The Tathāgatagarbha Can Reveal the Information of All Dharmas

Regarding all the secrets about oneself, who is it that lets them leak out to be known by others? When we come into contact and interact with people, we can immediately understand some rough information about the other person—how does the other person's information leak out? When looking at a photograph, the other person is not actually present, so there is no need for the other person's tathāgatagarbha to transmit information. Yet one can still discern the other person's character, age, temperament, disposition, and life background—how is this known? For a person who died several hundred or even a thousand years ago, as long as a few relics remain, someone with supernatural powers can, based on these relics, learn where that person is now, what identity they have, and what the condition of their five-aggregate body is—on what basis is this known? Especially the Buddha, who possesses immeasurable supernatural powers and the recollection of past lives (pūrvanivāsānusmṛti): everything, great and small, from beginningless kalpas ago about every single person, the Buddha knows completely, including the most minute details—how does the Buddha come to know all this?

Even when asleep or unconscious without mind consciousness, the information of the five aggregates can still be revealed; even a single photograph can reveal all the information about a sentient being. A photograph is jointly held and sustained by many tathāgatagarbhas; it is not something one person's tathāgatagarbha alone can hold and sustain. A photograph, like written text, does not involve the other person's tathāgatagarbha or five aggregates; it is one's own tathāgatagarbha that transforms the photograph and text into inner material sense-objects (inner rūpa-viṣaya). When the mind consciousness has wisdom, it can deliberate, analyze, and process the hidden meanings within the photograph and text. Without wisdom, it deliberates and analyzes erroneously and arrives at incorrect conclusions.

Relics carry information left behind by their owner. The tathāgatagarbha can follow the clues to find that person's tathāgatagarbha, and from the other person's tathāgatagarbha learn all the information. When the mind consciousness wants to know, one way is through supernatural powers, and another is through the manas alerting it to some important, relevant information. For example, a person stays in a room and then leaves; several hours or half a day later, a snake enters that room and can know that someone was just living there—part of that person's information is still in the room, such as temperature, scent, and so on. The snake can discern this, and then, following these traces of information, can track down that person. The tathāgatagarbha is just like that snake—extremely sensitive and all-knowing; it all depends on how much wisdom the mind consciousness has, and whether it can dig out the information from the manas and tathāgatagarbha.

The tathāgatagarbhas are all within the internet, publishing at any time and place all the information about their own five-aggregate bodies, without withholding anything, while at the same time being able to obtain all information from other tathāgatagarbhas. The tathāgatagarbhas exchange what they have with one another; there are no secrets. He neither deliberately conceals anything nor deliberately reveals anything—His mind is completely open. Each sentient being's manas, relying on its own tathāgatagarbha, can also know the relevant information in the other person's tathāgatagarbha; the manas can thus know the other person, and so people with karmic connections have a certain resonance with one another.

The tathāgatagarbha can, at any time and place, take in all information about the external environment of the five-aggregate body, and the manas can accordingly, at any time and place, contact the external realms of the six sense objects. Information that is useful or significant to oneself—the manas alerts the mind consciousness to know; unimportant information the manas handles itself, either ignoring it or storing it in the tathāgatagarbha as a record for reference.

In this world, one does not know what secret could fail to be leaked—do secrets even exist in this world? The matters in each person's mind are not known only to oneself; there are even more thoughts and ideas that one does not know oneself, which others have long since come to know. How could there be secrets in this world? A person with the recollection of past lives (pūrvanivāsānusmṛti) can, as if consulting archives, quickly retrieve every bit of each person's experiences since beginningless kalpas, omitting not even the smallest matter. But since the retrieval is done through the tathāgatagarbha, all these secrets were likewise leaked out by the tathāgatagarbha.