Can Enlightenment Regress?

Regarding whether one can regress after enlightenment, two questions are involved here. One question is whether the enlightenment is genuine or false, how the enlightenment came about, and what the process of enlightenment was like; the other question is what is meant by regression—regressing from what, and turning toward where.

The first question: the concept of enlightenment means opening up one's own mind and awakening to the true mind, the self-nature, the tathāgatagarbha. Opening up one's own mind is extremely difficult. For beginningless kalpas, we have always taken the five aggregates of body and mind to be a real self, continuously grasping at them, with intense craving and attachment. To turn around such a mind of craving and attachment, to have the sixth and seventh consciousnesses deny the five aggregates of body and mind and instead acknowledge a true mind, the tathāgatagarbha, which one has never met before—something utterly unfamiliar and beyond one's grasp—this difficulty is enormous. Only a person of great resolve can accomplish this; it requires considerable good roots and merit, considerable courage and perseverance, to step by step subdue the mind's inherent mistaken views, constantly negating the cognitive habits accumulated over beginningless kalpas; one must continually struggle against old ideological biases until one has completely denied one's own five aggregates of body and mind and established the correct view that within the body there is an unborn and unceasing true mind, the tathāgatagarbha, as the self. Only when the mind's nature has been subdued and one has attained the compliant acceptance of the true mind's self-nature can the conditions arise for finding and realizing the true mind, the tathāgatagarbha.

Before finding and realizing the tathāgatagarbha, one needs to engage in contemplative practice (vipaśyanā-caryā) on the illusory and unreal nature of the five aggregates of body and mind, constantly negating the five aggregates of body and mind, constantly striking them down, until the false view (mithyā-dṛṣṭi) of taking the five aggregates of body and mind as the self is eradicated; only then can one truly recognize the true mind, the self-nature. That is to say, the five aggregates of body and mind must fall down and die before one can find, within that corpse, the lively and vibrant self-nature, the tathāgatagarbha. There must be a death before one can realize that full-of-life one; otherwise, if one still takes a dead person for a living person, it is impossible to recognize that truly great living person. Therefore, before enlightenment one must eradicate the view of self (satkāya-dṛṣṭi-prahāṇa). Even if one finds the true mind, the tathāgatagarbha, one hour, one day, or several days after eradicating the view of self, it is still a matter of first eradicating the view of self, letting the five aggregates of body and mind die, and only then realizing the true tathāgatagarbha mind. Without this process of eradicating the view of self, genuine seeing of the mind and enlightenment is impossible—that would be a false awakening, with the mind not yet opened.

Another point is that ordinary beings have never been enlightened throughout beginningless kalpas; the first enlightenment must involve a long process of investigation. In this process, the seven factors of enlightenment must all be aroused and be complete, the eightfold noble path must be fully cultivated, the thirty-seven factors of the path must all be well cultivated and accomplished, and the conditions of the bodhisattva's six perfections must all be fulfilled, with the mind's nature softened and subdued, initially possessing the quality and disposition of a Mahāyāna bodhisattva—only then can one see the mind and become enlightened, becoming a true bodhisattva worthy of the name. Only such an enlightened person has genuine awakening, not false awakening. One who has genuinely awakened, who has obtained the fruit through a long and arduous process of investigation, will greatly cherish and value this hard-won fruit, and will not regress from the true mind, the self-nature, the tathāgatagarbha.

The second question concerns regression. Regression means withdrawing from the true mind, the tathāgatagarbha—no longer acknowledging the tathāgatagarbha as the true, unborn and unceasing mind—and returning to one's former view of taking the functions and activities of the five aggregates as real and as an imperishable self, turning from the true mind back to the deluded mind of the seven consciousnesses, continuing to take the deluded as real.

When this situation occurs, the main reason is that what was realized was not genuine and the views are not firmly established. One reason is that the process of eradicating the view of self was not undergone; the view of self that takes the five aggregates as the self was not eradicated, the five aggregates did not die, or did not die thoroughly.

Another reason is that there was no long-term process of investigating the tathāgatagarbha, no increasingly clear and thorough understanding of the tathāgatagarbha, no acceptance of the tathāgatagarbha's selfless nature, no acceptance of the tathāgatagarbha's formless, markless, and unassuming operating mechanism. Regarding the tathāgatagarbha, it is like looking at flowers through the fog—at most it is a conceptual understanding, without truly finding and realizing the tathāgatagarbha. One also cannot observe the tathāgatagarbha's operation upon the five aggregates of body and mind, cannot observe the purity, selflessness, and genuineness of the tathāgatagarbha in the operation of the five aggregates of body and mind.

Therefore, this hazy cognition of the tathāgatagarbha is not solid, cannot shake one's inner being, and one cannot treasure the true mind, the self-nature, the tathāgatagarbha; one can only go back to grasping the seemingly real functions and activities of the five aggregates as the self. This is regression and the cause of regression. With genuine, solid seeing of the mind and enlightenment, with the five aggregates dead through and through, what is realized is very real, and one can observe directly the operation of the true mind; one will no longer grasp at the functions and activities of the five aggregates. Therefore, no matter who tries to persuade or mislead, one will not regress from the tathāgatagarbha and unsurpassed bodhi.