Tathāgatagarbha Can Reveal the Information of All Dharmas

Regarding all the secrets about oneself—who is it that lets them flow out to be known by others? When we come into contact and interact with people, we can immediately understand some general information about the other party. How does the other person's information flow out? When looking at a photograph, there is no real person present, and there is no need for the other person's tathāgatagarbha to transmit information. Yet one can still discern the other person's personality, age, temperament, disposition, and life background—how is this known? For someone who died several hundred or even a thousand years ago, as long as a few relics remain, a person 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 aggregates 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 before beginningless kalpas 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, unconscious, and without the 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 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. 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, arriving at incorrect conclusions.

Relics carry information left behind by their owner. The tathāgatagarbha can follow the thread to find that person's tathāgatagarbha and thereby learn all the information from the other's tathāgatagarbha. When the mind consciousness wants to know something, it relies either on supernatural powers, or on the manas alerting it to certain important, relevant information. For example, suppose a person stays in a room and then leaves; a few 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 still remains in the room—such as temperature, scent, and so on. The snake can discern this, and then, following these traces, can track down that person. The tathāgatagarbha is like that snake—extremely sensitive and omniscient. It all depends on the wisdom of the mind consciousness: whether it can excavate the information from the manas and the tathāgatagarbha.

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

The tathāgatagarbha can, at any time and place, take in all information from outside the five aggregates' body, and the manas can likewise, at any time and place, be mindful of the external realms of the six sense objects. Information that is useful or significant must be brought to the mind consciousness's awareness through alertness; 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 leak out. 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, but which others have long since come to know. How could there be secrets in this world? A person with the recollection of past lives can, like consulting archives, rapidly retrieve every bit and piece of each person's experiences since beginningless kalpas, omitting not even the smallest matter. But since this is retrieved through the tathāgatagarbha, all these secrets were likewise leaked out by the tathāgatagarbha.