How Can the Mind Dharma Make Contact with Material Form

The mind dharmas are the seven consciousnesses; material form comprises 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 distinct boundaries, "boundary" meaning a limit or demarcation. Being of different boundaries, according to the laws of the mundane world, they simply do not connect; they cannot merge together or operate in harmonious 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 mundane perspective as something like the contact of hand with hand, or the kind of touching and contacting of a hand touching a material object. The extremely profound dharma of the seed-wisdom of Consciousness-Only simply cannot be explained or understood from the standpoint of mundane dharmas; the thinking patterns of the mundane world can never resolve the problems of Consciousness-Only. Only when the sixth and seventh consciousnesses transform consciousness into wisdom—transforming the cognitive and thinking mode of mundane consciousness into the cognitive and thinking mode of non-mundane 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 harmonious 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 something in common: all are constituted and formed from the seven great seeds within the tathāgatagarbha, and the seven great seeds stand in an equal, parallel, and juxtaposed relationship—different in attributes, yet without boundaries. They can completely merge and make contact with one another, giving rise to all dharmas in accordance with sentient beings' minds, as the Buddha said in the Śūraṅgama Sūtra. With this, the question of whether dharmas of different realms can make contact becomes easier to understand.

All the seven great seeds are formless and without characteristics; none of them can be said to have the kind of contact that material form in the mundane world has. Therefore, the question of contact or non-contact does not even arise, and the faculties, objects, and consciousnesses thus formed are not the mundane kind of contact. Even so, many people still find this hard to understand, because the distance between mundane dharmas and Buddha-dharma is too great; profound Buddha-dharma often transcends one's imagination. Just as the Buddha said, the Buddha-dharma cannot be attained through conjecture and speculation; only through actual realization can it be personally experienced.

The formless, characteristicless seven great seeds are transmitted outward to form the faculties, objects, and consciousnesses—do these have forms and appearances? So-called forms and appearances refer to those features visible to the mundane naked eye. From the standpoint of actual principle, from the ultimate truth, all dharmas lack the kind of appearances found in the mundane world; they all bear the appearance of the ultimate truth, invisible to the naked eye. Whatever is seen involves a cataract-like defect; diseased eyes see flowers in space, as the Buddha said in the Śūraṅgama Sūtra.

The conscious mind is formless and without characteristics, invisible to the naked eye; it can only be perceived by the mind consciousness, and ultimately the manas should also know it in the same way. Faculties and objects are material form: they have color, form, and appearance, visible to the naked eye. Faculties and objects are material dharmas of the same kind of attribute, and can make contact like hands and feet touching. The conscious mind then contacts the faculties and objects, contacting material dharmas, like a mirror contacting images. Images are not real material dharmas; the mirror can contact and can manifest them, and images, being unreal material dharmas, can appear within the mirror—this is called illusory manifestation. What the seven consciousnesses contact are all faculties and objects that are unreal material dharmas, all images; therefore images can appear in the mirror of the minds of the seven consciousnesses without obstruction. Who can contact real material dharmas? Only the tathāgatagarbha can contact such real material dharmas and the most primordial material form.

These operational laws and rules of the ultimate truth—we simply cannot understand or imagine them from the perspective of conventional truth. That is why the Buddha did not allow us to imagine or to grasp things through sentiment and intellectual interpretation, but instructed us to realize them through actual practice after precepts, samādhi, and wisdom are complete. Only those who have actually realized can mutually understand one another through the mind; those on the Path share the same designs, those on the Path share the same views. The conscious mind, formed from accumulated seeds of consciousness, lands upon the faculties and material dharmas formed from the piled-up five great seeds. Since the seeds bear no appearance whatsoever of the mundane world, how could the faculties, objects, and consciousnesses formed from them have appearances? If the most primordial material form had appearances, how could the tathāgatagarbha contact it, recognize it, transmit it, transform it, and manifest it? If even the most primordial material form has no appearance, how could the image-dharmas manifested by the tathāgatagarbha—material dharmas as images—have appearances? All are dharmas without appearance; the three—faculties, objects, and consciousnesses—can completely make contact with one another, and the conscious mind can completely manifest and discern faculties and objects, thereby giving rise to illusory feelings of joy, anger, sorrow, happiness, grief, and suffering.

Faculties, objects, and consciousnesses are dharmas within the world of the black box—illusory and unreal, the sight of diseased eyes.