Lecture Notes on the Sūtra of the Collection of the Father and Son (170)

The Essence of Mahāyāna Practice and Hīnayāna Practice

Cultivating the path is cultivating the mind. If you wish to cultivate the mind well, you must first recognize that your own mind is illusory and unreal, and that the six sense-object realms you crave are illusory and unreal; only then, by practicing meditative concentration and contemplative practice (vipaśyanā-caryā), can you extinguish the mind's false craving, desires, thoughts, and feelings, and sever the mind's afflictions and ignorance. In this way, one can be free from the suffering of birth-and-death in saṃsāra—this is the Hīnayāna method of practice. The Mahāyāna method of practice is to see the mind and attain realization, to find the Ālayavijñāna, to know where He operates, what functions He performs, how He functions, how He merges with the deluded mind, how He produces all dharmas, and how He manifests and transforms our conscious mind. After finding the Ālayavijñāna mind, one realizes His nature of neither arising nor ceasing, and at the same time knows that it is He who produced the five-aggregate body of "self"; therefore, the five aggregates born of Him are empty, illusory, and conjured, and the eighteen realms He gives rise to are empty and illusory, not real. This simultaneously realizes the fruit of Hīnayāna emptiness. At the moment of our enlightenment, we not only attain the Mahāyāna fruit, but also attain the Hīnayāna fruit—both fruits are attained simultaneously. However, realizing the fruit of Hīnayāna emptiness does not necessarily mean simultaneously attaining the Mahāyāna bodhisattva fruit; yet when we attain the Mahāyāna bodhisattva fruit, we certainly simultaneously attain the fruit of the Hīnayāna first fruit (srotāpanna), and likewise the karmic seeds of the three evil destinies are extinguished.