How to Train Your Own Power of Awareness?

A wealthy man in Germany had a son who was born deaf, mute, and paralyzed. He did not want to give up on this paralyzed son, believing that through effort he could raise him to become a talented person. So he drew up a plan to train his son's sensory perception in the five faculties. First he trained the eyesight: he placed a bright, glowing toy before his son's eyes, continuously moving the glowing toy up and down and left and right in front of him. Finally one day the son's vision recovered—his eyes could not only see the toy but also follow it as it moved, becoming lively and alert. The wealthy man continued training his son to improve his concentration, awareness, and observational ability. For hearing training, he used an object that could make sounds, striking it repeatedly to produce noises beside his son's left and right ears in turn. In the end the son's hearing recovered—he could hear sounds and was able to turn his head toward where the sound came from.

The wealthy man was not satisfied with his son merely being able to see and hear normally; he also wanted his son to enhance the perceptive and observational power of his vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, as well as his concentration, thinking, and imagination. When the son had grown a little older, he used all kinds of questions to inspire his mind and improve his capacity for discernment. In the end, by the age of fourteen, this son had become a genius with extraordinary intelligence. So-called intelligence includes the power of meditative concentration, concentration, observation, thinking, memory, awareness, insight, and so on. When all these powers are combined, they come down to the power of meditative concentration and the power of wisdom (prajñā-bala). "Crowd" refers to the crowd of people, humanity. The outstanding ability that stands out among the crowd is called "surpassing the crowd"—surpassing the human crowd, not surpassing the crowd of celestial beings or the crowd of sages and saints. But surpassing the human crowd is enough to satisfy people; ordinary people generally have no aspiration or pursuit of surpassing the celestial crowd or the crowd of sages.

So an ordinary person is not necessarily ordinary for a whole lifetime. Through all kinds of training and all kinds of effort, one can train oneself to become talented and capable, becoming an extraordinary, outstanding talent. So-called excellence means strong power of wisdom, including concentration, awareness, alertness, insight, execution, comprehension, understanding, capacity for awakening, and so on. Cases like this of being trained into talent in the worldly realm can be entirely replicated onto the practice and realization of the Buddha-dharma. The practice of the Buddha-dharma and training in worldly dharmas follow the same principle and can be applied interchangeably; and once one's practice of the Buddha-dharma succeeds, it can be fully applied to worldly dharmas. The ultimate goal of practicing the Buddha-dharma is to perfect worldly dharmas, to apply wisdom to worldly dharmas, and to make worldly dharmas as excellent and complete as possible. If the Buddha-dharma cannot be applied to worldly dharmas, then the Buddha-dharma one has learned is useless and without any meaning.

Our founding Buddha, Śākyamuni Buddha, long ago laid out the path for sentient beings' practice, established a practice plan, and gave the simplest and most effective method of practice: the contemplation of the four foundations of mindfulness. Here "contemplation" means observation, alertness, awareness, personal realization, awakening, experience, and so on. Just like the case above, through training in these ways one enhances one's various capacities—that is, the powers of observation, perception, and thinking on the five sense faculties—and thereby enhances the power of wisdom, comes to know the truth, and liberates oneself from self-imposed bondage.

However, some people, upon seeing that the four foundations of mindfulness belong to the Hīnayāna scriptures, develop a contemptuous attitude, fail to take them seriously, and casually skip over them without practicing. These people of deep arrogance do not know the importance of the contemplation of the four foundations of mindfulness, do not know that it is a precious dharma treasure for training one's various mental powers. If one abandons it and does not use it, how can one enhance one's alertness and enhance the power of wisdom of the first seven consciousnesses? And once the various powers of the seventh consciousness are enhanced, the contemplative practice (vipaśyanā-caryā) wisdom of the Mahāyāna dharma also rises accordingly, like a boat rising with the tide, and is enhanced along the way; seeing one's true mind and seeing one's nature in the Mahāyāna will also come quickly. As long as the various capacities of the seventh consciousness's mind are enhanced, wherever they are applied there will be power of wisdom. It is like a pure pearl: no matter which pond it is cast into, the pond water will become clear.

The initial method of practicing the four foundations of mindfulness is to contemplate the material body, beginning with contemplating the breath, training one's concentration and awareness, after which the other powers will also become complete. Then one contemplates the bodily actions of the material body: whenever the body performs each movement, the mind must be aware of it and alert to it. Gradually a kind of power will arise that separates the mind from the body, whereby one becomes alert to the fact that the body seems false and unreal, as if it were not one's own. At this point the mind accords with emptiness. This is called "investigating things to extend knowledge"—it is genuine experience, vastly different from understanding gained from reading books, even completely opposite. When each person personally experiences it, they will know: So this is how it is! I truly misused my mind before—it was simply wild fanciful thinking. So-and-so now is just like I was before, indulging in wild fanciful thinking, interpreting the meaning by clinging to the words, scratching an itch through a boot.

After "investigating things to extend knowledge," the four aids that come before seeing the path appear. At this point one may be at the stage of warmth, or at the stage of peak, or at the stage of patience. When the mind's separation from the body grows ever stronger, and its accord with emptiness grows ever greater, one will transcend the supreme worldly dharma of the four aids, and the Hīnayāna sees the path. This process will inevitably appear as long as one makes effort, and it is an indispensable link in seeing the path; without this link one cannot see the path. Seeing the path has nothing to do with how good one's theory is. Those who talk eloquently often disdain such arduous practice and value only theory, because they like to collect other people's theoretical viewpoints. Unable to attain meditative concentration, if the mind cannot settle down there is no alertness at all, and of course the power of wisdom cannot arise.

After the mind has separated from the body, one will personally experience how false the five aggregates (pañca-skandha) of the material body are—they are simply not mine. Every action and every mental thought feels unfamiliar, and one will feel that the world is utterly boring, no longer interested in anything, somewhat melancholy. As for the emptiness conceived by those skilled in theory, it is simply hard to describe in a word—it runs north and south of personal experience. Conjecture is, after all, conjecture; body and mind remain forever as they originally were, and perhaps may even go downhill.

Those before and after seeing the path feel: what have I been doing all along? It was all meaningless. Looking at others, they also sigh endlessly—what are they all grasping at in the world? What is there to grasp at? Truly foolish! And those who grasp at worldly dharmas, looking at these people, also think they are truly foolish—attentive to nothing, pursuing nothing. The result is that each side thinks the other is foolish. If these two kinds of fools cannot be reconciled, then they must temporarily part ways. Personal experience is far, far better than clinging to the Tripitaka. What good does it do to read through and memorize all three collections and twelve divisions of scriptures? The scriptures are the scriptures, and you are still you; the two have no intersection. Greed, hatred, and delusion remain greed, hatred, and delusion, with not the slightest benefit and not the slightest change. How wonderful actual practice is—learning while practicing, practicing while realizing; after realizing, whatever one learns becomes thoroughly clear, and after becoming thoroughly clear one can further realize it in practice. Wisdom develops in a rolling fashion, and buddhahood has a set date. Why cling to other people's words while having not half a measure of one's own merit to use?