Dreams Manifest the Transformations of Kleshas

When cultivation reaches the mental faculty, the reduction of ignorance and the growth of wisdom within the mental faculty can bring about fundamental changes. This enables one to handle both worldly and transcendental dharmas with increasing perfection. Therefore, cultivation must penetrate deeply into the mental faculty. Because the mental faculty is the governing consciousness, it determines the actions of body, speech, and mind, and determines karmic seeds and their retribution. It discerns an immense number of dharmas, enabling it to take control and make decisions beforehand, either before events occur or as they are just beginning, devising strategies to handle matters effectively. In this way, our response to all situations becomes harmonious and unobstructed, leading to increasing harmony with the surrounding environment, people, affairs, and phenomena, thereby enabling us to deliver more and more sentient beings.

If one cultivates to the point of transforming the mental faculty, ignorance diminishes bit by bit, and greed, hatred, and delusion gradually weaken and fade away. When the afflictions of greed, hatred, and delusion within the mental faculty lessen and become thinner, they manifest through dreams. For instance, when the mental faculty no longer wishes to cling to certain dharmas in daily life, corresponding mental activities, thoughts, and aspirations arise. The Tathagata then cooperates by manifesting these through dreams. How is this demonstrated? Greed, hatred, and delusion represent the defilements of the mind. The defilements of the mind are expressed through impure material forms and environments. As the mind becomes purified and its defilements decrease, the environment in which the person finds themselves is revealed as utterly filthy. The more impure the external environment appears, the more afflictions are being expelled from the mind, signifying that the inner mind has become purer than before. Although the external realm remains impure, it contrasts with and highlights the purity of the mind.

Therefore, dreams also indicate the degree of a person's cultivation: whether the afflictions of greed, hatred, and delusion have lessened, and whether the inner mind is gradually becoming purified. Of course, there remains a certain difference between this expulsion of defilements before awakening and before attaining the fruition, and the subjugation and elimination of greed, hatred, and delusion after attaining the fruition. Before attaining the fruition, during the cultivation of the Thirty-Seven Aids to Enlightenment, through the practice of precepts, concentration, and wisdom, a portion of afflictions should indeed be subdued, and the mind should become purer than before. This is the result of cultivating precepts, concentration, and wisdom before awakening and before attaining the fruition. Otherwise, if the cultivation of precepts, concentration, wisdom, and the Thirty-Seven Aids to Enlightenment does not meet the standard, the obscurations of greed, hatred, and delusion remain severe, making it impossible to attain the fruition or realize the mind.