How Can Mind Dharmas Contact Form Dharmas?

The mind dharmas are the seven consciousnesses; the material dharmas are the five sense faculties and the six sense objects. Faculties, objects, and consciousnesses belong to the dharmas of the three realms; they are dharmas of three kinds of boundaries, "realm" meaning boundary. Because their boundaries differ, according to the laws of the worldly realm, they do not connect with one another, cannot merge together, and cannot operate in combination. In fact, the contact between the realm of consciousness and the realm of material form, being of different realms, cannot be understood from the worldly perspective as something like the contact of hand with hand, or the touching and contacting of a hand touching a material form. The extremely profound dharma of the seed-wisdom of Consciousness-Only simply cannot be explained or understood from the perspective of worldly dharmas; the thinking patterns of the worldly realm can never solve the problems of Consciousness-Only. Only when the sixth and seventh consciousnesses undergo the transformation of consciousness into wisdom—transforming the cognitive and thinking mode of worldly-realm consciousness into the cognitive and thinking mode of non-worldly wisdom—can the problems of the seed-wisdom of Consciousness-Only be gradually resolved.

How should one contemplate, in the mode of the seed-wisdom of Consciousness-Only, the combined contact of faculties, objects, and consciousnesses? We should know that although faculties, objects, and consciousnesses have different boundaries and are different kinds of dharmas, they share a common part: they are all constituted and formed by the seeds of the seven great elements within the tathāgatagarbha, and the seeds of the seven great elements are equal, parallel, and juxtaposed in relationship; their attributes differ, but there is no boundary between them, so they can completely merge and make contact, giving rise to all dharmas in accordance with the minds of sentient beings, as the Buddha said in the Śūraṅgama Sūtra. In this way, the question of whether dharmas of different realms can make contact becomes easy to understand.

All the seeds of the seven great elements are formless and without mark, so none of them can be said to have contact like that of material forms in the worldly realm; therefore the question of whether they touch or not does not even arise, and thus the faculties, objects, and consciousnesses formed from them are not worldly dharmas of contact. Even said this way, many people still find it hard to understand, because the gap between worldly dharmas and Buddhadharma spans too great a distance; profound Buddhadharma often surpasses one's imagination. Just as the Buddha said, the Buddhadharma is not obtained through speculation and conjecture; only through genuine realization can it be personally experienced.

The formless, markless seeds of the seven great elements are transmitted outward to form the faculties, objects, and consciousnesses—do these have form and appearance? So-called form and appearance refers to the kind of appearance visible to the worldly flesh eye. From the standpoint of the ground of actual reality, from the ultimate truth (paramārtha-satya), all dharmas lack that kind of worldly appearance; they all bear the aspect of ultimate truth, invisible to the flesh eye—whatever is seen involves the defect of cataract, a diseased eye seeing flowers in empty space, as the Buddha said in the Śūraṅgama Sūtra.

The conscious mind is formless and without mark, invisible to the flesh eye, and can only be perceived by the mind consciousness, and finally let the manas also know it together. Faculties and objects are material dharmas, having form, having shape and appearance, visible to the flesh eye. Faculties and objects are material dharmas of the same kind of attribute, and can touch each other like hands and feet touching; the conscious mind then touches the faculties and objects, touches the material dharmas, like a mirror touching images—the images are not real material dharmas, yet the mirror can touch them and can manifest them; images that are not real material dharmas can appear in the mirror, which is called illusory manifestation. What the seven consciousnesses touch are all faculties and objects that are not real material dharmas, all images; therefore the images can appear in the mirror of the minds of the seven consciousnesses without obstruction. Who can touch real material dharmas? Only the tathāgatagarbha can touch such real material dharmas and the most primordial material dharmas.

These operational laws and rules of ultimate truth, from the perspective of conventional truth (saṃvṛti-satya), we simply cannot understand or imagine; therefore the Buddha does not allow us to imagine or to grasp with emotional thought and intellectual interpretation, but instructs us toward realization after precepts, meditation, and wisdom are complete. Only those who have genuinely realized can intuitively understand one another; those on the Path share the same design, those on the Path share the same view. The conscious mind, accumulated from consciousness seeds, lands upon the faculties and material dharmas piled up from the seeds of the five great elements—the seeds have no worldly appearance whatsoever, so how could the faculties, objects, and consciousnesses formed from them have appearance? If the initial primordial material dharmas had appearance, how could the tathāgatagarbha touch them, recognize them, transmit them, transform them, and manifest them? If the initial primordial material dharmas have no appearance, how could the image-material dharmas manifested by the tathāgatagarbha, the material-dharma images, have appearance? They are all dharmas without appearance; the three—faculties, objects, and consciousnesses—can completely touch one another, and the conscious mind can completely manifest the faculties and objects and cognize them, thereby giving rise to illusory feelings of joy, anger, sorrow, happiness, grief, and suffering.

Faculties, objects, and consciousnesses are dharmas within a black-box world, illusory and unreal, the sight of a diseased eye.