Even If the Mind Consciousness Attains the Fruits, One Is Still an Ordinary Being Bound by All Fetters

Attaining realization through the mind consciousness is extremely quick and effortless: it requires paying hardly any price, does not demand exhausting the brain or exerting effort in investigating Chan, and most importantly does not require cultivating meditative concentration (samādhi). This is simply too convenient. The hurdle of meditative concentration is the hardest to pass—especially arduous, time-consuming, and requiring painful endurance of sitting with crossed legs, and it delays many worldly affairs. Attaining realization through the mind consciousness does not require much observance of precepts; even the three refuges and five precepts can be dispensed with. The most troublesome thirty-seven factors of the path need not be cultivated, saving an enormous amount of time and energy. Merit need not be particularly good either; the first five of the bodhisattva's six perfections can all be skipped—how convenient! One only needs to use the mind consciousness to study some theoretical knowledge, then deliberate, understand, analyze, speculate, infer, integrate, and summarize. None of these operations require much concentration or much mental strain and fatigue; these tasks are like the daily work of a junior secretary—anyone of average intelligence can handle them.

How cheap it is to attain realization this way! It costs hardly anything, and a pile of theoretical knowledge can also attract attention and win people's admiration. There is no need to abandon wife and children to leave home and cultivate the path, no need to part from relatives and sever attachments. One can engage in romantic relationships and call it "liberating sentient beings," without giving up worldly careers. One can even accept offerings from the masses, become a Dharma-master bodhisattva, become an "ultimate-meaning monastic" who overshadows monastics, reaping the benefits of both the monastic and lay life—maximizing worldly benefits. With so many advantages to attaining realization through the mind consciousness, who could bear to give it up?

But after attaining realization this way, one cannot sever even the slightest trace of afflictions, being no different whatsoever from a bound ordinary being. Some people make excuses for themselves, saying that only third-fruit and fourth-fruit practitioners sever afflictions, and that first-fruit and second-fruit practitioners still have afflictions, which is nothing surprising; that a first-fruit person has afflictions as many and as heavy as an ordinary being's is also nothing surprising. But if a first-fruit person is the same as a bound ordinary being, that means the first-fruit person is essentially an ordinary being complete with all afflictions—the first fruit exists in name only. How could such a person be a first-fruit person who has eliminated self-view (ātma-dṛṣṭi)? If the Buddha's Dharma is carried on like this, how can Buddhism not perish?

Although there are many worldly deviant dharmas and deviant teachers, those deviant dharmas are all very shallow and low, incapable of destroying the foundation of Buddhism or shaking its roots. For example, what a certain Dharma master teaches about tathāgatagarbha is utter nonsense, but he can never influence the mainstream development of Buddhism. The beings he liberates all have extremely shallow spiritual faculties; even with painstaking effort to drag them out, they accomplish nothing and pose no threat to Buddhism. Another example is the tantric practice of sexual union: it is fundamentally an external path's dharma, of an extremely low and inferior level. Anyone with a bit of wisdom can discern it and will not enter into it; most of those who do enter are people of heavy karmic obstructions and shallow roots of goodness. Even if one painstakingly rescues and delivers them out, they cannot amount to anything and can never become the mainstay of Buddhism. What can destroy Buddhism will never be external paths or their dharmas; destruction always comes from within Buddhism itself—as the saying goes, the worms within the lion's body devour the flesh of the lion's body.

Therefore, the foundation and focal point of Buddhism across the three times lie in the extremely critical link of attaining realization and awakening to the true mind and seeing one's nature. As long as nothing goes seriously wrong at this link, the future development of Buddhism will be fine. That is why the fundamental dharmas of eliminating self-view and of awakening to the true mind and seeing one's nature cannot be transmitted by just anyone, and must absolutely not be handled recklessly. If one recklessly transmits them, harming the Dharmakāya and wisdom-life of sentient beings, then in the future even wishing to be a wild fox for five hundred lives would be wishful thinking—the evil retribution one undergoes will be countless times more severe than that. Supporting those who recklessly transmit the Dharma is tantamount to aiding a tyrant in his tyranny, and the retribution is likewise quite bad. Therefore, I earnestly ask everyone to ponder cause and effect deeply, to treat the Buddha's Dharma with seriousness, and to maintain a highly responsible attitude toward sentient beings and Buddhism.