Lecture Notes on the Sūtra of the Collection of the Father and Son (74)

The six faculties condition the six sense objects and give rise to the six consciousnesses

The six faculties each condition their respective sense objects: the eye faculty faces form objects, the ear faculty faces sound objects, the nose faculty faces odor objects, the tongue faculty faces taste objects, the body faculty faces tangible objects, and the manas faces mental objects (dharmas). The mental object is a form included in the realm of dharmas (dharma-āyatana-rūpa) that manifests upon the preceding five sense objects. For example, when I look at a book, a mental object of the book manifests upon the form object of the book itself—referring to the book's shape and size, its length, breadth, squareness, and roundness, the quality and thickness of the paper, the size and form of the characters, the informational content within, and so on. All of these belong to the mental object, which is the object perceived and discerned by the mind consciousness. When the manas and the mental object confront each other, and the eye faculty and the book's colors confront each other, the mind consciousness and the eye consciousness arise simultaneously to discern the book, but the scope and degree of fineness or coarseness of what they discern are different.