The Attachment of the Manas to the Body

Question: After a person accidentally severs a finger, if it is reattached in time within a certain period, it can regain its function. However, when an organ or a portion of flesh leaves the main body, it can still display vivid signs of life (such as twisting, twitching, etc.), which is a bit hard to understand. By what means does the manas keep that organ or portion of the body active? Just as when the gross physical sense organ is gone, how do the manas and the tathāgatagarbha control the detached organ or the severed flesh? Can the tathāgatagarbha, through the manas, output seeds to a detached organ out of thin air? Or is this twitching merely an unconscious neural reflex? 

Answer: An organ that has just left the body is the same as an organ still on the body—it is jointly sustained by the manas and the tathāgatagarbha. The tathāgatagarbha provides the seeds of the four great elements to meet the needs of the bodily faculty. Once the manas deems the detached organ useless, it will abandon it; then the tathāgatagarbha no longer outputs the seeds of the four great elements, and those organs lose their vital vitality.

As the seeds of the four great elements continually arise and cease upon the organ, the organ exhibits the characteristics of the four great elements: the mobility of wind, the solidity of earth, the moistening quality of water, and the warmth of fire. The particles composed of these seeds continually undergo arising, abiding, changing, and perishing, driving the particles into constant motion and transformation, thereby producing various forms of energy—kinetic energy, thermal energy, potential energy, and so on.

Flesh that has just been severed from the body still moves because the nerve tissue still retains its function of conduction; its function has not died, and both the manas and the tathāgatagarbha are still sustaining it. The more attached the manas is, the longer the flesh will move. Some animals have been dead for a long time, their bodies carved up piece by piece and sold, yet the flesh is still moving. Such an animal is extremely attached to its own body; it knows exactly who bought its flesh, and in the future it will surely seek revenge and settle the score. When sentient beings come together, some repay kindness and debts, while others retaliate against one another in an endless cycle of grievances—the relationships are extraordinarily complex, and there is no one who has no enemies.