How Is the Manas Successfully Perfumed?

For the manas to be successfully cultivated through habituation, it must have deliberated (manasikāra/manana) upon the dharma of the contacted realm itself, and its deliberation must have been thorough and penetrating before it can trust and confirm it. Only after accepting it with faith will its thoughts and views be transformed, and it will be turned by that dharma. For the manas to deliberate upon a dharma clearly and thoroughly, it must do so under the premise of reducing grasping at objects, under conditions with relatively few disturbances, and with a certain degree of concentration; only then can there be the wisdom to deliberate thoroughly and penetratingly, and only then can the dharma enter the mind. Therefore, the wisdom of the manas is necessarily related to meditative concentration (samādhi)—the deeper the meditative concentration, the more penetrating the wisdom—whereas the mind consciousness does not necessarily require much meditative concentration.

If the manas has not been successfully permeated and influenced, its thoughts and views cannot be transformed, it cannot eradicate ignorance and sever afflictions to their end, and it will remain as it was before. If the principles grasped by the mind consciousness are strong enough, they can also subdue and suppress the manas; however, once the mind consciousness is not fully alert, it can no longer regulate the manas, and the manas's afflictions will manifest. This is the state of sentient beings before they have eradicated their afflictions. At this stage, sentient beings can only keep the precepts of body and speech without violating them, but cannot keep the mind from violating the precepts; the Mahāyāna mind-ground precepts cannot be strictly observed or automatically observed without violation—they are not yet able to hold the bodhisattva's mind-ground precepts, because their mind has not yet been transformed. This is a stage in sentient beings' learning of Buddhism and cultivation. The length of this stage varies from person to person, depending on sentient beings' wholesome roots and merit.