Differences in the Supreme Faculty (rūpa-prasāda) Among Beings of the Various Realms

All beings in the human realm possess the supreme faculty (rūpa-prasāda), and beings in the animal realm also possess the supreme faculty. The physical bodies of animals, like those of humans, are flesh bodies composed of the four great real seeds; they have brains and supreme faculties. When the supreme faculty develops pathological changes, animals can also become schizophrenic or insane. Due to karmic obstructions, the supreme faculties of animals are inferior to those of humans; they perceive people and things with great illusion and do not see dharmas as they truly are. However, each kind of animal has special strengths belonging to its own species: for example, some animals have keen vision and can see at night, some have keen hearing, some have keen smell, some have keen taste, and some have keen touch. But generally speaking, animals have very poor deliberative capacity in their mind consciousness, and even less capacity for logical analysis; they mostly rely on the intuitive power of the manas, and so they appear rather simple. Apart from the killing karma committed for the sake of filling their bellies and surviving, they almost never use their minds to create other unwholesome karma; they are beings who purely undergo retribution.

The beings of the four formless heavens in the formless realm, because their living environment is formless, have no material form or five sense objects, and no physical body; therefore they have no supreme faculty, no inner five sense objects, no inner mental sense objects, and no five sense consciousnesses. Yet they do possess the mind consciousness, the manas, and the eighth consciousness. Their eighth consciousness and manas exist forever without ceasing, and their mind consciousness also exists forever without ceasing. What their mind consciousness discerns is the Image-Only Object in meditation; there is no external mental sense object, only the Image-Only Object. If the mind consciousness were to cease, only the eighth consciousness and the manas would remain, which belongs to the state of the cessation of perception and feeling (nirodha-samāpatti). Therefore, the mind consciousness of the formless-realm devas also exists forever without ceasing; there is no distinction between day and night, they do not need sleep or rest, and they are forever in meditative concentration, facing the Image-Only Object.