How Is the Manas Successfully Perfumed?

For the manas to be successfully cultivated through habituation, it must have deliberated (manana) upon the dharma of the states it encountered, and its deliberation must have penetrated through, before it will trust and confirm it. Only after accepting it with faith do its thoughts and views transform, and it is then transformed 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 conditions, in circumstances with relatively few distractions; only with a certain degree of concentrative power can it have the wisdom to deliberate through to penetration, so that the dharma can enter the mind. Therefore, the wisdom of the manas is necessarily related to meditative concentration (samādhi): the deeper the samādhi, the more penetrating the wisdom, whereas the mind consciousness does not necessarily require much samādhi.

If the manas has not been successfully influenced through habituation, its thoughts and views cannot transform, and it cannot eliminate ignorance and sever afflictions; it will remain the same as before. If the principles grasped by the mind consciousness are strong enough, they can also subdue and suppress the manas; but once the mind consciousness is no longer quite clear, it cannot regulate the manas, and the manas's afflictions will manifest. This is the state of sentient beings before they have severed their afflictions. At this stage, sentient beings can only uphold the precepts of body and speech without violating them, but cannot uphold the precepts of mind without violation; the Mahāyāna precepts of the mind-ground cannot be strictly upheld or automatically kept without violation. They are not yet able to hold the bodhisattva precepts of the mind-ground, because their minds have not yet transformed. This is a stage in sentient beings' study of Buddhism and cultivation. The length of this stage varies from person to person, depending on each sentient being's roots of goodness and merit.