Why Should One Contemplate the Mind in Buddhist Practice

Those who do not know how to contemplate the mind, who are unable to contemplate the mind, cannot awaken to their own mind; and without awakening to their own mind, they cannot transform their own mind. Many people who study Buddhism simply let their minds drift along, following their own afflictions of greed, hatred, and delusion, following their own self-nature (the nature of self-clinging), never having considered that they have evil minds and unwholesome mental factors, and therefore never having considered changing themselves. Consequently, they will not constantly and everywhere go against the self, go against their own afflictive habits, go against their own ignorance and delusion; they do not know that following one's own mind and self-nature is following birth-and-death, following the three evil destinies, following bitter karma.

Revolution—whose life is to be revolutionized? It is to revolutionize oneself, to revolutionize the manas; only thus can one attain liberation and great ease and freedom. Yet many people, every day, are busy revolutionizing others, striving to change other people so as to follow their own self-nature and satisfy their own selfish desires and greed. Such people are precisely those deeply mired in ignorance. All who cannot contemplate the mind are people with severe afflictive habits, people heavy with self-nature, people arrogant and conceited. For such people, even the mind consciousness has not awakened—how could the manas deep within be awakened, so as to attain liberation and freedom?

Most people, before encountering the Buddha-dharma, are lost and unawakened in their minds; and after encountering the Buddha-dharma, they remain just as lost and unawakened. They grasp at external objects as "mine" and for my use, increasing self-view (ātma-dṛṣṭi) and self-conceit, not hesitating to resort to base means to achieve their private desires and personal gain, yet brazenly believing themselves to be cultivated, resourceful, clever, and talented. They never turn the light inward to reflect upon themselves; after studying the Dharma, they use Buddhist knowledge as a disguise to inflate and aggrandize the self—this is truly foolishness, and they do not even know it.