The Section on the Consciousness and Mind Having No Marks of Inside or Outside

When a doctor treats a patient and restores the patient's physical health, is it the doctor's outer representation or inner representation that is changed? The patient's physical body is an outer representation to the doctor; when the patient's body becomes healthy, it is the doctor's outer representation that has changed, and the inner representation changes in accordance with the change in the outer representation.

Changing another person's mind, however, belongs to changing someone else's mind, causing the views, thoughts, concepts, attitudes, and so forth in the mind to undergo change. The conscious mind is only distinguished by which sentient being it belongs to; it is not divided into inner and outer. The conscious mind is formless and without marks; it does not enter another person's supreme faculty through transmission, and therefore, unlike material form, it is not divided into inner and outer representations. The conscious mind is not jointly manifested by many tathāgatagarbhas; it is individually brought forth by the tathāgatagarbha of each individual sentient being, and is not something shared in common. Hence there is no notion of inner and outer. For the conscious mind to undergo change means that its cognition, feelings, intentions, attitudes, thoughts, decisions, mental states, mental factors (caittas), and so forth have changed.