In contemplative practice (vipaśyanā-caryā) to eliminate self-view (ātma-dṛṣṭi), one must neither take the five aggregates (pañcaskandha)—form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness—as the self (the manas), nor treat them as belonging to the self. One cannot say that the aggregate of form is not the self, yet is something the self can possess and use; nor can one say that the aggregates of feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness are not the self, yet are something the self can possess and use. That form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness are the self is a wrong view and wrong understanding, and that the self can possess form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness is likewise a wrong view and wrong understanding. All these views must be eliminated, dug out from the mind.
As long as there is a "belonging to the self," there is a self, and self-view has not been eliminated. Who is it that takes the functions of form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness as possessions of the self? It is of course the manas. Since beginningless kalpas, the manas has been using and exploiting these functions, believing that it possesses them; because it has these functions, it gives rise to pride and self-grasping, and the afflictions of birth and death never cease.
When the manas desires to have these functions, the eighth consciousness will, without stinting, generate a physical body and the six consciousnesses for the manas, manifesting these functions. The manas then takes these functions as "me" and "mine," not knowing that they all belong to the eighth consciousness, and thus the cycle of birth and death flows on without end. To escape the suffering of this cycle of birth and death, one must make the manas eliminate these notions and views, so that the manas no longer regards these functions as "me" and "mine." In this way the manas becomes without self, gradually no longer seeking to exploit these functions to create afflicted karma, gradually lessening its grasping and craving toward these functions, and the karma of birth and death is thereby dissolved.
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