Enlightenment Is the Fruit of Cultivation Over Many Lifetimes

Some people feel that the mind consciousness and the manas essentially have no self of their own at all—that they are all just the tathāgatagarbha's own tricks. "Neither the mind consciousness nor the manas is me; both are the tathāgatagarbha"—this is a merely similar understanding, unreliable. Because this kind of cognition is too superficial and has no evidence whatsoever: if the mind consciousness is not taken as real, let alone the manas, which is even less taken as real. Only when one truly realizes it does one know that neither the mind consciousness nor the manas is the self; after realizing the eighth consciousness, through direct contemplation of how the sixth and seventh consciousnesses are born from the eighth consciousness, one truly knows that the sixth and seventh consciousnesses are in essence also the eighth consciousness. Such direct contemplation is extremely difficult, not easy; it requires very great realization and excellent meditative concentration (samādhi), otherwise the component of mere intellectual understanding still predominates.

Some dharmas, even if understood for ten thousand years, may still not see the conditions for enlightenment appear. True enlightenment requires accumulating, over life after life, the good roots, merit, and all the various provisions for seeing the Path. It is not something attained easily just by talking about it.

Some people insist that enlightenment in the Buddha's time was extremely easy for those people. In fact, by the time they attained those fruits, they had already accumulated provisions of merit for a very long time; their precepts, meditative concentration, and wisdom were all already complete. Encountering such a great condition as the Buddha, they became enlightened all at once. Their identities in previous lives were quite special, and they cultivated with great diligence life after life. Among them, many were manifestations—people who appeared in all sorts of identities in order to assist the Buddha in propagating the Dharma, a troupe in which every kind of role was present, all having come from the worlds of the ten directions to cooperate with the Buddha in putting on the play.

Why say this? For example, all Buddhist practitioners know that animals are sentient beings belonging to one of the six realms of saṃsāra, and that we too were animals in past lives; eating animal flesh is lacking compassion for sentient beings, is incurring debt to animals, which must be repaid doubly in the future. But what use is this kind of knowing? Because there is no personal realization—people merely believe the principle of cause and effect taught by the Buddha, having forgotten their own personal experiences—so in their minds they remain half-believing and half-doubting, which makes abstaining from meat and renouncing meat, fish, and pungent foods so difficult. Believing is one thing, doing is another; belief without realization is very hard to put into function. It is the same with all the theoretical knowledge we now study: although the mind consciousness understands and accepts it, because there is no realization, this understanding still cannot have actual effect. On the great matter of birth and death, an extremely easy enlightenment is impossible. Having transmigrated through measureless kalpas and unspeakable kalpas, with ignorance deep and heavy beyond description—how could one attain realization merely by reading some books, doing some study, gaining some understanding? Many people harbor a mentality of taking chances; in fact it is the mentality of opportunism and cutting corners at work, which precisely proves that most people are still very ignorant, with deep and heavy ignorance.

When one truly eradicates the view of self (satkāya-dṛṣṭi), each eradication makes one genuinely humble—whoever eradicates it becomes humble—because one has truly realized non-self, truly knows non-self, and the mind immediately becomes humble, no longer flaunting and showing off the self, no longer boasting "I have attained the fruit." If there is a mind of showing off, then the view of self has not been eradicated, and moreover there is an additional self that has attained the fruit—thus two selves appear, and of course the afflictions become even heavier than before, utterly overweening, with the pride of self blazing fiercely.

I have met quite a few people who had attained the fruit and seen the mind, and they were almost all somewhat domineering and overweening, feeling themselves higher than the sky. The two selves in their minds, each more conspicuous than the other, yet they themselves were unaware of it—precisely because they had been harmed by the fruit.