Black Box World (43)

The six faculties are divided into inner faculties and outer faculties, and into faculties with form and faculties without form. The first five faculties are faculties with form—material sense faculties with visible appearance, constituted by the four great seeds of earth, water, fire, and wind. The manas is a faculty without form; it is not constituted by the four great seeds and does not belong to material form. He is mind and consciousness, possessing the mind's functions of discrimination and recognition. The five faculties include both the gross faculty (the manifest faculty) and the supreme faculty (indriya). The gross faculties are the outer faculties, floating on the surface of the body, visible to others. The supreme faculties are the inner faculties, located at the back of the head, invisible to others but visible to the divine eye. When the five faculties are emphasized as the surface ones, they refer to the gross faculties and do not include the supreme faculties. But if one speaks of all the functional natures of the five faculties, then the supreme faculties are included. There are also cases that specifically emphasize the supreme faculties, depending on the particular context. The back of the head is where the supreme faculties are located; they are responsible for contacting the inner sense-objects, and then the tathāgatagarbha produces consciousness.

When the six faculties contact the six sense-objects, the tathāgatagarbha produces the six consciousnesses. When the three—faculty, sense-object, and consciousness—converge in contact, the six consciousnesses discern the inner six sense-objects, and sentient beings thereby know the contents of the inner six sense-objects, completing discrimination and knowing. What sentient beings discern is the inner sense-objects, the inner object-aspects (nimitta), not the outer sense-objects, the outer object-aspects; therefore the six sense-objects that sentient beings discern are illusory. The inner sense-objects are illusory; compared with the inner ones, the outer sense-objects seem real, but they are also conjured forth by the tathāgatagarbha and are likewise illusory and unreal. What is truly real is the unborn and undying true mind, the tathāgatagarbha; apart from this, everything is false, all illusory, conjured and unreal.

Sentient beings can never come into contact with the outer sense-objects; they all live within illusory appearances and false appearances—it is nothing more than diseased eyes gazing at flowers in the sky. Do the inner sense-objects and outer sense-objects exist or not? When sentient beings' eyes are diseased, they can see flowers in the sky; when sentient beings' mind-eye is obstructed by affliction, they will see all appearances as real and true. When sentient beings' minds are free of disease, they no longer see flowers in the sky, but only see the nature of the tathāgatagarbha. For example, our five aggregates have movement and activity; these false appearances cannot be excluded—they do exist, but this existence is false existence. These dharmas may not be experientially realized at present, but after attaining enlightenment and developing the various wisdoms of contemplative practice (vipaśyanā-caryā), one will then understand clearly. This is a personally realized realm of direct perception; no matter how others explain it, one cannot experientially realize it, because this is not a matter of intellectual understanding—it must be personally verified through actual practice. What is merely understood is unreliable and cannot resolve the problem of birth and death.