Intuition: The Power of Manas Awareness

Steve Jobs said that you should trust your intuition, for it transcends thinking and lets you see what thinking cannot see. The intuition Jobs spoke of is the awareness of the manas, while thinking is the awareness of the mind consciousness. What the mind consciousness can be aware of is limited in scope, whereas the awareness of the manas is unlimited; the mind consciousness cannot be aware of many of the dharmas that the manas is able to perceive.

Why is the awareness of the manas called intuition? Because the manas, relying on the tathāgatagarbha, can cognize all dharmas. The Śūraṅgama Sūtra expresses this as the manas silently encompassing all dharmas—the manas can quickly make contact with all dharmas, though the degree to which it knows them is another matter. Therefore the awareness of the manas is extremely fast: it directly confronts dharmas, directly and swiftly discerning them—knowing if it knows, not knowing if it does not know—without going through the analysis, reasoning, and inference of the mind consciousness, for at that point the mind consciousness has not yet arisen. But once a dharma falls into the mind consciousness, there must inevitably be a round of deliberation, analysis, reasoning, and judgment, which makes a huge detour and takes a relatively long time, so the final result is not genuine, because it contains elements of inference and conjecture—it is not seeing and knowing in the very moment.

In the past, when Chan masters guided students toward enlightenment, if a student rolled his eyes and racked his brain thinking over a question, the master would immediately strike him with a board and tell him: "If you can get it, get it—what is there to deliberate about?" The Chan masters all guided students to awaken to the Way through direct intuition, without falling into thinking: when the question was posed, if you awakened in that very moment, you awakened; if not, you did not—falling into the deliberation of the mind consciousness was not permitted. If a Chan master is guiding you to enlightenment and you ponder over and over, then right at the moment you begin pondering, you should be struck with a blow of the staff and sent home—how could you be allowed to ponder over and over? Yet nowadays some people, upon "attaining enlightenment," ponder for several hours, or even several days—a result like that is even less credible. The answer might possibly be pondered correctly, but no matter how correct it is, it does not count, precisely because it was figured out by the mind consciousness—it was not directly seen, not personally seen.

If you interrogate someone about whether they know a certain matter, and that person hemming and hawing thinks it over and over without answering directly, then that person's words cannot be trusted, for the thinking within contains elements of concealment and adulteration. For example, suppose you deliberate, analyze, reason, imagine, and speculate about what Beijing looks like, and finally conclude that Beijing is such-and-such—congratulations, you speculated correctly; Beijing is roughly like that. But because you have never been to Beijing, you are not someone who has personally seen Beijing. Only someone who has been to Beijing and entered the city is one who has personally seen Beijing; such a person's description of Beijing's appearance will be true and genuine, detailed and meticulous, utterly certain, admitting no doubt. This is analogous to the eradication of the view of self (satkāya-dṛṣṭi-prahāṇa) that severs the three fetters, eliminating doubt, leaving no misgivings. Whereas someone who has never been to Beijing, no matter how they describe Beijing's appearance, will inwardly feel insecure and guilty at heart, not daring to be one hundred percent certain. This is analogous to the intellectual understanding of the mind consciousness, which cannot sever the three fetters and cannot eliminate doubt and generate faith.

Only when you have quietly done all the groundwork behind the scenes and are lacking just that tiny last bit can a Chan master guide you to enlightenment and realization of the Way—like water naturally flowing into a channel, completely natural, without the slightest artifice, without the slightest adulteration. Or perhaps you are only missing the right conditions and timing; then the Chan master will observe you, pay attention to your state, and see whether you have reached the proper time. When the time arrives, he will give you the opportunity so that you may awaken and enter. But if, upon observation, he finds that you are still far off, the Chan master will absolutely not step in to guide you. Yet with enlightenment nowadays, even when a student is still a hundred thousand miles away, they forcibly drag him along with an iron hook—the result is like yanking a giant radish out of the ground, pulling it to death alive; nothing good comes of it, and the karmic retribution in later lives is extremely terrifying.