The Deliberation of the Manas Is Essentially to Seek Benefit and Avoid Harm.

Can the manas weigh the benefits and harms of all dharmas so as to seek advantage and avoid harm? The people, affairs, objects, and principles He has experienced since beginningless kalpas can accumulate into experience and memory, stored up in the mind, so that in later lives and in lives after those, when He encounters the same people, affairs, objects, and principles again, He will make selective responses based on past experience and memory, and the result is seeking advantage and avoiding harm.

We should know that the manas has always been in accordance with karmic seeds. Whatever the manas experiences leaves behind seeds, and the mental actions of the manas are all in accordance with those seeds. When the manas takes rebirth as various kinds of sentient beings, the mental actions and choices of the manas are in accordance with the current kind of sentient being, taking Himself to be that kind of being, never thinking that He could also be some other kind of being—except for special cases.

When the manas takes rebirth as a human, His mental actions and behavior should be mainly in accordance with those of a human, but this does not rule out very strong habitual tendencies from previous lives, including the habitual tendencies of having been a sage, or the habitual tendencies of having been an animal or a hungry ghost; still, they are most in accordance with human habitual tendencies. When karmic seeds become manifest, the manas accords even more with the karmic seeds. For example, when the conditions for major unwholesome karma ripen, the manas becomes unwholesome; when the conditions for major wholesome karma ripen, the manas becomes wholesome—something that seems inconceivable to others.

Therefore, everything the manas experiences becomes His own experience and memory, and when conditions are encountered, those experiences and memories are released, influencing His choices—or even having an absolute influence on them. The result is seeking advantage and avoiding harm, and He is extremely confident in this, not tolerating interference or obstruction from external factors.