The mental actions determine whether karmic seeds are wholesome or unwholesome

Question: Someone says: When the manas has personally experienced a dharma it wants to be attached to, if the mind consciousness has no extremely strong intention to remember it, the manas, following the mind consciousness's judgment, will not have the tathāgatagarbha store it in an important place, and so after a long time it is forgotten. Can the manas cause the tathāgatagarbha to store a dharma in an important place or an unimportant place?

Answer: The tathāgatagarbha is formless and without appearance; within it there are no places, and it has no inside or outside. The karmic seeds formed by the actions of the six consciousnesses are formless, appearanceless information, and likewise cannot have form or location. Since there are no places within the tathāgatagarbha, there is certainly no question of places being important or unimportant. The tathāgatagarbha also cannot discern whether karmic seeds and karmic actions are important or not; it has no such capacity for judgment, nor can it distinguish which dharmas are important and which are not. Therefore, the storing of karmic seeds cannot possibly be done according to whether a dharma is important or not.

Furthermore, even if there were important and unimportant places within the tathāgatagarbha, it would still not be the manas that makes the tathāgatagarbha store seeds according to whether dharmas are important or not. This does not accord with the Dharma principle, nor does it accord with the principle of the tathāgatagarbha naturally and spontaneously storing seeds, naturally so (法尔如是).

In fact, all dharmas created by the body and mind of the five aggregates are stored into the mind-substance by the tathāgatagarbha at any time, without discrimination. Different karma means different seeds; different mental activities mean different seeds; and the kalpas in which seeds ripen also differ. What is meant by different mental activities? It means the manifestations of the manas and the mind consciousness in the operation of dharmas: whether there are afflictions of greed, hatred, and delusion; whether it is intentional or unintentional; whether it is deliberate or not deliberate; what the thoughts and views are; whether there is attachment; whether there is weariness and desire to leave; whether there is wisdom or lack of wisdom; whether the mind is concentrated or scattered, and so on and so forth—the list goes on. In short, these are the mental factors (caittas) of the several consciousness-minds. When the mental activities of the sixth and seventh consciousnesses differ, their attention to dharmas differs, their application of mind differs, and the karmic seeds formed will differ. To put it plainly, karmic seeds are the record of the mind's activities; when mental activities differ, the records naturally differ.

On the other hand, regarding the dharmas one has experienced, sometimes the mind consciousness intends to remember them; the key point, however, is whether the manas also wishes to remember them. If the manas does not want to remember, no matter how much the mind consciousness wants to remember, it is useless, and in the end nothing is remembered. Both remembering and not remembering store seeds, but the seeds stored are completely different. If you can clearly distinguish the master-servant relationship between the manas and the mind consciousness, you will not elevate the function of the mind consciousness to such a high degree.