Dreams Can Reveal the Changes of Afflictions.

When cultivation reaches the manas, the manas's ignorance diminishes and wisdom grows, and then the root can be changed, enabling one to handle many worldly and world-transcending dharmas with increasing perfection. Therefore, in cultivating the Dharma, one must penetrate deep into the manas. Because the manas is the consciousness that takes charge, it determines bodily, verbal, and mental actions, and determines karmic seeds and retributions. It discerns a great many dharmas and, before things happen or just as they happen, can take charge and make decisions in advance, think out countermeasures, and handle matters well. In this way, our responses to everything will be comprehensive and unobstructed, we will become increasingly harmonious with our surroundings, with people, affairs, and the physical environment, and we will be able to deliver more and more sentient beings.

If one cultivates to the level of the manas, ignorance decreases bit by bit, and greed, anger, and delusion will gradually grow fainter, thereby transforming the manas. When the manas's afflictions of greed, anger, and delusion diminish and grow faint, this will be revealed through dreams. For example, when in daily life the manas no longer wishes to cling greedily to certain dharmas, corresponding mental activities—thoughts and aspirations—will arise, and the tathāgatagarbha will cooperate by displaying them in dreams. How are they displayed? Greed, anger, and delusion represent the defilement of the mind, and the defilement of the mind must be represented by defiled states of material form. When the mind's purity increases and its defilement decreases, it is displayed as the environment in which this person finds himself being utterly filthy. The filthier the external environment, the more afflictions it represents as having been expelled from the mind; the mind has become purer than before. Although the realm is impure, it serves to set off the purity of the mind.

Therefore, dreams also indicate the degree of a person's cultivation—whether the afflictions of greed, anger, and delusion have lessened, and whether the mind is gradually becoming pure. Of course, there is still a certain difference between this expulsion of defilement before enlightenment and before realizing the fruits, and the subduing and elimination of greed, anger, and delusion after realizing the fruits. Before realizing the fruits, in the course of cultivating the thirty-seven aids to enlightenment, through the study and practice of precepts, meditation, and wisdom, a portion of the afflictions should indeed be subdued, and the mind should be somewhat purer than before. This is the result of the pre-enlightenment and pre-fruit cultivation of precepts, meditation, and wisdom. Otherwise, if the study and practice of precepts, meditation, wisdom, and the thirty-seven aids to enlightenment have not yet reached the standard, and the obstruction of greed, anger, and delusion is still severe, one will be unable to realize the fruits and see the mind.