The Profound Meaning of Vijñaptimātratā in the Diamond Sutra (20)

The taste-consciousness perceives flavors, distinguishing sweet, sour, bitter, and spicy; the mental consciousness discriminates the types of food and the degree of good or bad taste, giving rise to minds of liking and disliking. This produces feelings of suffering, happiness, or neutrality, leading to the generation of bodily, verbal, and mental actions. The body-consciousness perceives tangible objects, discerning cold, heat, hunger, thirst, fullness, softness, hardness, and so forth. Simultaneously, the mental consciousness discriminates fatigue, lightness, comfort, exhaustion, and other states, giving rise to mental activities such as liking and disliking. This produces feelings of suffering, happiness, or neutrality, along with other bodily, verbal, and mental actions. The mental consciousness discriminates simultaneously with the first five consciousnesses, yet it can also function alone to perceive, recall the past, plan for the future, analyze, reason, and judge. It gives rise to feelings of suffering, happiness, sorrow, joy, and equanimity, producing the subsequent bodily, verbal, and mental actions.

The mind root (manas) is also a mind. It is formless and without any characteristics, also called the formless root. It has existed since beginningless kalpas and ceases when an Arhat enters nirvana without remainder. It is the self-clinging consciousness, which since beginningless kalpas has clung to the self, regarding everything as "I" and "mine." It clings to the functions of the first six consciousnesses as being "mine," and clings to the functions of the eighth consciousness as being "mine." Greed, hatred, delusion, arrogance, doubt, and wrong views continuously manifest within it. It is the fundamental source of karma creation, always directing the six consciousnesses to act according to its habits. Spiritual practice primarily focuses on transforming it. The mind root undergoes one transformation upon enlightenment and entry into the first ground (bhumi), another transformation at the eighth-ground Bodhisattva stage, and is completely transformed into the Wisdom of Equality upon Buddhahood. The mental consciousness becomes the Wisdom of Wonderful Observation, the first five consciousnesses become the Wisdom of Perfect Accomplishment, and the eighth consciousness becomes the Great Mirror Wisdom. If one can eradicate the self-clinging nature of the mind root, ceasing to cling to oneself, then upon death, one will extinguish one's own five aggregates and eighteen elements and enter nirvana without remainder.