The Secret of the Contact Arising from the Conjunction of the Three: Root, Object, and Consciousness

When consciousness contacts the sense-objects, the three—faculty, sense-object, and consciousness—come together in contact. What is the result of this? What are the functions of the six consciousnesses? This coming together of the three in contact is extremely important; its result is that consciousness acquires the functions of feeling, perception, and formations, whereby bodily, verbal, and mental actions are produced, and karmic seeds are left behind. If consciousness does not contact the sense-objects, consciousness has no function at all.

What kinds of sense-objects does each consciousness contact? Once you clarify the range that each consciousness can contact, all dharmas can be thoroughly understood and contemplated. Then contemplate: without the six consciousnesses, what else could be done? All these functions are produced by the six consciousnesses, and they are arising-and-ceasing, false and illusory.

Beings in the formless realm have no material body and no five sense faculties, so why does the mind consciousness still exist there, and upon what does the mind consciousness depend for its existence? Upon what conditions does the powerful discriminating function of the mind consciousness depend? Once these questions are clarified, then in the future, whether in the Mahāyāna or the Hīnayāna, one will be able to attain a deeper and more thorough awakening. At present, contemplative practice (vipaśyanā-caryā) is not comprehensive or penetrating, and more and more people have merely intellectual understanding/interpretive awakening, gaining no real merit or benefit in their minds, with afflictions still just as heavy. Some people, watching others gesture and demonstrate, and knowing a certain point of function in it, feel as if they have understood, as if they may have awakened; yet they have not reached the root and essence of the question—this is not realization and awakening.

When the faculty contacts the sense-object, consciousness arises; if the faculty does not contact the sense-object, consciousness cannot arise. At the end of life, the four great elements disintegrate first, and at that time consciousness still exists and can still discriminate and feel, hence the intense suffering. Everyone's material body is held and sustained by one's own eighth consciousness, and changes in one's own material body are also the result of the functions of one's own several consciousnesses. Then how can one person go and kill another person, thereby changing the condition of another person's material body? Without the mind consciousness, the five sense consciousnesses cannot arise; the discrimination of the six sense-objects is decided by the manas, which acts as the master—the manas must be contacting the mental sense-objects. If the manas does not decide and does not act as master, the eighth consciousness will not produce the five sense consciousnesses; and once the manas acts as master, it is contacting the mental sense-objects, and the mind consciousness will certainly arise. The mind consciousness is also the dominant condition (adhipati-pratyaya) of the five sense consciousnesses.