Selected Lectures from the Pitāputrasamāgama Sūtra

Your Majesty, the cessation of the final consciousness is called the aggregates of death. The arising of the initial consciousness is called the aggregates of birth.

Explanation: The Buddha said: Your Majesty, at the end of life, when the consciousness-mind ceases entirely, the five aggregates are called the aggregates of death. At the initial moment when the consciousness-mind arises, the five aggregates are called the aggregates of birth.

The magnitude of karmic offenses also lies in the actions of the mind, in the degree of hatred, and in whether there was hatred or an intent to kill. For example, suppose there is a complete living person inside a sack. If a person unintentionally kills him, not knowing there was a person inside the sack but thinking it was an inanimate object, and thus stabs it with a knife, resulting in death, this does not count as intentional killing. After death, such a person will not fall into hell to receive retribution. Nevertheless, in the future when encountering that person, he will also be unintentionally killed by that person once, though he will not fall into hell to suffer evil retribution. When killing, one must look at whether it was done with intent or without intent. Intentional killing constitutes the offense of killing, belonging to the karma of murder; unintentional killing is not a complete act of killing, but there is still karmic retribution. On the other hand, if the sack contained a piece of wood, an inanimate object, and not a person, but someone, out of hatred, mistook it for another person and killed it—though the wood was not a living being, killing it would be like chopping firewood—but because the mind harbored hatred and the intent to kill, treating it as a person to kill, this offense is great. The magnitude of the offense depends on the state of mind.

If one crushes an ant to death with an extremely malicious mind, this offense is also very great because the hatred is too severe; it differs from ordinary killing. Ordinary killing is sometimes unintentional, sometimes carrying a slight degree of hatred, and the karmic retribution is entirely different. Therefore, the judgment in law is also like this: it distinguishes between intentional killing and unintentional killing, and the sentencing results are different.

To summarize: Cultivation practices involve cultivating the deluded mind of the seventh consciousness. When the deluded mind is well-cultivated and the mind becomes pure, when there are no seeds of evil karma in the ālaya consciousness, one becomes a Buddha and can recover one’s original true nature. Currently, the karmic seeds contained within our ālaya consciousness are defiled, containing ignorance; our mind of the seventh consciousness has afflictions of greed, hatred, and delusion. The Buddha’s mind of the seventh consciousness is completely pure, having already transformed consciousness into wisdom, utterly devoid of self.