Intuitive Enlightenment Is True Enlightenment

Steve Jobs said that you should trust your intuition, for it transcends thinking and lets you see what thinking cannot see. The intuition Jobs spoke of is the awareness of the manas, while thinking is the awareness of the mind consciousness. What the mind consciousness can be aware of is limited in quantity, whereas the awareness of the manas is unlimited; the mind consciousness cannot be aware of many of the dharmas that the manas is able to perceive.

Why is the awareness of the manas called intuition? Because the manas, relying on the tathāgatagarbha, can directly know all dharmas, whereas the mind consciousness, in order to know dharmas, must rely on the manas and thus knows them indirectly. In the Śūraṅgama Sūtra this is expressed as the manas silently embracing all dharmas—the manas can swiftly make contact with all dharmas, though the degree to which it knows them is another matter. Therefore the awareness of the manas is extremely fast: it directly faces the dharma and directly and swiftly discerns it—knowing if it knows, not knowing if it does not—without going through the mind consciousness's analysis and inference, for at that moment the mind consciousness has not yet arisen. But once a dharma falls into the mind consciousness, there must inevitably be a round of deliberation, analysis, inference, and judgment, which takes a great detour and a rather long time, and the final result is not genuine, because it contains an element of inference and conjecture—it is not seeing and knowing in the very moment.

In the past, when Chan masters guided students toward enlightenment, if a student, upon being asked a question, rolled his eyes and scratched his head in thought, the master would immediately strike him with the board and tell him: "If you can get it, get it—what is there to deliberate about?" The Chan masters all guided students to awaken to the Way through direct intuition, without falling into thinking: when the question was asked, if you awakened, you awakened; if not, you did not—falling into the mind consciousness's deliberation was not permitted. If a Chan master is guiding you to enlightenment and you ponder over and over, then right at the moment you begin pondering, you should be struck with the staff and sent home—who allowed you to ponder over and over? Yet nowadays some people, in order to "attain enlightenment," ponder for hours, even for days; such a result is all the less credible. The answer might possibly be pondered correctly, but no matter how correct it is, it does not count, precisely because it was worked out by the mind consciousness—it was not seen directly, not personally seen by the manas.

If you interrogate someone about whether they know a certain matter, and that person hemming and hawing thinks it over and over without answering directly, then that person's words cannot be trusted, for the thinking within contains elements of concealment and adulteration. For example, suppose you think about, analyze, infer, imagine, and ponder the appearance of Beijing, and finally conclude what Beijing is like and how it is—congratulations, you have pondered it correctly; Beijing is roughly like that. But because you have never been to Beijing, you are not someone who has personally seen Beijing. Only someone who has been to Beijing and entered the city is one who has personally seen Beijing, and such a person's description of Beijing's appearance will be true and real, minute and detailed, utterly certain, admitting no doubt. This is analogous to the eradication of the view of self (satkāya-dṛṣṭi-prahāṇa) that severs the three fetters and eliminates doubt, leaving no misgivings. Whereas for someone who has never been to Beijing, no matter how they describe Beijing's appearance, their heart is not at ease—they feel guilty at heart and dare not be one hundred percent certain. This is analogous to the mind consciousness's intellectual understanding, which cannot sever the three fetters and cannot eliminate doubt and give rise to faith.

Only when you have quietly done all the groundwork behind the scenes and are short by just that tiny bit can a Chan master guide you to enlightenment and realization of the Way—the water flows and the channel forms naturally, without the slightest contrivance, without the slightest adulteration. Or perhaps you are only short of the right conditions and season; then the Chan master will observe you and pay attention to your state, watching whether you have reached the season. When the season arrives, the master will give you the opportunity so that you may awaken and enter. But if the master observes you and finds that you are still far short, the master will absolutely not step in to guide you. Yet with today's so-called enlightenment, when a student is still a hundred thousand miles away, they are forcibly yanked with an iron hook—the result is like pulling up a giant radish, pulling it to death alive, and the karmic retribution in later lives is extremely terrifying.