at all; at most they can drive the tathāgatagarbha to manifest on their behalf. The tathāgatagarbha can discern the five-aggregate body and the vessel-world, adjusting the five-aggregate body and the world at all times and places — this great wisdom is unimaginable. Its discernment of the manas and its cooperation with the manas is an unimaginable great wisdom. Its discernment of karmic seeds and its transmission of seeds is an unimaginable great wisdom. Those functions of the tathāgatagarbha that are not easily known by people — the upādāna (grasping-and-sustaining) functions, all the functions that cannot presently be known, the great wisdom of upholding all dharmas — are all unimaginable.

If the tathāgatagarbha has the nature of discernment, it must have wisdom; if it can create all dharmas, it must have wisdom. Without wisdom, that discerning nature would serve no purpose — it would discern yet not know what it had discerned. If that were the case, then after discerning, how to proceed further would be unknown, and the next dharma would not appear. Observe just how great the wisdom of the tathāgatagarbha actually is. First of all, the tathāgatagarbha has no ignorance (avidyā) — it is entirely illumination; it does not perform any ignorant karma such as greed, hatred, or delusion, and therefore it is not bound by anything, has not the slightest karma of birth-and-death, and is a great liberated one, a greatly self-possessed one. From this point of view, the tathāgatagarbha is truly worthy of veneration, of taking refuge in, and of praise — it is the great treasure of both the mundane and supramundane, the light and guiding leader of sentient beings.

The discerning wisdom of the tathāgatagarbha is swift and powerful. After discerning all dharmas, it can, in an instant, in accordance with dharmas, conditions, karma, and the wishes of the seven consciousnesses, give rise to and change all dharmas. After discerning the mental factors of the manas, if the tathāgatagarbha lacked discriminating wisdom, how could it cooperate with the manas to give rise to all dharmas? The tathāgatagarbha discerns karmic seeds; if it lacked the wisdom to discern what kind of karmic seeds they are, and did not know whether the karmic seeds had matured, then how could it give rise to the five-aggregate body-and-mind and the material universe in accordance with those karmic seeds? The principle of the body's self-healing, whether known or unknown to sentient beings, is a manifestation of the great wisdom of the tathāgatagarbha — it is the tathāgatagarbha that repairs sentient beings' bodies. This wisdom is beyond our capacity to fathom.

Although the tathāgatagarbha possesses the mental factor of wisdom (prajñā-caitta), it differs from the wisdom of the seven consciousnesses — it is extremely powerful. The wisdom of the seven consciousnesses is used to discriminate the dharmas of the mundane world, whereas the wisdom of the tathāgatagarbha discriminates what is not of the mundane world. Precisely because the tathāgatagarbha can discriminate the dharmas that are not of the mundane world, the seven consciousnesses are able, with ease and without interruption, to discriminate the dharmas of the mundane world, and thereby to survive in the mundane world life after life.