Even If the Mind Consciousness Attains the Fruits, One Is Still an Ordinary Being Bound by All Fetters

Attaining realization through the mind consciousness is extremely quick and effortless: it requires paying little price, does not demand exhausting mental effort or laborious Chan investigation, and most importantly does not require cultivating meditative concentration (samādhi)—how remarkably convenient. The hurdle of meditative concentration is the hardest to pass, especially arduous, consuming time and requiring painful sitting; it delays many worldly affairs. Attaining realization through the mind consciousness requires hardly any keeping of precepts—even the three refuges and five precepts can be waived. The most troublesome thirty-seven factors of enlightenment need not be cultivated, saving an enormous amount of time and energy. Merit need not be particularly good either; the first five of the bodhisattva's six perfections can all be dispensed with—simply too convenient. One only needs to use the mind consciousness to study theoretical knowledge, then deliberate, understand, analyze, speculate, infer, integrate, and summarize. None of these operations require much concentration or strain the mind; these tasks are like the daily work of a junior secretary—anyone of average intelligence can manage them.

How cheap such realization is! Little price to pay, a whole pile of theoretical knowledge, and it can even attract attention and win admiration. No need to abandon wife and children to leave home and cultivate the path, no need to part from kin and sever attachments, no interference with worldly careers. One can even accept offerings from the multitude, become a Dharma-master bodhisattva, or pose as a noble-meaning monastic overshadowing ordained monks—reaping the benefits of both the ordained and lay life, maximizing worldly gain. With so many benefits to attaining realization through the mind consciousness, who could bear to give it up?

But after such "realization," one cannot sever even a thread of afflictions, being no different whatsoever from a fettered worldling (pṛthagjana). Some people make excuses for themselves, saying that only third-fruit and fourth-fruit practitioners sever afflictions, while stream-enterers and once-returners still have afflictions, so this is nothing surprising—that a stream-enterer's afflictions are as many and as heavy as a worldling's is also nothing surprising. If a stream-enterer is the same as a fettered worldling, that means the stream-enterer is essentially a worldling replete with all afflictions—a stream-enterer in name only. How could such a person be a stream-enterer who has eliminated self-view (ātma-dṛṣṭi)? If the Buddha-Dharma proceeds like this, how can Buddhism not perish?

Although there are many worldly deviant dharmas and deviant teachers, those deviant dharmas are all very shallow and low, incapable of destroying the foundation of Buddhism or shaking its roots. For example, a certain Dharma master's teaching on tathāgatagarbha is utter nonsense, but he can never influence the mainstream development of Buddhism; the sentient beings he delivers have extremely shallow spiritual faculties, and even after he painstakingly drags them out, they accomplish nothing and pose no threat to Buddhism. Take another example: the practice of dual cultivation—that is fundamentally an external path's dharma, of an extremely low grade. Anyone with a bit of wisdom can discern it and will not enter into it; those who do enter are mostly people of heavy karmic obstruction and shallow roots of goodness. Even if one exhausts effort to rescue and deliver them out, they cannot amount to anything and can never become the mainstay of Buddhism. What can destroy Buddhism will never be external paths or their dharmas; destruction always comes from within Buddhism itself—as the saying goes, the worms within the lion's body devour the flesh of its own body.

The foundation and focal point of Buddhism across the three periods lies in the extremely critical link of attaining realization and awakening to the true mind and seeing one's nature. As long as nothing goes seriously wrong at this link, the future development of Buddhism will be smooth and untroubled. Therefore, the fundamental dharmas of eliminating self-view and of awakening to the true mind and seeing one's nature are not something just anyone can transmit; they absolutely must not be handled recklessly. If one recklessly transmits them, harming the Dharmakāya and wisdom-life of sentient beings, then in the future even wishing to be a wild fox for five hundred lifetimes would be wishful thinking—the evil retribution one undergoes will be countless times more severe than that. Protecting and supporting those who recklessly transmit the Dharma is tantamount to abetting a tyrant, and the retribution is likewise quite bad. So I earnestly ask everyone to ponder cause and effect deeply, to treat the Buddha-Dharma with seriousness, and to maintain a highly responsible attitude toward sentient beings and Buddhism.