The Dharma Must Be Realized, Not Speculated or Imagined.

The Buddhadharma emphasizes realization and also demands realization. Without realization, relying merely on word-of-mouth transmission and reasoning-based intellectual understanding, one has long since strayed a hundred thousand miles from the great Way. If one establishes in the mind an emptiness that is taken as real, as an actually existing dharma, then that emptiness becomes real and turns into a dharma-bondage, and one cannot attain liberation. All dharmas are empty—so is the dharma of emptiness itself empty? If the dharma that "all dharmas are empty" is not empty, how can it be said that all dharmas are empty?

Many people have not truly eradicated the view of self (satkāya-dṛṣṭi-prahāṇa); the five aggregates (pañca-skandha) have not been seen as empty, yet they go on to speculate and imagine the emptiness of dharmas, regarding all dharmas as the eighth consciousness. Only when they reach the stage of bodhisattvas at the sixth and seventh bhūmis can they truly accomplish viewing all dharmas as the eighth consciousness. But bodhisattvas at the sixth and seventh bhūmis, including those at the eighth and ninth bhūmis, still cannot regard all dharmas whatsoever as the eighth consciousness, because there are still so many dharmas they have not realized; dharmas that have not been realized simply cannot be truthfully regarded as the eighth consciousness. Even the coarsest of these, the body of the five aggregates, has not been realized as arising from the eighth consciousness; without genuinely engaging in contemplative practice (vipaśyanā-caryā) on this point, one cannot truly and truthfully regard the body of the five aggregates as the eighth consciousness—otherwise one would long ago have eradicated the grasping on self and entered the first bhūmi.

Many people, having never realized any dharma, thus fabricate an imagined method of practice and posit a route of cultivation, drawing that route map so vaguely and indistinctly that even they themselves cannot make sense of it. This is exactly how the Buddhadharma is transmitted nowadays—it does not touch on step-by-step actual practice at all, and there is no practical, workable method or means.