What Is Being Free from Marks

What is meant by "detaching from marks" is to let the mind of the six consciousnesses depart from all the illusory marks of the world, not taking these illusory marks as real, and thereby be able to break through the illusory self-view and recognize the true reality both within and beyond the world. And the one who truly detaches from all marks is the tathāgatagarbha mind-essence, which is originally detached from all marks and has no appearance of any kind.

What is meant by "detaching" is peeling away and excluding. What is meant by excluding is not taking the arising-and-ceasing illusory dharmas of the world as real; one observes that any dharma existing in the world is impermanent, arising and ceasing, subject to change, suffering, and illusory. Any dharma possessing these characteristics is not a real dharma, and thus in one's mind one can no longer take these dharmas as real.

After negating these illusory dharmas one by one, we can then search among these illusory dharmas to find exactly which dharma is originally detached from all marks, unborn and unceasing, ever-present, unchanging, and not empty yet possessing real function. If we find a dharma and consider it to be suchness, to be the true self, then we must compare it with the nature of the emptiness mind described in the Heart Sutra, observing whether this dharma has increase or decrease, whether it undergoes change, whether it exhibits arising, ceasing, and impermanence, whether it is mutable and impermanent, whether it lacks self-mastery (avaśatā), whether it is born of causes and conditions, and whether it is constrained by many causal conditions.

If it is like this, then it is an arising-and-ceasing illusory dharma. If it is not like this—if it truly accords with the nature described in the Heart Sutra as neither arising nor ceasing, neither defiled nor pure (na saṃkleśo na vyavadānam), neither increasing nor decreasing, neither empty nor existent—then it is the true, eternal, unchanging suchness of the tathāgatagarbha. Only in this way has one found the true mind of suchness, and only then has one genuinely realized the original mind of the tathāgatagarbha.

Therefore, peeling away dharmas does not mean extinguishing anything; rather, it means confirming the illusory, unreal nature of worldly dharmas, not taking them as true. After all have been peeled away, what remains—unborn and unceasing, unchanging—is the true. This method does not ask us to sit in meditation and cultivate samādhi, extinguishing the mind of awareness. If the mind of awareness were entirely extinguished, one could not know which is the true suchness of the tathāgatagarbha, and could not awaken to the true mind and attain enlightenment.

Moreover, realizing the true mind of the tathāgatagarbha does not necessarily occur while sitting in meditation cultivating samādhi, when the mind of awareness becomes slightly purer and free of wandering thoughts—one should not take this to be enlightenment. At such a time the consciousness merely temporarily lacks wandering thoughts and seems purified, but after a while the wandering thoughts of the mind consciousness will appear again; it is impossible to permanently maintain clarity without a single wandering thought. Even if there were never any wandering thoughts and it were forever pure, it would still be the mind consciousness; He can never become the true mind. This is a phenomenon of arising, ceasing, and change in the mental sense-object realm of deluded thinking, not the unchanging mind of suchness. At such a time it is merely a temporary state of some kind of meditative concentration, not the realm of enlightenment, and therefore it must not be taken and accepted as a true dharma.

Then what are the illusory dharmas of the world? Worldly dharmas are conventional dharmas—the dharmas of the five aggregates (pañcaskandha) world, including the six sense faculties, the six sense objects, and the six consciousnesses. The six sense faculties are the eye faculty, ear faculty, nose faculty, tongue faculty, body faculty, and manas. The six consciousnesses are the eye consciousness, ear consciousness, nose consciousness, tongue consciousness, body consciousness, and mind consciousness. The six sense objects are form, sound, smell, taste, touch, and dharma. Corresponding to the eye faculty is the form sense-object; corresponding to the ear faculty is the sound sense-object; corresponding to the nose faculty is the smell sense-object; corresponding to the tongue faculty is the taste sense-object; corresponding to the body faculty is the touch sense-object; corresponding to the manas is the mental sense-object.

The five aggregates are the aggregate of form (rūpa), the aggregate of feeling (vedanā), the aggregate of perception (saṃjñā), the aggregate of formations (saṃskāra), and the aggregate of consciousness (vijñāna). The five aggregates and eighteen elements constitute the entire world of the three realms, and every dharma within them is illusory, arising, ceasing, and mutable, impermanent. The world of the five aggregates consists entirely of conditioned dharmas—dharmas with actions and fabrications, dharmas born later—and therefore they are illusory. The dharma beyond the world refers to the tathāgatagarbha; He is not within the world of the three realms, and He has no dharma that stands opposed to Him, and therefore He is the true dharma.