After the five sense faculties contact the five sense objects, who decides whether the five consciousnesses arise?

What determines the contact of the five faculties with the five sense objects? The five faculties are fixed and immobile; the tathāgatagarbha gives rise to the five sense objects upon the five faculties respectively, and the five faculties naturally come into contact with the five sense objects. However, contact is merely contact; whether discernment occurs is determined by the manas. Since whether the five faculties contacting the five sense objects give rise to the five consciousnesses to discern the five sense objects is determined by the manas, the manas must be able to know roughly whether the five sense objects are important and whether they are of interest to the manas; otherwise, on what basis would the manas decide to discern the five sense objects, whereupon the six consciousnesses arise to discern them? The Buddha taught in the Śūraṅgama Sūtra that the six faculties can intercommunicate and function interchangeably, and that the manas can substitute for the other five faculties, citing actual examples, such as Gavāmpati, who knew tastes without his tongue, and the spirit Śūnyatā, who felt contact without a body.

Why could Gavāmpati know what the sense object of taste was without using the tongue faculty? Generally speaking, the sense object of taste is transmitted through the external tongue nerves in the oral cavity to the inner tongue faculty within the supreme faculty; when faculty and sense object contact each other and the manas decides to discern, the tongue consciousness and mind consciousness arise to discern. If the manas does not decide to discern, being occupied with more important matters, the tongue consciousness and mind consciousness do not arise, and one does not know what the food tastes like. Without the external tongue faculty, the sense object of taste cannot be transmitted to the inner tongue faculty within the supreme faculty, and the tongue consciousness and mind consciousness will not arise.

Yet even though the sense object of taste cannot be transmitted into the supreme faculty, after the tathāgatagarbha contacts the essential substance of the sense object of taste in the food, the tathāgatagarbha manifests a sense object of taste identical to the essential substance, just as a mirror reflects an image. At this point, the manas, together with the tathāgatagarbha, can perceive this external sense object of taste, and it can continue to contact the external sense object of taste until the tathāgatagarbha transmits the external sense object of taste to the external tongue faculty, being able to gain a rough, general appreciation of the external sense object of taste.

This is the manas of ordinary people, who have no cultivation or realization and can only do this. But for arhats with great wisdom and profound meditative concentration (samādhi), and bodhisattvas who have attained the bhūmis, the manas can discern the five sense objects and mental sense objects with considerable subtlety, because the mental sense objects are conjoined with the five sense objects, and the manas can contact and discern all six external sense objects. Therefore, the manas of a great practitioner can know the states of the six sense objects just as the six consciousnesses discern them, and even more subtly and thoroughly than the mind consciousness of ordinary people. By the same principle, this is also how the spirit Śūnyatā felt contact without a body: the manas substituted for the body faculty to contact and discern the sense object of touch, substituting for the body consciousness and mind consciousness.

During the process in which the tathāgatagarbha transmits the five sense objects, the manas has already discerned them first—like the pavilion near the water catching the moonlight first along with the tathāgatagarbha—before the tathāgatagarbha transmits the five sense objects to the external five faculties. If the five sense objects together with the mental sense object are extremely important and urgent, the manas immediately decides to make the corresponding response, and the six consciousnesses will arise swiftly to obey the manas's指令 and react; only afterward does the mind consciousness understand what happened. If the manas did not first discern the six sense objects and five sense objects, how could it take emergency measures extremely quickly when encountering major danger? At the moment of the stress response, the mind consciousness does not even know what is going on. Clearly, the manas is no simple matter; we must not underestimate Him.