The Importance of Resolving Doubts to Generate Faith

Dispelling doubts is essential to generate faith; with unresolved doubts, the root of faith remains incomplete. Only by truly seeing and realizing the Tathagatagarbha can one dispel doubts, attain genuine conviction, and gradually revolutionize reliance upon the Tathagatagarbha. Those who rely on intellectual understanding or speculation cannot attain such merit and benefit.

Learning from the Tathagatagarbha and revolutionizing reliance upon it is primarily a matter for the conscious mind. Once the conscious mind comprehends this thoroughly, it then instructs the manas (the seventh consciousness). When the manas takes refuge in the Tathagatagarbha, using it as a model, constantly and in all circumstances relying on the nature of the Tathagatagarbha, it subdues the self-nature of the manas, weakens ignorance, turns consciousness into wisdom, and accomplishes the Buddha Way.

The prerequisite for revolutionizing reliance must be genuine realization. Intellectual understanding alone cannot bring about true revolution of reliance, because intellectual understanding cannot observe the functioning of the Tathagatagarbha. It does not know the selflessness and thusness of the Tathagatagarbha within the operation of conditioned phenomena, making genuine revolution of reliance impossible. What is merely speculated upon leaves inner doubts unresolved; therefore, it cannot transform one's own mind. Only what one has personally and actually witnessed, true realization, can be believed with one hundred percent certainty, dispelling all doubts. Otherwise, even if one can speculate that the Tathagatagarbha is likely so pure and can temporarily suppress oneself into accepting it, the deep-seated doubt within cannot be severed, and thus the fetters cannot be broken. Severing the fetters means cutting off the root of birth and death, eradicating it completely—this is of utmost importance.