Who Determines Whether the Five Consciousnesses Arise After the Five Faculties Contact the Five Sense Objects

What determines the contact of the five faculties with the five sense objects? The five faculties are fixed and immobile; the tathāgatagarbha gives birth to the five sense objects respectively upon the five faculties, and the five faculties naturally come into contact with the five sense objects. However, contact is one thing; 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 them 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 it—otherwise, on what basis would the manas decide to discern the five sense objects and then have the six consciousnesses arise to discern them? The Buddha taught in the Śūraṅgama Sūtra that the six faculties can interfunction (interfunctioning of the six faculties), and that the manas can substitute for the other five faculties, citing actual examples, such as Gavāmpati, who knew tastes with an altered tongue, and the spirit Śūnyatā, who felt touch without a body.

Why could Gavāmpati know what the object of taste was without using the tongue faculty? Generally speaking, the object of taste is transmitted through the gross physical tongue-faculty nerves in the oral cavity to the inner tongue faculty within the supreme faculty. When faculty and object make contact and the manas decides to discern, the tongue consciousness and mind consciousness arise to discern; if the manas does not decide to discern because it is busy with more important matters, the tongue consciousness and mind consciousness do not arise, and the taste of the food and drink is not known. Without the gross physical tongue faculty, the 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 object of taste cannot be transmitted into the supreme faculty, after the tathāgatagarbha makes contact with the essential nature of the object of taste in the food and drink, the tathāgatagarbha manifests, like a mirror reflecting an image, an object of taste identical to the essential nature. At this point, the manas, together with the tathāgatagarbha, can perceive this outer object of taste, and it can continue to contact the outer object of taste until the tathāgatagarbha transmits the outer object of taste to the gross physical tongue faculty, gaining a rough, coarse appreciation of the outer object of taste.

This is the manas of ordinary people, who have no cultivation or realization and can do no more than this. But for arhats with great wisdom and profound dhyāna, and bodhisattvas who have attained the bhūmis, the manas can discern the five sense objects and mental objects with considerable subtlety, because the mental objects are attached to the five sense objects, and the manas can contact and discern all six outer sense objects. Therefore, the manas of a great practitioner can know the nature of the six sense-object realms, discerning them just as the six consciousnesses do, and even more subtly and thoroughly than the mind consciousness of ordinary people. By the same principle, the case of the spirit Śūnyatā, who felt touch without a body, is also like this: the manas substituted for the body faculty to contact the object of touch and discern it, 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 that catches the moonlight first—before the tathāgatagarbha transmits the five sense objects to the five gross physical faculties. If the five sense objects together with the mental object are extremely important and urgent, the manas immediately decides to make a corresponding response, and the six consciousnesses will arise rapidly 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 with such extraordinary speed 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.