The Black Box World (41)

When we are knocked unconscious, the nature of seeing, hearing, perception, and knowing disappears; we can no longer see, hear, smell, taste, touch, or discriminate, and thus cannot know all dharmas. Yet the flower is still there, and everyone else can see it. The sounds of wind and rain outside are still there, and others can hear them; the fragrance of flowers outside can be smelled by others, the fine food outside can be tasted by others, the warm sunshine outside can be felt by others—each person can perceive their own inner representation. It is the same in death, in meditative absorption, and in sleep. When we look at a flower, the beautiful flower itself has no mind intending to make us infatuated with it; it is our own seven consciousnesses that go to discriminate it, think about it, judge it, and admire it, thereby giving rise to feelings of liking and disliking. Likewise, the myriad dharmas of heaven and earth have no mind to make us feel joy, anger, sorrow, or happiness; it is our own deluded mind that attaches itself to the myriad things. Wine has no mind to intoxicate people; it is the drinker who cannot hold his liquor and simply gets himself drunk.

The external states of sense-objects have no mind to confuse us; when states manifest in our mind, they are like shadows—it is our own mind of the seven consciousnesses stirring, insisting on discriminating them, giving rise to all sorts of thoughts and emotions, making our own mind unsettled and generating afflictions by ourselves. Moreover, these several consciousnesses could not even exist if the eighth consciousness did not transmit seeds of consciousness to them; once the seeds are transmitted, these several minds become lively and active, engaging in all kinds of discrimination, all kinds of views, all kinds of emotions, producing all sorts of actions and karmic formations of body, speech, and mind. It is just like a shadow puppet show: as soon as someone pulls the string, the puppet can perform a play. The several consciousness-minds are just like this—utterly unreal. From this we can see how illusory our consciousness-minds are, how illusory and unreal our five aggregates are; they merely toss about back and forth on the surface of the eighth consciousness-mind. Therefore, when we perceive marks, the marks are illusory, and the seeing is also illusory; there is no such thing as "seeing marks"—it is merely a diseased eye gazing at flowers in the sky. I earnestly advise my fellow beings to recognize the true and the false, to no longer remain deluded and attached, to return to self-nature, and to attain great liberation soon!