Dharma Must Be Verified Through Practice, Not Through Speculation and Imagination

Buddhism emphasizes experiential verification and demands it; without such verification, relying solely on oral transmission, reasoning, and intellectual understanding, one would have long been separated from the great Way by a hundred thousand miles. If one establishes an idea of emptiness in the mind as real, as a true dharma, then emptiness becomes real and turns into bondage to dharmas, preventing liberation. If all dharmas are empty, then is this very dharma of emptiness itself empty? If the dharma that "all dharmas are empty" is not empty, then how can one say that all dharmas are empty?

Many people have not genuinely severed the view of self; the five aggregates are not yet empty. Then they attempt to speculate and imagine the emptiness of dharmas, trying to see all dharmas as the eighth consciousness. Only when one reaches the sixth or seventh Bodhisattva ground can one truly perceive all dharmas as the eighth consciousness. However, Bodhisattvas at the sixth and seventh grounds, including those at the eighth and ninth grounds, still cannot perceive all dharmas entirely as the eighth consciousness, because there remain so many dharmas they have not yet realized. Dharmas that are not realized cannot be authentically perceived as the eighth consciousness. Even the coarsest level, the body composed of the five aggregates, has not been realized as born from the eighth consciousness. Without truly contemplating and realizing this point, one cannot genuinely and accurately perceive the body of five aggregates as the eighth consciousness. If one could, they would have long since severed self-attachment and entered the first Bodhisattva ground.

Many people, having not experientially verified any dharma, consequently invent an imaginary practice method, hypothesize a cultivation path, sketching a roadmap that is vague and unclear, even to themselves. This is the state of Buddhism's transmission today—it fundamentally does not involve the step-by-step actual practice; there is no practical, feasible method or means.