The Difference Between Insentient Objects and Sentient Beings

Question: The four great elements—earth, water, fire, and wind—constitute all things with marks. Is the movement of manas and consciousness also a function of wind? Do all insentient objects, such as cups, teapots, grass, and trees, also possess the tathāgatagarbha?

Answer: The movement of manas and consciousness is itself a function of the nature of consciousness, because the mental factors (caittas) of the seven consciousnesses are operating. Wind cannot cause consciousness to move; it can only cause material objects to move. The four great elements—earth, water, fire, and wind—can only constitute the six sense objects with marks: form, sound, smell, taste, touch, and dharmas; they cannot compose the formless mental dharmas. Insentient objects are not sustained by a single tathāgatagarbha operating alone; rather, they are held and sustained by the tathāgatagarbhas of sentient beings with shared karma, and only then can insentient objects exhibit the phenomena of arising, abiding, changing, and ceasing.

Because the three realms are mind-only, all dharmas lack inherent self-nature; they all come from the tathāgatagarbha, all are generated and sustained by the tathāgatagarbha, and thus there is no dharma that can exist outside the tathāgatagarbha. The five-aggregate body born from the tathāgatagarbha is a sentient being, called a living being, possessing a lifespan and life activities; to kill it incurs an offense. Conversely, that which lacks the functioning of the five aggregates is an insentient object; to destroy it or consume it does not incur the offense of killing, because an object has no life activities of the five aggregates of form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness.